Twenty-five years ago today the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. The glow of commemorative candlelit vigils in Hong Kong will not warm the mainland. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains committed to driving the past, this part anyway, from its borders. While grandparents may have transmitted the deprivation and violence of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, many educated youngsters have no idea of the events of a quarter of a century ago.
The blowtorching started early and was done with a smile as well as a stick. For the 20th anniversary, Chinese author Yu Hua wrote about the episode for the first time. From a dingy hotel room, reporting on the aftermath for a local literary magazine, he watched as the CCP began the serious business of forgetting.
Every day the television repeatedly broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody ... I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.
Then one day, the picture on my TV screen changed completely. The images of detained suspects were replaced by scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. The announcer switched from passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students to cheerfully lauding our nation's progress.
The national narrative on the mainland has never switched back. The overwhelming story is one of progress and prosperity. There is little room for 'despairing looks'.
The response is understandable. While the exact number of casualties is debated, one eyewitness kept a running tally of the dead that reached 2600 before hospitals went mum due to pressure from above. The official line from Beijing is that a few retrograde elements were killed in self-defense as security forces restored order.
Even the high-end figures are dwarfed by the estimated 18–32.5 million killed during the Great Leap Forward and 3 million or so casualties of the Cultural Revolution (figures for both are decidedly sketchy). Let alone the 14 million killed a few decades earlier in WWII. The 20th century has been brutal to the Chinese people.
However the legacy of 1989 shouldn't be reduced to a numbers game. Yu Hua offers a key for unlocking part of the event's significance. In the days before the massacre he cycled through an icy spring night under martial law. Drawn to an incandescent light and glowing warmth he sought out the source. This