Jane Macartney in the Times, Jan 3
Beijing: A Chinese newspaper has defied a 21-year-old ban on all mention of the Tiananmen Square crackdown by publishing a cartoon that echoes one of the event’s most iconic moments.
The cartoon shows a little boy’s drawing on a blackboard of a row of tanks moving towards a stick figure. The national flag, which flies every day in front of the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, flutters below. Above the tanks the boy has drawn a torch, an apparent reference to the flame held by the plaster statue dubbed the Goddess of Democracy that student demonstrators raised in the square just days before the Army moved in to crush them.
A flurry of comments erupted on the Chinese internet once cybersurfers spotted the cartoon — published to mark Children’s Day on June 1 but clearly intended to commemorate the 21st anniversary on Friday of the crackdown of June 4, 1989.
Links to the cartoon were being passed around via Twitter, which is blocked in China but is nonetheless used by many younger and more tech-savvy “netizens” who have found ways to circumvent the Great Firewall.
One comment read: “The Southern Metropolis Daily has done a good thing.” Another wrote: “Make sure the next generation knows about the past, that they remember history. Do not forget! Do not forget!”
It is not clear what the date or the writing — “School Report” — on the blackboard might refer to.
Some reports said the drawing had been removed from the newspaper’s website, leaving a blank among the seven remaining anodyne cartoons. However, the image could still be found on page 16 of the PDF version of the newspaper.
The Communist Party has branded the 1989 demonstrations — when students took to the streets to protest against inflation and corruption and call for democracy — as a counter-revolutionary rebellion. Scant reference appears in history text books and the use of tanks and troops to crush the movement on the night of June 3-4, with the loss of hundreds of lives, is never mentioned.
Many young Chinese have never even heard of the events. They have never seen the image, famous around the world, of an unidentified man in a white shirt, holding a shopping bag, standing in front of a column of tanks as they moved out of the square on the morning of June 4.
It would not be the first time a Chinese newspaper has tried to slip a commemorative reference past the censors. In 2008, editions of the popular Beijing News were withdrawn from stands after running a photograph showing two wounded young men being carried away on a flatbed tricycle from Tiananmen Square. A year earlier, the authorities sacked three editors of a provincial newspaper from printing an advertisement that praised the mothers of the Tiananmen victims for their campaign for justice.
The Communist Party is acutely aware of the anniversary, filling Tiananamen Square with thousands of plainclothes police just in case anyone dares to attempt to remember publicly the hundreds killed or the thousands sent to jail.
So sensitive is the date that police in Hong Kong today deported a sculptor who recreated the Goddess of Democracy statue a day after he tried to enter the territory earlier in the week. Chen Weiming had arrived from Los Angeles. His statue had been seized a few days earlier when it was displayed on a city pavement along with a carving depicting the tragedy.
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