Yuyao You - Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

Find an example of counter memory. What parts of the official memory are being contested and how is that being done?
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

Type 59 tanks on Tiananmen Square.

“The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, commonly known as the June Fourth Incident or more accurate language 八九民运 in Chinese, were student-led popular demonstrations in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989 and received broad support from city residents, exposing deep splits within China's political leadership. The protests were forcibly suppressed by hardline leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the country's capital. The crackdown that initiated on June 3–4 became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June 4 Massacre as troops with assault rifles and tanks inflicted casualties on unarmed civilians trying to block the military’s advance towards Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which student demonstrators had occupied for seven weeks. The scale of military mobilization and the resulting bloodshed were unprecedented in the history of Beijing, a city with a rich tradition of popular protests in the 20th century.

          The Chinese government condemned the protests as a "counter-revolutionary riot", and has prohibited all forms of discussion or remembrance of the events since. Due to the lack of information from China, many aspects of the events remain unknown or unconfirmed. Estimates of the death toll range from a few hundred to the thousands.

          The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of former Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer, who was deposed after losing a power struggle with hardliners over the direction of political and economic reform.

University students who marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu also voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite. They called for government accountability, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of workers' control over industry. At the height of the protests, about a million people assembled in the Square.

          The government initially took a conciliatory stance toward the protesters. The student-led hunger strike galvanized support for the demonstrators around the country and the protests spread to 400 cities by mid-May. Ultimately, China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and other party elders resolved to use force. Party authorities declared martial law on May 20, and mobilized as many as 300,000 troops to Beijing.

          In the aftermath of the crackdown, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, expelled foreign journalists and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press. The police and internal security forces were strengthened. Officials deemed sympathetic to the protests were demoted or purged. Zhao Ziyang was ousted in a party leadership reshuffle and replaced with Jiang Zemin. Political reforms were largely halted and economic reforms did not resume until Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern tour. The Chinese government was widely condemned internationally for the use of force against the protesters. Western governments imposed economic sanctions and arms embargoes.”( Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989)

          Actually this event is still kept as a “secret” by the Chinese government currently. Individual could do nothing but just recalled these horrible memory sometimes, and everybody just moves on. Chinese people are too afraid to say something true or do something that the government not allow stealthily. As a consequence, people just go on their normal life. The government does not even give us the opportunity to find the truth. We can’t go on Wikipedia in China, and once we search the key words of “Tiananmen Square protests of 1989”, we get nothing but “According to the relevant laws and regulations and policies, some of the search results have not been displayed.” However, no one could find what those laws exactly are. And “some of” means all of. By the way, we could not even get on Google in China, we have our own search website called “Baidu” controlled by the government which is almost the same copy of Google.

          I was born in 1994 so I just missed this huge even fortunately. My father told me about this event. He was one of those students who sat on the Tiananmen Square protesting. And finally the government army was sent with tanks and machine guns. They just fired to the student on the Tiananmen Square which is considered as a most sacred place in China where Chairman Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s republic of China. What a sarcasm! Luckily my father sat very back of the students, he ran under the bullets and survived. Some of his friends and classmates just got the bullets and dead. He even became a federal employee and worked for government. He knows the evil of the government but he can do nothing but earn a life from being a federal employee. Additionally, there are many people who are just like my father. They have professional ethics so they would not say anything about the event in public but they could tell their family.

          I was told by my father when I was in high school. And I had already get paralytic about our government doing these kinds of things. I just don’t care about them. What I only want is live my own life and make it as good as possible under the “suppress” of the government, like many people do.