Thirty years after the brutal crackdown, the Tiananmen anniversary has become more – rather than less – politically sensitive as time has passed. Every year, the authorities use a range of tactics to suppress both the anniversary commemorations and journalistic reporting on them. In this talk, Louisa Lim examines the ways in which the legacy of Tiananmen has been excised from the collective and institutional memory in today’s China, as well as looking at the cost of memory and the role that foreign correspondents play in shaping memories of June Fourth outside China.
Co-sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies
About Louisa Lim
Louisa Lim is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is an award-winning journalist, who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. She teaches journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong.