Generation Amnesia: why China’s youth don’t talk about Tiananmen
- Three decades have passed since the Tiananmen Square crackdown when troops fired on student-led pro-democracy protesters
- The shots were heard around the country and reverberate today despite persistent official censorship of the event
In the fourth in a six-part series, Mimi Lau and Phoebe Zhang look at how censorship, silence and time have created a gulf between the young people who witnessed the events and those who came after them.
Beijing-based writer Ma Bo, better known as Lao Gui, remembers taking his six-year-old son to the heart of the Chinese capital and hoisting the child on his shoulders to get a better view.
In the spring of 1989, crowds of students had poured into Tiananmen Square to demand greater accountability from the government.
Ma, then a journalist and an active participant in the movement, was keen for himself and his son to witness history unfold.
Then the tanks rolled through the square in a bloody crackdown in which hundreds of people, perhaps more than 1,000, died.
“I never thought they [the government] would really launch a rampage,” he said.
“It was too horrifying … I could never forget it.”
