Thirty years ago this week the Chinese government sent forces into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to enforce martial law declared after thoiusands of mostly-young protesters assembled in the Square to demand greater freedoms.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, with thousands more injured.
A young man named Shen Tong was one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. He was 20 years old, but had grown up not far from Tiananmen Square, and in 1990 published a memoir of his childhood, and thew violence that ended it.
I met Shen Tong just a little over a year after the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
But the epilogue to the story is, the Chinese government has all but completely obliterated the Tiananmen Square story from all records. So much so, that NBC News reported this week that manyu young Chinese today aren’t evben aware that the protests ever took place.