The global battle to preserve the memory of Tiananmen Square.

By Probe International

Despite relentless suppression and an intensified campaign of erasure under Xi Jinping, interest in the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, persists and even grows. New photographs, eyewitness accounts, and documents continue to surface every year.

Beijing-based journalist Amy Hawkins, in her latest piece for The Guardian U.K., explores international efforts to document and preserve the truth of that pivotal event — from grassroots digital archives to rare primary sources — in the face of strict domestic censorship. [See: ‘Every Year I Get New Pictures’: The Fight to Preserve the Memory of Tiananmen]

A central theme is the link between historical truth and independent thought. To that end, the open access China Unofficial Archives is a digital NGO dedicated to preserving independent blogs, films and documents beyond the reach of China’s internet censorship. Headquartered in New York, a CUA editor told Hawkins: “History cannot only be written by officials. If you don’t have real information, it’s difficult for you to have independent thought.”

One of the most significant artefacts now safeguarded abroad is the diaries of Li Rui, a senior Communist Party official and former secretary to Mao Zedong. Li, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 101, witnessed the June 4 crackdown from a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square and recorded it starkly as a “black weekend” of soldiers “firing randomly.”

After a legal battle, his detailed, unvarnished diaries were secured at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, preventing what his daughter, Li Nanyang, feared would be their destruction or concealment in China. If returned, that would enable the CCP to claim the truth about the massacre was “fake news that comes from the western world,” she said.

The U.S.-based Chinese human rights activist Zhou Fengsuo, a prominent leader of the Tiananmen protests, notes optimistically: “Every year, I learn more about Tiananmen through people, every year I get new pictures, new documents. I think it’s pretty clear that the memory of Tiananmen is preserved.”

While technology has strengthened China’s censorship and surveillance apparatus, it has also given activists new ways to reach broader audiences, Zhou says. Asked whether the combination of ageing witnesses and pressure from the Chinese Communist Party could erode public memory of the events of 1989, Zhou remains buoyant. “I’m far less worried than I was 10 years ago,” he says.

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