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How China Rewrote Tiananmen History

Recalling Tiananmen 20 years later

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff

Posted May 27, 2009 2:59 PM CDT

(Newser) – The Tiananmen Square massacre isn’t something the Chinese government wants the world to remember, and it's doing a good job keeping the matter quiet, writes Terrence Cheng in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In China, “those who dare to speak about it are swiftly silenced,” he writes. “The fading concern over Tiananmen, in China and around the world, has devolved into indifference in the face of economic and other priorities.”

Instead, the world sees an image of China pushed in events like the Olympic opening ceremony—a spectacle that proved the government had won its 20-year public-relations battle. “This new face is an illusion meant to replace the image of one man standing down a line of tanks,” Cheng writes. And even the Olympic event was manipulated, with digitally enhanced fireworks and fake singing. “With the Chinese government, there is always something more than meets the eye.”

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Demonstrators light candles and burn paper money during a candlelight vigil outside the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, June 3, 1999, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. (Getty Images)

Wang Dan, a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, is shown In New York City May 25, 1998. (Getty Images)

The bodies of dead civilians lie among mangled bicycles near Beijing's Tiananmen Square in this June 4, 1989 file photo. A candlelight vigil held annually in Hong Kong to mark the anniversary of the... (AP Photo/File)

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The days that followed June 4 rang with cries of shocked outrage from around the world, but two decades later those calls for justice and change are but a whisper. - Terrence Cheng

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How China Rewrote Tiananmen History