After Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo died last week, China’s government became busy trying to erase any traces of his memory and declared war on candle emojis. While the communists have to work harder these days due to the internet, they have a long history of obliterating any trace of dissent from official memory
Draconian state-sponsored amnesia
In 1957, Chinese tyrant Mao Zedong launched an “Anti-Rightist Movement” in which nearly 500,000 were persecuted. The renowned physicist Fang Lizhi was purged for the first time. He wondered why they used “cruel methods against those who showed a tiny bit (and some not even that) of free thought”
“I discovered this worry of mine seemed ridiculous to older friends; they laughed at my ignorance of history,” wrote Fang in The New York Review of Books. They told him the same methods—“rectification” and “criticism and struggle”, euphemisms for forcing people to commit suicide, and even beheading—were used by the communists as early as 1942
Tiananmen: forced to forget
Over half of the 1989 Tiananmen movement participants were not aware of the persecution of the 1979 Democracy Wall Movement protestors. And two decades later, a professor who taught in Hong Kong found his students had no idea of the Tiananmen Square Massacre