Ah, the "beauty" of a dictatorship - think Communist China - where a regime can either re-write / revise history or expunge it altogether. Exhibit #1. The Tiananmen Square (Beijing) protest in 1989 which led to what can only be described as a wholesale massacre.
Writing from China in "Tiananmen, Forgotten" in The New York Times...
"Twenty-five years after the massacre, the topic remains taboo here. I try to piece together the events of that spring through underground documentaries, foreign reports and conversations with my parents. Yet the more facts and anecdotes I gather, the more those crowds and gunshots seem unreal, like tragic scenes from an old foreign film.
To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.
Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits."
Comments