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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

The amount of work they do to bury it is a good sign for the movement against authoritarianism. It means that the government is still scared of the event and what it signifies. As long as they're scared of Tiananmen and actively fight it, it still has power and the fight isn't over. When the government stops trying to suppress it is when the Tiananmen movement truly fails.

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Consider that their goal is for young Chinese to not be aware of Tiananmen, which they are close to achieving.

What people outside of China think is much less of a concern.

I wonder what would happen if the US made a requirement that to get a student visa to study here, applicants from China have to take and pass a history course about Tiananmen Square and the subsequent efforts to cover it up?

There are around 360k Chinese students in the US. If China didn't do anything to counter it, that would be a lot of educated young people eventually returning to China to take influential jobs who are aware of Tiananmen.

Would China go so far as to stop allowing their students to study in the US to stop that? Or would they just to to convince the students that the US is lying?

Chinese students are cash cows for universities. Wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to argue against complying with any such mandate that endangered this rather important profit center. As far as the Chinese government goes, they could require pre and post briefings for all students studying in the United States. It wouldn't avoid the students being exposed to what happen in Tiananmen Square but under the right conditions, with the right carrots and sticks, they could be made to either be skeptical or disinterested in the truth. As Upton Sinclair said 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

At Auburn University in the late 90s there was a seemingly random murder of a Chinese grad student and his wife. The local police were mystified because it didn't match a typical homicide and there appeared to be no motive, not even robbery. Eventually it turned out that the student was the son of a important regional politician back in China. His enemies had the son and daughter-in-law murdered in the United States to send him a message. Similar demonstrations of the long reach of the Chinese government could be made to students studying in the United States if they as a group started creating difficulties for the official narrative.

The students that make it to the USA mostly know things like that already. Their ideological positions, one way or the other, are not influenced much by ignorance.

I've met several Chinese students whose personal Tiananmen epiphanies were in the States, not on the mainland.

Epiphanies and knowledge are different things.

Confucius Institutes are arms of the Chinese state that operates on US university campuses that monitor and report on their citizens' activities while they're studying in the US, as well as organizing propaganda events in the US. US universities must stop collaborating with these institutes and expel them from campus, even if only to protect their students as much as possible.

It's a lot easier for those students to learn about it once outside of China. No firewall, less groupthink, less fear of being watched.

How many are unaware, and how many pretend to be unaware because they know they're expected to be unaware?

Here's a weeks long thread where I engage in a conversation with a (allegedly) Chinese student about such topics.

For those that have bought into the propaganda, the impression is generally that the government put down a dangerous riot that was killing innocents.

Start of the Twitter uh "thread" (not sure how to refer to these) https://twitter.com/Chinahnpy/status/1129327748743409664?s=2...

Here's the start of some tiananmen discussion: https://twitter.com/komali_2/status/1133764941675094016?s=20

Yes, there’s a lot of people who know nothing of Tiananmen at all, but often those that do would characterize it as a riot by agitators who forced the governments hand.

I think the central government now advocates apathy rather than forgettance. Young people get apathy, so it’s an easier sell.

Kind of related, but Turkey just as much tries to bury/deny the Armenian-Greek-Syriac genocide over 100 years later. I sincerely hope that any resolution that would admit Turkey into the EU would involve admitting and paying the price for those atrocities.

As a Turk, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey are aware of the way the late Ottoman Empire treated certain ethnic minorities. What they deny is the “genocide” classification (and the responsibility and repercussions that would come with accepting it).

As a Greek with Armenian in laws, my grandparents and great grandparents would quite literally spit in the face of someone who tries to tell them that wasn't genocide, and deservedly so. I have family alive right now that remember what happened then. If we can't call what was carried out by Turks in the early 1915's throughout WW1 genocide, we might as well retire that word from language all together.

Actually, the word genocide was coined specifically to refer to what the Turks did to the Armenians.

It's not truly forgotten when there's this much effort to try to forget it, that applies to both Tiananmen and the genocide. I remain (perhaps foolishly) optimistic that these movements to gain recognition for events and fight for democracy are strong enough that when one of these governments finally falters in their fight, even for a second, they'll be able to come back in full force

How about the concurrent/earlier genocides of Turks and other Muslim ethnicities in the Balkans and Hellas supported by the Great Powers of the era? Those are also related. Action and reaction, as it is.

Edit: both are, after all, caused by religious nationalism. Let's not ignore one of them.

There is a new wave of activism in China that is being accidentally kick started from where the top leaders least expected it... Marxist study sessions!

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-...

I doubt the leaders didn't expect it; Lenin had the same problem, and wrote a whole book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Left-Wing%22_Communism:_An_...

So for a while the communitsts were the good guys, they unite factory workers against evil factory owners; then capitalists became the good guy, who pay worker fairly and champion human rights; are we seeing a coming back of communists being the good guys again?

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