FOCUS: Ignorance about Tiananmen behind indifference among Chinese youth+

BEIJING, June 3 Kyodo -
Twenty-seven-year-old 'Amanda' Zhong still remembers hearing gunshots emanating
from the area around Beijing's Tiananmen Square only 5 kilometers east of her
home on the central artery of Changan Avenue, or the Eternal Peace Avenue, on
the night of June 3, 20 years ago.
Amanda had no idea then that a brutal military crackdown on peaceful student
protestors was taking place and only guessed it must have been something
significant when on her seventh birthday the next day, she did not get a
birthday cake.
''I remember asking my parents for a cake, but they told me they couldn't go
out onto the streets to get me one,'' she said.
Other than a foiled birthday celebration, Amanda did not think much of what
happened in the years after largely because she never heard any further about
it.
Her parents never mentioned the event, nor was it discussed at prestigious
Peking University where she was a journalism student and where many of the
student protestors at Tiananmen had been from.
Amanda eventually read about the events of 1989 on the Internet when she
started work at a foreign firm, which uses a proxy to bypass what is popularly
called the ''Great Firewall of China,'' a network firewall that blocks
sensitive material and sites from domestic Internet users.
This powerful Internet censorship in recent days was reported to have been
extended to sites like Hotmail, Flickr and Twitter, popular social services
used by young Chinese, as China tightened all-round surveillance in order to
ensure minimal political discussion ahead of the sensitive anniversary.
Thanks to such enthusiastic avoidance, a generation of Chinese like Amanda has
grown up without learning of the details of how hundreds or possibly thousands
of civilians were killed when the Communist Party sent in troops to quell the
student movement.
Li Shuai Han, who was 5 at the time of the event, said all he had heard was
that it was a ''student-related movement.''
But Li also stressed he was not interested in finding out more.
In his final year at university, he said he was more interested in having
''three meals a day'' and joining a band.
''Friends my age are more interested in pursuing ideals and ambitions, and in
individuality,'' the aspiring musician said.
Wang Song Lian, an activist at a Hong-Kong based rights group, said that in her
work with mainland human rights activists, she had seldom come across those in
their 20s.
And the few young Chinese she did work with were not representative of a
generation of youths who had been encouraged from young to focus instead on
material gains, Wang said.
''I think lack of information and honest discussion about China's contemporary
history like the Tiananmen massacre gives youths of today a very distorted view
and understanding of China,'' Wang said.
That young Chinese have dim knowledge of the events of Tiananmen is something
that also worries older Chinese like Pu Zhiqiang, who says the memory of an
event two decades old still weighs him down every year as the anniversary
nears.
The Beijing civil rights lawyer, 44, was a postgraduate student when he
participated in the Tiananmen protests. The picture he painted of the young
protestors then vastly differed from the one Wang had described of young
Chinese now.
''During the events of June 4, we saw ourselves as saviors, and we saw the
ordinary people as needing us to liberate and save them,'' he said of himself
and fellow students. ''I wanted to serve the people and sacrifice myself, I was
willing to bleed.''
In an earlier interview, activist Ding Zhilin, whose son was killed during the
crackdown, also described the students then as an idealistic group who
protested against corruption and demanded justice and freedom, even if they had
''unclear'' ideas of what democracy really means.
''It's not that they had an especially outstanding slogan that they could rouse
the masses,'' Ding said. ''Their slogan was strong and targeted society's
problems at that time.''
In recent years, however, it had seemed from local media reports that
protesting against such societal ''problems'' like official corruption had been
mostly left to online 'netizens' and disenchanted migrant workers in the
provinces.
But to Pu, the seeming inaction of present day student elites is due less to
political apathy and more to the lack of open discussion of past events like
the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen massacre.
The Chinese government has consistently labeled the peaceful student protests a
''counterrevolutionary rebellion'' and justified the crackdown as necessary to
maintaining economic reforms.
''Perhaps we have cut off the history for these students,'' Pu said. ''They do
not know what happened.''
The progress of Chinese history, he said, will be dependent on the Tiananmen
''issue'' reaching a conclusion.
''And the first step toward reaching this conclusion is to find out the truth
of the matter, to let everyone be able to discuss this matter openly,'' Pu
said.
At least with the case of Amanda, it seems indeed that the lack of knowledge
had been the source of her earlier indifference.
''(After I read about the event) I feel that the Chinese government should come
forward to address this matter and not evade it any longer,'' she said.
==Kyodo
2009-06-03 23:47:46