This Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the deadly suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests on June 4. It has been a quarter of a century of enormous change in China, but one key fact of life in that country has not changed: its leaders continue to maintain that they were correct to use tanks and automatic weapons to crush the demonstrations and correct that the killing defines neither the killers nor their country.
Not that they speak of it this way. In fact, they mention the demonstrations and the crackdown as little as possible. Even the numbers 6 and 4 are taboo. And yet, as the massacre recedes further into the past, as China appears to heed its leaders’ calls to “look to the future,” the energy and force the Chinese regime devotes to suppressing the history of what happened that night in June have only grown. This year, the annual rituals of erasure have taken on the peculiarly zealous quality of an obsessive compulsive’s locking and relocking of the same door: relatives of those killed have been forbidden to visit Beijing to mourn their loved ones; a small group of scholars and former activists who held a private commemoration were detained on charges of “creating a public disturbance”; police have grabbed people in the Square for taking selfies.
But memory persists—and its champions have new tools to tell and transmit their story. “Voices from Tiananmen,” a joint undertaking by the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and The South China Morning Post, reconstructs the spring of 1989 and its aftermath in text, photographs, video, graphics, and most strikingly, new video interviews with key figures filmed in mainland China, and published for the first time in this report:
Voices from Tiananmen: Eyewitnesses Look Back to the Spring of 1989
Patrick Boehler of The South China Morning Post reported, in collaboration with Yuen-Ying Chan and Karen Chang of the University of Hong Kong. Cedric Sam, also of the Post, designed and built the report. ChinaFile provided editorial support. Additional materials including interview transcripts, archives, and essays are available at june4.hk.