Hold that Ad

David Aikman

Perhaps China has been too successful at censorship.

It was some eighteen years ago that the world was trying to absorb what had taken place in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing on the night of June 3–4, 1989. Six weeks of sometimes chaotic, always spontaneous, and invariably exhilarating demonstrations had taken place in Tiananmen Square, after the death of Hu Yaobang, a Chinese leader associated with reform, on April 15.

Students had crowded into the center of Beijing from the university district to the north of the city and set up a semi-permanent camp of tents. They had then turned the square into China’s only free-speech zone, addressing demands to the government through bullhorns or trying to recruit fellow students and passersby to this or that democratic cause. Students from campuses outside Beijing flocked to join them.

The student leaders had held hunger strikes and had conducted televised dialogues with China’s prime minister, Li Peng. They had even seriously embarrassed the government by preventing visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from moving around the city. It was all heady stuff. I arrived to observe it as a reporter on the morning of June 3.

The events of that afternoon and evening are well known. Some two weeks after first declaring martial law in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army had assembled at least three army groups around the capital. On the night of June 3, starting about 10.00 p.m., columns of trucks had started making their way towards Tiananmen from the West, along the main city cross-street, Changan Avenue. They were opposed by shouting and stone-throwing young people all the way. There was massive firing by the troops. By around 2.00 a.m., they had occupied the square. Around 5.30 a.m. tanks had also entered the square from the West, also along Changan Avenue, knocked over the Styrofoam statue of the Goddess of Democracy erected by students some days earlier, and arrested or killed anyone who resisted. Sporadic shooting at demonstrators lasted until 2.00 p.m. in the afternoon of June 4, Sunday. But the rebellion had been crushed. The death toll has never been revealed, but estimates vary from about 600 to some 3,000. Some of the bodies were taken away and burned outside the city proper.

The subversive name for the Tiananmen massacre inside China is “6-4,” designating the month and day of the event. But that’s what George Orwell would have called a “non-number”; Chinese media are never allowed to refer to the event by that name. In fact, so successfully has the Chinese government suppressed information about the student movement of 1989 that many young Chinese are totally unaware of it.

So when a tiny classified ad was placed in the Chengdu Evening News early in June with the words, “Saluting the strong mothers of victims of 6-4,” the young female clerk hadn’t a clue what it referred to. “A mining accident,” the ad-placer said.

That ad appeared, and then things hit the fan. The deputy editor-in-chief and two other newspaper employees were fired. Ironically, the young editor himself had no idea what “6-4” meant. The story, of course, got around on the Internet and through text-messaging. The score so far: Chinese Communist Party 1, dissent 0. But wait until the CCP has to play against history.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, War and Peace, Tue 10 Jul 2007