Today marks the 25th anniversary of a turning point in modern Chinese history. In the run-up, around 20 key intellectuals and campaigners have been been detained, and security around Beijing heightened. And who knows how many warnings and threats have been issued to the family and friends of conscience-driven citizens across the country.

Such policies are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s comprehensive attempt to eradicate the memory of June 4, 1989 from this country’s history. Louisa Lim, veteran NPR correspondent in Beijing, focuses on this policy and its impact on Chinese society in The People’s Republic of Amnesia. The title of the book comes from an essay penned by a soldier-turned-novelist and fearless government critic, Yan Lianke, in 2003. He wrote that in contemporary China, one must be “willing to see what is allowed to be seen, and look away from what is not allowed to be looked at… our amnesia is a state sponsored sport.”

Lim investigates this state-promoted amnesia through interviews with those involved in the Tiananmen Square protests, such as prominent student leader Wu’er Kaixi, the brave and resilient Tiananmen Mothers, a young soldier ordered to clear the square on that tragic night, a senior member of Deng Xiaoping’s government, and a number of people from younger generations, to whom any knowledge of the events must come through deliberate and determined searching within a restricted realm of information. From these diverse perspectives, Lim builds a complex picture of the significance of the brutal events of 1989 to Chinese society today.

Most apparent from these series of profiles is the generation gap in knowledge and government approach. The last 25 years has seen government strategy move away from the active suppression of information to the careful cultivation of a situation where ignorance is the status quo. Lim sees this shift reflected in official rhetoric. Originally labeled “counter revolutionary turmoil,” the events of June 4, by way of “political storm,” are now called an “incident.”

This strategy has also seen official policy on June 4 move from confrontation to all-out avoidance. In the immediate aftermath of the events, the government drew up a list of most-wanted culprits, a number of whom escaped through a network of human smugglers via Hong Kong, and foreign embassy sponsors and triad organizations across China. The government now avoids contact with them. When in 2009 the exiled Wu’er Kaixi tried to turn himself in to the authorities, they simply refused. “Like football players on the bench, the overseas activists have been removed from the field of play,” Lim summarizes. (Good luck to Murong Xuecun, who last week announced he would hand himself over in an act of defiance against the state.)

Other than the rare opportunity to hear all these perspectives, the real coup of the book is Lim’s investigation into one of the numerous parallel protests and suppressions, Chengdu, an event largely forgotten both within and outside of China.

Through conversations with relatives of the Chengdu protesters, Lim paints one of the first pictures of the brutal crackdown that happened there. “Lacking an independent media to amplify their voices, [Chengdu’s] short-lived scream of fury became a cry into thin air,” Lim writes.

It is estimated that student protests took place in at least 63 cities across the country that summer. That 1989 was about far more than just Tiananmen is a part of history almost totally conquered by China’s state-sponsored amnesia.

For Lim, 1989 marks a watershed in the CCP’s rule. She believes the consequence of the government turning guns on the people and its sinister attempt to erase this fact from history is an ever-growing moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary Chinese society. Her words echo those of Bao Tong, a senior government minister who was purged in 1989. He sees June 4th as having laid the groundwork for a form of governance based on coercion, threat, and violence at all levels. “If that was possible at the highest levels, then why not at the lower levels? … How many little Tiananmens are there every day?’

The People’s Republic of Amnesia concludes on a radical note. Lim, believing facts can never be fully conquered, quotes the fiery language of Lu Xun: “Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood. All blood debts must be repaid in kind.” The People’s Republic of Amnesia is a fearless investigation and survey of the post-Tiananmen era. The government may prefer an epilogue never be written, but it will be — it’s just a matter of when.

Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based freelancer writer. He is also co-founder and editor of Concrete Flux, an online journal on urban spaces. You can follow him @TomBaxter17. His previous piece for BJC was a review of Adam Minter‘s Junkyard Planet.

Also see, from June 4, 2013: The Conversion Of Liao Yiwu: How A Poet Becomes A Dissident.

Junkyard Planet, the first book by Bloomberg Shanghai correspondent Adam Minter, offers a look at the often unheard and unseen $500 billion global scrap and recycling industry, which has formed in the shadow of burgeoning Western — and increasingly Chinese — consumerism. Minter is himself “a proud junkyard kid” from a Minneapolis scrap trading family that established themselves through hard graft in the post-Depression period. This background provided him the connections to offer an invaluable insider perspective on this unknown trade — and also informs his somewhat Romanticized, American Dream-inspired perspective.

But a personalized voice keeps the book from sinking into tedium. Minter first came to China in the mid-90s while working for his family scrap business. It was a time when American consumption and its inevitable byproduct, waste, was skyrocketing, and a time when China, opening up to the world, offered willing and cheap labor for the dirty work of recycling. Since then, the shipment of American waste to China has come to form the foundation of China’s huge recycling industry.

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, American scrap that came to China was broken down into its most useful elements and sold as raw materials to Chinese factories which would then use it to make products such as toys, tools, and car engines for resale to the West. This is a neat ecosystem, which Minter presents with unceasing enthusiasm.

In the last few years, however, the path of this scrap material has been changing. The products made, wholly or partially, from recycled American goods are increasingly sold within China. And one key metal, the electricity-conducting copper — the main recyclable from Christmas tree lights — is finding its resting place in China’s high-speed train networks and in the wiring of her sprouting high-rise metropolises. In 2012, China accounted for 42 percent of the world’s copper demand.

Minter is in admiration of the scrap trade, its truly global reach and its ability to create wealth from junk –modern alchemy. But he’s also concerned with the side effects, in particular the environmental tragedies for which recycling is responsible, such as the transformation of Wen’an county in Beijing from a “bucolic… agricultural region renowned for its streams, peach trees, and… rolling landscape” into a plastic-scented “dead zone.” There are also devastating health effects. The township of Guiyu, Guangdong, a hub of “e-waste” recycling, reportedly has seen 88 percent of its children under six suffering from some form of lead poisoning.

All of the above is to say the author’s own views are more than a little ambivalent. It is hard to square fears of environmental pollution, labor conditions and health risks with Minter’s statement, “Whether I need the upgraded iPhone of not (and I really don’t), I want the upgraded iPhone.”

Moral ambivalence characterizes the book throughout in part because of the complexity of the global system Minter describes, and in part because of his personally ambivalent position as both “junkyard kid” and journalist. But not one to shy away from a strong opinion, he rails against Apple for its concerted efforts to monopolize the repair and recycling of its products by making them too complex for untrained workers to dismantle.

Junkyard Planet offers an informed insight into a massive global system of trade, of which very few of us are aware. The book is littered with surprising examples of what happens to our junk. In the end, we’re offered a positive portrait of the unglamorous, often filthy, and sometimes wealthy industry of recycling. Ultimately, “if China didn’t import… resources, it’d have to dig and drill them.” And we are all fully aware of the environmental damage that can cause.

Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based freelancer writer. He is also co-founder and editor of Concrete Flux, an online journal on urban spaces and the experience of urbanity in China. You can follow him @TomBaxter17.

Last Thursday saw the publication of the China Story Yearbook 2013, the second in an annual series published by the China experts at Australia National University’s Center on China in the World. It was co-edited by the estimable Geremie Barmé and Beijing’s very own Jeremy Goldkorn. Disclosure: I’m partial. I occasionally write for the China Story blog, but don’t let that deter you. The yearbook is packed with insight and perspectives you won’t find in commercial media, with gems that will prove invaluable to any China watcher.

This year’s publication is called Civilising China, and takes as its focus the concept of wenming, which encompasses both grand ideas as civilization and the more everyday notion of civility. This wenming is precisely the one you see plastered around Beijing in connection with anti-spitting campaigns or, as I saw in a park toilet a few years ago, correct urinal usage: “One small step closer to the urinal, one big step for civilization/civility.”

The yearbook includes eight “forums,” in which authors from the Centre on China in the World and other journalists and commentators, such as Leta Hong Fincher, discuss topics including censorship, the rule of law, and the meaning of the “Chinese Dream.”

The expertise is apparent. Barmé, rather characteristically, provides readers with golden nuggets as the origins of “I was here” graffiti vis-à-vis Ding Jinhao:

In the classical novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西游记), the Buddha fools the Monkey King (Sun Wukong 孙悟空) by promising that if he can manage to leap out of the Buddha’s palm, he can occupy the Celestial Throne. The overconfident Monkey King accepts the challenge, jumps into the Buddha’s palm and then does an almighty somersault, tumbling through the air for thousands of miles. Finally, coming to rest at a place where five massive pillars reach into the sky, the Monkey King promptly scratches the following characters into the middle pillar to prove he was there:

老孙到此一游 (Lao Sun dao ci yiyou ‘Old Sun was here’)

Throughout, the China Story Yearbook places news and current events in the context of thousands of years of Chinese history. Another great example is that the phrase “four dishes and one soup” — used by Xi Jinping in his call for frugality among Party members — which has its origins in the rhetoric of Ming campaigns against officials’ gluttony.

Such historical contextualizing reflects the China Story’s mission — in large part a response to the CCP’s desire to monopolize the narrative of Chinese history — to tell a diverse, plural story of China and the broader Chinese world. The entire site is a gem — hidden, by some accounts — for us sinophiles. In particular, there’s a fantastic section on Chinese intellectuals, old and contemporary, and a section called Lexicon A-Z, a dictionary of key terms such as “New China Newspeak” and “New Sinology.”

In short, download a copy of the China Story Yearbook 2013 and get reading. A year’s worth of stories will appear in a new and fascinating light.

Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based freelancer writer. He is also co-founder and editor of Concrete Flux, an online journal on urban spaces and the experience of urbanity in China. You can follow him @TomBaxter17.