The People's Republic of Amnesia Quotes

“our amnesia is a state-sponsored sport.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“On the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, when three shifts of people a day were sharing the watching responsibilities, she decided it was too good an opportunity to miss. She photocopied two articles she had written and distributed them to all the policemen and plainclothes agents, telling them, “You guys are the ones watching me, but you don’t know why you’re watching me, do you? I’ll give you this information so you know why.” She discovered that some of them had no idea what had happened on June 4th, and one—a young female student from the Police Academy—even abandoned her post in disgust after discovering the reason she was there. “There is nothing we can do about this,” another watcher told her. “We were sent here by our superiors. They’re all messed up. Their brains are all addled.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“One of the tragedies of discourse in China, Zhang believes, is that grey areas have been swallowed up by black-and-white moral absolutism. Rule by the emperor, or the strongman, has become the only mode of governance that people recognize: Obey or be crushed, for there is no alternative. Even the students, while clamoring for democracy, had become mini-dictators of the world that they had created with their wordy titles, petty denunciations, and fervid inner-court power struggles.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“The Western media was also complicit in controlling the narrative in convenient ways; what happened outside Beijing was largely overlooked, due to the lack of information and the difficulty of confirming exactly what had happened. Acts of violence carried out by ordinary Chinese against policemen—and soldiers in Beijing—were often downplayed. After all, these did not fit easily into the West’s favored narrative of freedom-seeking students versus a repressive state.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“Over the past quarter-century, the events of those seven hot summer weeks across China have become telescoped into one single word: Tiananmen. That shorthand has narrowed the geographic scope of events to the capital, relegating the massive protest movements in dozens of other cities to silence. But Beijing’s demonstrations were not the only ones, nor were they the only ones to be suppressed. What happened in 1989 was a nationwide movement, and to allow this to be forgotten is to minimize its scale. The protests in Chengdu were not merely student marches, but part of a genuinely popular movement with support from across the spectrum. The pitched battles and temporary loss of control of the streets in Chengdu show the depth of the nationwide crisis facing the central government. According to the Tiananmen Papers, demonstrations against the brutality of the June 4th killings in Beijing broke out in 63 cities across China with thousands marching in cities including Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Jinan, and Hangzhou, in addition to Chengdu.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“For Bao Tong, undertaking economic reforms without the accompanying political reforms was dangerous. The subsequent dismantling of state-owned enterprises without proper supervision has created a princeling kleptocracy, far exceeding the nepotism and profiteering that drove some of the 1989 protests. “This was called ‘progress,’” Bao Tong told me, his words heavy with sarcasm. “It sounded so good. In reality, it was simply taking things from the people—the state-owned enterprises—and giving them to the officials. And the officials became millionaires.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“Does it even matter? Soon the party’s institutions were ignored and Deng’s elderly supporters were brought into play to stack the decision-making process. What happened during those seven weeks was that the old patriarch Deng Xiaoping engineered a coup, during which he circumnavigated the institutions of state in order to oust the party leader he himself had chosen. But the major difference would be in terms of legacy. Bao Tong believes history has been too kind, remembering Deng as the architect of Chinese reform; he believes Deng’s role in June 4th points to a more complicated truth. “What’s really important is that Chinese people need to know that he was a dictator.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“For Bao Tong, these passages were evidence that Zhao Ziyang had been a marked man before 1989. “This had nothing to do with the students,” Bao told me. He believes that Deng used the students as a tool to oust his designated successor. “He had to find a reason. The more the students pushed, the more of a reason Deng Xiaoping had. If the students all went home, then Deng Xiaoping wouldn’t have had a reason.” According to Bao’s theory, the gradual escalation of tensions between the Communist leadership and the students may not have been due to mishandling by a divided party, but part of a deliberate strategy.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“The Chinese memory of national humiliation is really the key to understanding China’s foreign policy,” says scholar Zheng Wang, who believes that the strident voice of the young nationalists, magnified by the Internet, has become a factor in foreign policy decisions. “This government is finding itself the victim of its own patriotic education campaign. It has very limited choices. Backing down becomes weakness or even a new humiliation. The government is the guardian of China’s national face, so being tough and strong is the only choice.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“Yet, for the party’s patriotic education strategy to work, looking back is necessary, as long as the retrospection happens under strictly controlled circumstances. Certain periods of history should be forgotten—notably those when the wounds were self-inflicted through misguided internal policies, such as the Cultural Revolution and June 4th. But the memory of other episodes—when the pain was inflicted by external sources—should be kept alive to ensure that China’s citizens remain grateful to their Communist leaders for delivering them from the depredations of the past.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“I once asked a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Yunnan what she dreamed of doing when she grew up. “I want to spend time with corrupt officials,” she answered. “The more corrupt they are, the better. Because they’re the ones who know how the world works.” Morality aside, it was difficult to argue with the logic of her argument.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“Paradoxically, the Chinese government’s success in enforcing collective amnesia and whitewashing its own history may now threaten its control over information. Many of those too young to have lived through Tiananmen are completely ignorant about what happened, indeed dangerously ignorant from the government’s perspective. On a couple of occasions in recent years, young media workers have even failed to recognize Tiananmen-related material and thus have neglected to censor it.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“A quarter-century later, this post-suppression justification reads like his living will, setting out the future political direction of the country by emphasizing that, while economic reform and the opening up of China should continue at an accelerated pace, they should not be accompanied by similarly fast political liberalization.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“I believe that I have a conscience. My conscience is God.”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited

“If that was now possible at the highest levels of government, then why not at the lower levels? There was one big Tiananmen. But how many little Tiananmens have there been? How many little Tiananmens are there every day?”
― Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited