Unlike other children in Beijing, Steven Chen rarely went to Tiananmen Square with his parents when he was a child.
He knew why at a family reunion, at the age of eight, when he first learned of the “Tiananmen repression.”
On the night of June 3, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army aimed its weapons at students and ordinary people who demanded a democratic future for their country.
For weeks before, the students, who were among the hundreds of civilians massacred that night, had been encamped in Tiananmen Square as part of their protest.
When stories were told that night to eight-year-old Mr. Chen, he was “totally shocked” to hear his relatives talk about “tanks running over students’ bodies,” he told ABC.
“Tiananmen has always seemed to me a very solemn and stately place. It is difficult to associate the two scenes,” he said.
“I even thought my families had drunk too much and told me things that were exaggerated and dramatic.”
Today, 33 years after the Tiananmen massacre, he has shared how he experienced repression and how it has affected his life.
Learning about Tiananmen Repression influenced Steven Chen’s decision to emigrate to Australia when he was 15 years old. (Supplied)
“I asked my father why he didn’t take me to Tiananmen Square like other parents did. Then he showed me a video of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989,” Chen said.
“This is the first time I’ve seen the famous image of the tankman.”
But when he asked questions about what had happened, his parents refused to reveal more.
Out of curiosity, he searched for “Tiananmen Square incident” and “incident 8964” online, but the only thing that appeared was an empty webpage.
Although he did not fully understand what a blank search page meant as an elementary school student, it sparked his desire to see the world outside the Great Firewall.
At the age of 15 he moved to Australia to study.
Here, he was able to access information that was not available to most people in mainland China.
“Knowing the Tiananmen movement changed my life, which pushed me out of Truman’s world and bring down the ideological wall of Berlin,” he said.
‘It’s my duty’
Chinese students spend weeks camping in Tiananmen Square campaigning for democracy in 1989. (Reuters: Dominic Dudouble)
With the help of his older brothers, Mr. Chen first exposed himself to the world outside the Great Firewall through a VPN when he was in sixth grade.
Among the large number of images of the Tiananmen crackdown on YouTube, what struck him most was a brief conversation between a young man on a bicycle and a Western journalist.
The young man told the reporter that he was going to Tiananmen Square because “it is my duty.”
“I look like he’s my age. He was smiling and in a good mood as if he were going to a party. I saw the hope of the Chinese youth in that ray of his smile,” Chen said.
He told the ABC that if he had lived in China in 1989, he would have joined the movement as well.
“I admire these students who could have lived a stable life, but they chose to take that risk to fight a goal that would not necessarily bear fruit in the short term,” Chen explained.
Before arriving in Australia, Mr. Chen once mentioned the Tiananmen movement to his classmates, but everyone looked at him questioningly.
“We live in the same society and in the same space, but we have a disconnected perception,” he said.
“It’s my biggest grief”
On the 30th anniversary of the 2019 Tiananmen Repression, Xu Xiao carried the banner used in the 1989 protest at Liberty Sculpture Park in the United States. (Supplied)
Not the entire younger generation in China shares Mr. Chen to know the erased history of Chinese textbooks, even including the descendants of participants in the Tiananmen movement.
Xu Xiao, a senior college student in Nanjing in 1989 and one of the organizers of the student protest at his university, told the ABC that his son was “completely indifferent” to what happened in 1989.
He said his son’s indifference has been an indelible pain.
Xiao moved to the United States in 2019, but her son still lives in China.
He compared his situation to that of Sitong Tan, a famous revolutionary who devoted his life to advancing Chinese society.
“Before Mr. Tan was killed, his wife told him, ‘You’re about to be killed and we don’t have any children yet.’ Tan said, ‘One more child means one more slave in the world.’
“I have a son, but my son was born and educated in China and they have brainwashed him. [the Chinese Communist Party]. It is my greatest sorrow. [It’s] heartbreaking. “
Child recreates the image of a tankman weeping over Tiananmen crackdown on Sydney Harbor in 2018. (Supplied)
But Chen believes there is a reason why the younger generation knows little and cares less about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
In addition to the strict censorship in China, he said another reason was that the movement had no relevance to the real interests of modern youth.
If they focus on aspects such as the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), the master’s degree or the internship, it may allow them to get a higher salary for their future jobs.
“But [they know] a democratic movement does not add any condiment to its curricula, which means that it does not add value to its real world. “
‘Why should we review this story?’
More than 3,200 terms referring to the Tiananmen massacre have been censored on the Internet in China. (ABC News: Graphic / Jarrod Fankhauser)
The commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown has become part of Mr. Xiao’s daily life, but said that relying on the “first generation of ’89” alone “was not enough.”
Louisa Lim, a journalist who has been reporting from China for a decade, has been working to uncover the hidden truth about the Tiananmen movement.
In June 2018, when Lim was talking to Chinese students at an Australian university about the repression in Tiananmen, a Chinese student asked, “Why do we need to review this story? Why do you think knowing this story is helpful for the young woman? Chinese generation, like me? “
Lim told the ABC that young Chinese people deserve the right to know the truth, although many may be terrified to hear something incompatible with what the government had told them.
Louisa Lim spent years discovering the hidden truth of the Tiananmen crackdown by talking to student leaders of the protests. (Supplied)
“They are convinced that all government decisions are right and unmistakable, and any deviation from this benchmark is reckless, even dangerous,” he wrote in his book The People’s Republic of Amnesia.
June 4’s political sensibilities have increased in China over the years, with more than 3,200 terms referring to the Tiananmen massacre that have been censored on the Chinese Internet.
Lim said that when this knowledge was hidden from people, it was a sign of weakness rather than strength.
“I think the Chinese are mature enough to know what happened in June 1989 and to be able to draw their own conclusions about the behavior of the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.”
Even as one of the few young people known, Chen said he would not encourage the younger generation in China to get to know the Tiananmen movement because “most young people can’t change anything even if they know it.”
They should even use Pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters based on their pronunciation) or abbreviations to avoid detecting AI algorithms when writing anything about 1989 on social media platforms, including WeChat.
“They can’t do justice to those who died, they can’t go to any memorial service,” he said.
“Instead, they will be more disappointed with the society in which they live when they find out what happened in 1989.”