Editorial Illustration for The Wall Street Journal
“China’s Effort to Erase the June 4 Protests From History: The Tiananmen crackdown and the iconic ‘tank man’ have long been walled off from public discussion. Now Beijing’s efforts to control the narrative of Communist rule go much further.”
Reported by Charles Hutzler and edited by Linda Rubes
pub. May 31, 2019
Read the article here.
“Tank man” images are ruthlessly excised from Chinese social media, according to monitoring services. When the British journalist Louisa Lim was researching a 2015 book on the Tiananmen events and the suppression of their memory, she showed the iconic photo of “tank man” to 100 students at four universities in Beijing. Only 15 correctly identified it, two by guessing, she wrote in the “The People’s Republic of Amnesia.”