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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

I was doing consulting work for the IOC when cities were bidding for the 2008 Summer Olympics. BOCOG submitted as part of their bid using Tiananmen Square as the site for Beach Volleyball. The IOC had to tell them it was inappropriate and to change that part of their bid. They really do want to pretend nothing happened there.

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Another way of looking at it: even for Chinese people who are aware of and care about the incident, Tiananmen Square is still a famous and significant place in its own right and is not primarily associated with that particular event. They don’t call it the “Tiananmen Square” incident in Chinese, because many other things also happened there.

Exactly! This is an example of the many cognitive biases.

To people live outside of China, that event is all they know about Tiananmen. But to a Chinese person especially a local resident, it's a place of many memories - a big playground for kids, a hub for changing buses, the entrance to Forbidden City/Zhongshan (Sun Yat Sen) Park/National Museum, a pathway to a shopping quarter, and of course a place full of annoying tourists.

No one is trying to hide anything. It's simply a wonderful venue for olympic games. The view would have been amazing! You will never get an opportunity like that again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGQke3dJdNU&feature=youtu.be... (again please ignore those awkward tourists)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNYf_OsxLeM

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