Never Forget...

Toaday, other than being me and the boyfriend's one month boyfriendhood anniversary, is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident where hundreds of unarmed civilians and students were brutally killed by the Chinese army because of the student-led pro-democracy demonstration. Instead of handling it with communication and dignity, the Chinese government decided to close up all media channels and declared martial law, using assault rifles and tanks killing its own people. The death toll was never announced but it's estimated to be between 400-800 people by the New York Times and around 10,000 by some other sources.

I was living in Hong Kong then, which is a territory composed by Chinese people who considered themselves lucky to have escaped the cultural revolution under Mao, and these kind of shit is just reaffirmed their fears for the Chinese government. All we could have done is to join some local protests to echo the sentiment and create more bad press to counter the face saving mentality of the Chinese government. Some student organizer activists get caught and were forced to write apology letters, some others fled the country and took political asylum but the Chinese government have yet to learn. Just look at how they handle the protest in Tibet during the Olympics or how they are censoring any information mentioning the incident. The country is more prosperous, but the attitude and the brainwashing are still the same. (Open dialogues were never a policy in Chinese parenting, not until your parents need you to do something for them, but then there is always guilt.)

In fact, since all information around the issue is censored to such a degree that the younger Chinese are completely ignorant that anything like that actually happened. The life of the Chinese are not as tough now and people are satisfied with their country's economy and general direction while the past seems distant and irrelevant. The good news is that the country is progressing from seeing what democracy and capitalism is helping its people and perhaps true, true democracy can finally be implemented. But since it took us 5,000 years to reach this point, I'm not holding my breath for them.