For some, it started by overhearing a casual comment. Others found out from someone with firsthand knowledge. Some even had personal connections to those involved.
Regardless of how they first learned of the June 4, 1989 massacre of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, young people were motivated to learn more, driven by a sense that the truth had been hidden from them, a query from Chinese youth on Twitter compiled by Radio Free Asia Programs.
His instincts weren’t wrong.
The Chinese Communist Party has gone to great lengths to obstruct any form of public discussion of the incident 34 years ago.
The authorities have worked tirelessly to erase the matter from the history books, online discussions, and the media. Every June, the police go to the homes of dissidents, place them under house arrest and prohibit them from posting on the issue or speaking to the media.
And with the protesting students now well into their 50s, and children born since the massacre growing up with virtually no knowledge of the event, the passing of time is helping the Communist Party erase memories.
But China’s youth are tech-savvy and have figured out ways around the country’s Great Firewall of Internet censorship. Many use VPNs, or virtual private networks, to mask their IP addresses, which are illegal in China but still widely used.
How did you find out?
Ahead of this year’s anniversary, RFA sent out a query on Twitter, asking Chinese netizens born after 2000, essentially those 22 and younger, to share how they first learned about the Tiananmen massacre.
RFA received almost 1,400 responses. Twitter is banned in China, but can be accessed via VPN.
Most of the respondents refused to give their full names, citing fear of reprisals. Many openly expressed their surprise at what they discovered, some saying it had changed them forever.
Tanzhang first heard about the crackdown in 2020, when he was in high school, while watching a video describing the cameras on Bilibili, the popular content-sharing platform.
“When they mentioned (the brand) Leica, the creator of the video added a comment saying: ‘Leica recently filmed an ad that insulted China,'” he said, referring to a commercial in which a photographer appears to be taking photos of the People’s Liberation Army’s advance on students in the square, only to be confronted by authorities at their hotel.
“All the comments were cryptic, which piqued my curiosity, so I searched for more information. Later, when I checked Bilibili’s video, I found that the comment had been removed,” she said.
‘Deeply shocked’
A high school student who identified himself as Liang said he found out about Twitter and Facebook in October 2021 while browsing Douyin, a Chinese TikTok-style video platform. He got a VPN account and started following some accounts of Chinese nationalist officials known as “wolf warriors”.
“I saw someone mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in the comments of a tweet by (Foreign Ministry spokesperson) Hua Chunying, so I googled it and was deeply shocked,” he said.
Several students said that instructors put themselves at risk by teaching about repression in class or gained access to censored educational materials during their studies.
“In a college elective many years ago, the teacher sneaked us a video (about the massacre) with the door closed, without saying a word,” said a student who gave his name as “Y.” “Today it is impossible that such a thing could happen.”
Another respondent who identified himself as Guan Fu said that while he was in eighth grade, his modern Chinese history teacher “spent an entire class explaining everything about the Tiananmen Square incident.”
“That day the beliefs that had been instilled in me since I was a child collapsed,” he said. “I returned home and asked my elders about it. Turns out they all knew, but in the face of that bloody purge at the time, they chose silence.”
One respondent who identified themselves as “Student A” said that a teacher had mentioned that university students in the plaza had been “repressed by the government,” and that the reference was enough to make them want to investigate further.
Image of the ‘tank man’
At an international school in China, teachers sealed sections of history textbooks deemed politically sensitive before returning them to class to study, said one respondent who gave the name “Classmate S.”
“Out of curiosity, my classmates and I cautiously opened the seals and saw an image in the China content: a man blocking a tank,” he said, referring to the iconic image of an unarmed protester standing on the road from a tank. on a major boulevard.
The student said he and his classmates were taken to the principal’s office and forced to write self-criticisms.
“I don’t understand why I am being punished for seeking the truth about history,” he said. “Why is our government hiding the facts? I am truly disappointed in my government and deeply disgusted by its hypocrisy.”
Some described personal connections to the crackdown that they said had led them to investigate.
Another respondent told RFA that a classmate “told me that his father and grandfather were soldiers and had shot at Beijing students.”
“He spoke with a lot of pride,” the student said. “I went home for the weekend and searched the Internet bypassing the Great Firewall.”
A student named Lin said he was watching a movie called “The Curse of the Golden Flower” about a failed rebellion against the Chinese empire with his parents in 2006 when he first learned of the incident.
“During the finale, after Prince Jie’s rebellion fails and the palace eunuchs and maidens clean up the rebels’ bloodstains while arranging the chrysanthemums,” he said. “Then my mom said, ‘Isn’t this like 64?’” a common and cryptic way of referring to June 4th.
“My dad nervously motioned for my mom to stop,” she said. “I had never seen such expressions on my parents’ faces, so I went online to find answers.”
Edited by Josh Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
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