China: a victim of its own ’success’?
It’s almost 18 years to the day since the infamous student protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. To most in the west, the mere mention of the Tiananmen Square protests will bring up memories of the ‘Unknown Rebel’ who was photographed in a photo of the same name by Jeff Widener standing before a line of advancing tanks in protest.
Outside of China we may discuss this freely but behind the ‘Great Firewall of China’ mention of the protests remain a taboo. So much so, that there is a generation of Chinese citizens who are not even familiar of the events in the spring on 1989.
Editors of the ‘Chengdu Evening News’ have been sacked as their newspaper carried an ad ’saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown’. Hong Kong’s ‘South China Morning Post’ reported on Wednesday that a young clerk approved the advertisement for publication. The report goes on to mention that she had never heard of the military crackdown.
It is truly sad that many of China’s youth are ignorant to the events on 1989 as the result of a cover-up at state level. References to the Tiananmen Square protects are prohibited in the media aw well as online and in other printed material.
However this highlights an interesting point for the Chinese communist party – with so few people knowing about it how do they prevent the few that do know from taking advantage of the fact and raising awareness?
I’m very interested to look are the political development over then next few years in China. If they want to come to the international table and do business, their culture of secrecy must end.
Of course, in writing this post, website traffic from China will, no doubt, drop off over the next few days until there are no visitors from china to report on in my statistics. I’m convinced I was previously blocked in China as for a long time I had no traffic what so ever from China and then, all of a sudden, I started receiving visitors again. Weird.
©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.
.
