For Chinese, the Tiananmen Square Massacre Is Still Too Taboo to Talk About

For Chinese young people, the best way to talk about the 1989 military crackdown is to not talk about it.
For Chinese, the Tiananmen Square Massacre Is Still Too Taboo to Talk About
A 25 May 1989 file photo shows students waving banners as they march in Beijing streets near Tiananmen Square during a rally to support the pro-democracy protest against the Chinese government. Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images
Matthew Robertson
Updated:

When I asked my wife, who is Chinese, to see whether some of her friends would be willing to speak with a Western reporter about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she snapped her head around and blurted out: “Are you nuts?!”

A question like that, she said, would be the fastest way to put a friendship on ice.

The regime-ordered slaughter of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of Chinese people 26 years ago is not really a topic of conversation among Chinese youth today. In private, one approaches it with the utmost circumspection; in public, not at all.

Even getting Chinese to talk about how they talk about the massacre—not what they think happened, or who was right and who was wrong—has its peculiarities. None of those I spoke with permitted their names to be used, for instance.

Others would not speak directly to me, but only through a friend already known to them. One even agreed with the idea that there should be restrictions of speech on the topic.

Until traveling to the United States and Googling the topic, my wife was one of the truly ignorant. Once, in response to an inquiry about the massacre by a traveling foreign tourist, she asserted that the government was merely restoring stability after violent unrest by radical students—and anyway, it was none of your business. It was “like a mother smacking her unruly child.”

A young man who works in the international department of a major state-run company, when asked for his view on the incident, said the kind of thing that one would say if there was a political commissar on the other side of the mirror glass.

“I’m a Party member, and I side with the Party. Those extreme young people were instigated by hostile foreign forces in an attempt to split China,” he wrote on WeChat, a popular social media app, before dialing it up a notch. “My Party took the correct action at the correct time and strangled those evil forces in their crib.”

Then he added the Chinese phrase that equates to a wink and a nudge: “You know.”

The phrase, “ni dongde” in Mandarin, was first popularized by Lu Xinhua, representative for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress, when asked in March 2014 whether Zhou Yongkang, the Party’s former security czar, was indeed under disciplinary investigation. Lu’s response equated to an admission that Zhou was, without actually providing the admission. Everyone was in on the joke.

Students sing as they hold a pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May of 1989. (Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images)
Students sing as they hold a pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May of 1989. Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images
Matthew Robertson
Matthew Robertson
Author
Matthew Robertson is the former China news editor for The Epoch Times. He was previously a reporter for the newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 2013 he was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for coverage of the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.
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