Featured review: the republic of forgetting.

• Author: Levine, Paul
• Position: "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited" and "Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China" - Book review

Featured Review

The Republic of Forgetting

Review Essay by Paul Levine

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim. Oxford University Press: New York, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-934770-4, 248 pp., $24.95 (Hardcover), $16.95 (Paperback) Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China by Rowena Xiaoqing He. Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2014, ISBN 978-1-137.43830-0, ISBN 978-1-137-43831, 212 pp., $100 (Hardcover), $29 (Paperback).

A scant few years ago Louisa Lim tried an experiment. Lim was a journalist working for National Public Radio in China. She visited Beijing's four most prominent universities to find out what China's best students knew of their own recent history. Lim showed them the iconic image of an ordinary man holding two shopping bags while confronting a column of tanks on Beijing's main thoroughfare leading to Tiananmen Square. The photo was taken on June 5, 1989, the day after the PLA opened fire on unarmed students and ordinary citizens and killed a large number of them. According to one version, the young man jumped up on a tank and shouted, "Turn around! Stop killing my people." Then he disappeared. To this day nobody knows who he was.

Lim says, "I was curious to know how many of today's Internet-savvy students would recognize the photo. The students I spoke to are the creme de la creme, the best educated students in China, yet the vast majority of them looked at the photo without the slightest flicker of recognition." One student thought it might be taken in Kosovo, another in South Korea, others thought it might be a military parade. In all, Lim questioned one hundred students and only fifteen could identify the famous photograph.

Last year, I tried the same experiment with a group of Chinese exchange students at Copenhagen University and got the same results. It seems that the CPC regime has been successful at suppressing remembrance of this horrific event where the PLA fired on its own citizens. But it is one thing to suppress historical remembrance and another to erase history itself. In 2009 Chan Kunchoong published a satirical novel about collective amnesia entitled The Fat Years which was, of course, banned in China. Chan writes: "For the great majority of young mainland Chinese, the events of the Tiananmen Massacre have never entered their consciousness; they have never seen the photographs and news reports about it, and even fewer have had it explained to them by their family or teachers. They have not forgotten it; they have never known anything about it. In theory, after a period of time has elapsed, an entire year can indeed disappear from history-because no one says anything about it."

But two recent books on the Tiananmen Massacre jog our memories. Louisa Lim's The People's Republic of Amnesia is a journalist's account of how the past affects the...