Square one

There would have been nothing surprising about a communist party mouthpiece bemoaning students lack of idealism and indifference to politics in these predominantly utilitarian times. But when the paper lamenting thus is Chinas Peoples Daily,one can rest assured the Party is actually relieved that,20 years after the Tiananmen crackdown,university students know little more about it than the one-line entry in school history textbooks.

There is still no rift in the veil of prohibition that precludes discussion of the events of April-June 1989 on Chinese soil. The curbs imposed by the Party-state on several websites on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown,the travel and entry bans on dissidents and former dissidents,and,above all,preventing foreign journalists from entering Tiananmen Square on June 4 are evidence of the spectacular nervousness of an administration whose economic and industrial policies have turned China around since 1989,and given its citizens much of what protestors were demanding in 1989,except of course the Big One.

Eyewitness journalists have since revised their accounts that there was,for instance,no massacre in Tiananmen Square itself. But lives were lost in Beijing,on roads leading to the Square as on Changan Avenue and hundreds,possibly thousands to use the most oft quoted media line died. The Party never allowed an investigation; the figures were never known. But some day soon itll have to revise its account too. Its no coincidence that Zhao Ziyangs the then reformist general secretary who was purged for his sympathetic attitude towards the protestors secret memoirs have been published just weeks before June 4. Coming eight years after the surfacing of the so-called The Tiananmen Papers,Zhaos memoirs will further reveal how the Party unleashed the bloody night of June 3,1989 and the day after.