From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AN ASIAN VIEW Fifteen years after the Tiananmen massacre, a whole generation have grown up in China who were too young to understand the significance of the brutal events of June 4 at the time.
It's fashionable to suggest that this younger generation who have benefited so much from China's breakneck economic growth care only about making money. And that they have long since forgotten, if they ever knew at all, about the brave students and workers who gave their lives for democracy in Beijing in 1989.
The Chinese government has certainly done everything it can to erase all memory of June 4 from the collective consciousness of Chinese people. Textbooks in Chinese schools contain only brief references to what is described as "a political disturbance" or "turmoil resulting from ever-worsening bourgeois liberalization," and make no mention of the number of civilian casualties.
The media too remains muzzled on this, as on so many other issues. The Chinese leadership is so sensitive about any mention of June 4 that it recently banned former Premier Li Peng, who announced the decision to send troops into Beijing in 1989, from publishing memoirs that try to explain his role in the crackdown.
But broadcasting into China from outside its borders, Radio Free Asia is not subject to such censorship. And the calls our phone-in shows receive from across the mainland suggest the Communist leadership has failed to nurture a generation who know nothing of Tiananmen.
Half of the approximately 600 calls our Mandarin language service -- which has a toll free number for calls from China -- has received over the past 12 months about June 4 have been from people aged 16-30. And more than 70% of the approximately 2,000 requests for CDs containing interviews with families of Tiananmen victims have been people in the same age group.
As long as alternative sources of information such as RFA exist, young Chinese have the opportunity to learn the uncensored version of their country's history. And judging from the calls we receive many are confident that, despite the government's lies, justice will eventually be done for the victims of the massacre.
Many of our younger callers first learned about the events of June 4 by listening to RFA. Some of the charismatic student leaders of the 1989 democracy movement who were forced into exile are now RFA commentators, such as Gao Xin, Wang Dan, Wang Juntao and Xiang Xiaoji. Others, whose lives were destroyed by the Tiananmen events, have found RFA an effective way to speak to the Chinese people. Bao Tong, top aide to then party secretary Zhao Ziyang and the highest-ranking official to have served a prison sentence for Tiananmen, is one such example. The renowned writer Zheng Yi is another. Through voices like theirs, the legacy of 1989 lives on.
Many young callers say that the issues raised by the student demonstrators remain relevant today. In 1989, ordinary people across China supported the demonstrators in their demands that the government fight rampant corruption, hold officials accountable, institute democratic reforms, and allow a free press.
As one 22-year-old college student from Guizhou observed, "Those are exactly the kinds of things that we want today."
Learning about the Tiananmen crackdown has led many young Chinese to lose faith in the Chinese Communist Party, and it's common for RFA to receive calls full of anger. "Tiananmen is a psychic wound from which the Chinese people will never fully recover," said one Shanghai resident in his 30s. He nevertheless credited the 1989 pro-democracy movement with making him a better human being, because it taught him the importance of idealism.
For the past 15 years, the party has tried to keep its younger generation in the dark about Tiananmen. But the government has failed to erase history, and its attempts to do so have only undermined its own legitimacy.
Ms. Chou is director of Radio Free Asia's Mandarin Service.
China Can't Stop Its Youth
Learning About the Massacre
BY JENNIFER CHOU
Wednesday, June 2, 2004 12:00 p.m. EDT
