Outside the Communist Party, memories of the 1989 massacre get hazy

AMONG journalists at a Chinese newspaper, there has been some surprising talk of publishing a story to mark the 20th anniversary on June 3rd and 4th of the massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens by Chinese soldiers. One journalist even told his colleagues he would be ready to go to jail for doing so. But such bravado, especially if it proves more than rhetoric, is likely to be rare. For many in China the nationwide pro-democracy protests of 1989 and their bloody end have become a muddled and half-forgotten tale.

Twenty years on, the memory of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square has not faded, but the events in the weeks that led up to it have been largely forgotten

It is 20 years since Ding Zilin stood by her gate and waited for her son.

“What came were students with tattered clothes and disheveled hair, shouting ‘they are killing people, they are shooting at people,’” she said.

“The more we watched, the more terrified and desperate we felt ... At about five in the morning we saw a car with a flat wooden board on it and a child’s body on the board. When I saw the body of that child I felt my son’s fate was the same and he would not come back again,” she said.