Last week I was on an extended sojourn to the Russian borderlands of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. I’m now back in Beijing and seem to have landed into the middle of a history blackout. I’ve said it before, but nothing makes the CCP look more like a bunch of Kim Jong-il wannabes then when they pull one of these periodic returns to the bad old days of information blackouts and official stupidity.
Whatever one’s view regarding the nature of the Tiananmen demonstrations and the way in which they were suppressed, for the historian, the stone-handed way the Chinese government is trying to block out all memory of the event is a depressing and sad reminder that this government is still being run by scared old men.
The ridiculous measures being undertaken in this pathetic campaign of official amnesia include increasing the thug count on the streets of Beijing, the exile of several octogenarians out of the capital, the censoring of foreign satellite signals, the interdiction of foreign newspapers, and even the blocking of social networking sites like Twitter (Really? By-the-minute 140-word updates of the dinner plans of Perez Hilton or what song is playing at Shaq’s crib is going to bring down the regime? Are you F—–g kidding me?) The most interesting part is that the government of the PRC does in fact have its own official version of the story, but even that sanitized account seems too hot to handle for the Chinese-language PRC press this week.
This is the CCP in full-blown ninny mode.
The truth is that few remembrances of June 4th will occur on the mainland. No doubt the CCP propaganda machine and that bizarre mash of lonely boys, naive nationalists, and disingenuous wannabe elite who make up the fenqing are going to point to this lack of activity as a sign that the Chinese people have ‘moved past’ the event and there’s no need to talk about it.
But what’s astonishing to me though is that a country with such a rich intellectual and historical tradition would be content to take such a profoundly anti-intellectual approach to history, but I guess such is the “culture” of learning in today’s PRC, which can best be summed up as “Take a test, memorize your lessons, graduate, shut up, quit thinking, and buy a damn car.”
If I sound a little testy, it’s because I am. When history is swept under the rug, it can begin to rot and that stench is the smell of fear, the odor of a government which cannot tolerate ideas or perspectives with which it disagrees. There have been other such governments in the past, and several which linger to this day, but none I suspect with whom the CCP would care to be associated closely in the global consciousness.
