Chinese Government Preempts Tiananmen Anniversery with Jailing

Next month will be the 25th anniversary of the student protests in Tiananmen Square that left hundreds if not thousands killed by the Chinese military. The ring leaders at the time were found and executed, but many, those who were not as vital to organization, were tried and allowed to return to University. Sunday Pu Zhiqang, a Human Rights Lawyer and 1989 protestor, was summoned and detained under suspicion that he is helping organize a protest to mark the anniversary (or something; the party often doesn’t feel the need to give a reason). The Chinese Government would not allow such an anniversary to be recognized. They also refuse to acknowledge the Tiananmen Square protests as an event in Chinese history. In addition to Pu, several other academics with ties to the protests have disappeared. Recently those who have disappeared – allegedly, this is all alleged – attended a discussion on the events surrounding Tiananmen Square. It scares me to think that any organization has the power to make people disappear and revise history to make them seem crazy. We will talk about Globalization this week. It is assumed that economic choice will also ease the access to information and help bring freedom of thought to the entire world. This is not the case, obviously, for China with its Communist Party monopoly. Do the people of China not care about the Tiananmen Square protests? Have they been conditioned to forget under the threat of punishment, or are they fearful that if they say anything that they will disappear? If either of the latter are true how can we know that China is actually being affected by globalization. http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/rights-lawyer-detained-ahead-of-tiananmen-anniversary/?action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry687%23%2Faustin%2Bramzy%2F7days%2F Mitch Wood