It was just another day on the Square, though it seemed there were slightly fewer people than usual. Many must have been turned away at the security line underground, as officers informed, “If you don’t have ID, don’t bother waiting in line.” The sternest reprimand we heard all day came from an officer who halted a woman sauntering past the queue. “Go wait in line,” he barked. “Do you not see all these people waiting?”

The Square itself was as you’d expect it to be: immaculate, expansive, as clean as the day it was built, as if nothing ever happened there. Across the Avenue of Eternal Peace, Tiananmen — the size of which always takes me aback — stood as an apt symbol of modern China: big, red, bold, full of right angles, refurbished, a mixture of old and new. Mao gazed out from between giant block letters. You look long enough and you just might convince yourself he’ll be there forever.

The flag will go back up at 4:47 am.

China ramped up its censorship considerably in the lead-up to today, both of words and Internet services. Google is by far the biggest company to find its services halted – as anyone trying to access Gmail without a VPN knows well — and Google has by far the best response to it. We really want this to be true, anyway — via Jonah Kessel:

Google apparently playing hardball with china with today’s recommended Chinese phrase of the day in Google Translate App. Can’t really be a coincidence #june4

“Harmonious society” is the government’s official vision for Chinese society, one in which everyone is part of one giant happy family and history is one big bright bouncy castle.

It’s also a hollow phrase that tries to deny reality. So yeah, we don’t really have any use for it, either.

UPDATE, 10:45 pm: As has been pointed out, Google Translate doesn’t have a “phrase of the day.” Nonetheless.

“June 4, 1989, 10:45am – People on West Chang’an Ave watch smoke rise from entire column on army vehicles set ablaze,” via @prchovanec

A special links edition.

A young Chinese’s path to understanding Tiananmen — and why it’s curbed by the Internet. “The immense interest among those jiulinghou who are in the know has not translated into active discussion, let alone action. Not all of us think it was wrong to use force against the protesters. And we certainly do not all think China should adopt Western-style democracy. But whatever our views are, we dare not openly discuss them online, in public forums, or even in private chats. And since the Internet is where my generation goes to communicate, we are essentially deprived of the chance to engage in civil discourse. // The Internet has chilled an honest reckoning with Tiananmen, not enabled it…. Everything becomes part of our permanent record.” (Foreign Policy)

Same idea… “In a recent conversation with a high school friend, who is now an editor at People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, he brought up the subject of Tiananmen. An avid follower of Western news and user of Facebook, he shrugs off the urgency for Chinese society to revisit the event. ‘What do you think it can bring us, to resurrect liu si?’ he asked. ‘Nothing is going to change. We have to move forward.’” (Helen Gao, NY Times)

Global Times: “Amanda Yang, 23, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has the chance to see events that mainland students cannot, such as the annual commemoration of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, but she said she has no intention of going to any of them. // ‘I am not interested in discussing politics in that way,’ Yang told the Global Times. ‘I am more interested in finding a job in Hong Kong.’” (Global Times)

Corollary: “English-Language Chinese Newspaper Breaks Silence on Tiananmen Crackdown.” (NY Times)

You know it’s that time of year when Gmail stops working. “In an apparent sign of government nervousness, connections to the global Internet appeared to have been disrupted, with Google’s mail and other services mostly inaccessible. China already routinely blocks popular overseas social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube and heavily censors Chinese sites for politically sensitive content.” (AP)

Corollary: “At the height of China’s domestic internet crackdown, LinkedIn censors politically sensitive content from its pages.” (Tech in Asia)

Digging deep. “Twenty-five years after China’s Tiananmen massacre, at least two soldiers who were in Beijing on the fateful day have now risen to the very top of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). // The PLA continues to feel such shame over the blood spilt on the streets of Beijing that decades of service have been carefully wiped from the official biographies of General Zhang Yang and Major General Qin Shengxiang.” (The Telegraph)

Checking in with Chai Ling. “An exiled leader of the Tiananmen Square protests deplored Friday the US stance 25 years ago, saying the ambassador confided to her that Washington didn’t ‘care’ about the crackdown. // Chai Ling, who was commander-in-chief of the students agitating for democracy in Beijing, said that she had hoped the United States would intervene as Chinese troops crushed the uprising on the night of June 3-4, 1989.” (AFP)

#Tiananmen: 11 cables from the US embassy Beijing at the time https://t.co/ArOMmxmVux

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 4, 2014

Of all #TAM25 retrospectives being shared, this is one of the very best (and written in 1990) http://t.co/DolIbQUwVl — Robert Foyle Hunwick (@MrRFH) June 3, 2014

Beijing subway Chienmen Station Northeast exit closed from 13:30 Jun 3, till informed otherwise RT@beidaijin — Valentina Luo (@valentinaluo) June 3, 2014

The 21 most wanted student leaders during #Tiananmen. Where are they now? http://t.co/sNdNUJMvBq pic.twitter.com/8juBBqD3P7 — SCMP News (@SCMP_News) June 3, 2014

Still a good read after all these years: A collection of NYT coverage of the protests and crackdown in Tiananmen http://t.co/dVuaA6NPsJ

— Philip Pan (@panphil) June 4, 2014

HK cabbie on Tiananmen: “That’s a problem for Chinese people.” Love how he satisfies and offends Chinese government goals in six words. — Benjamin Haas 本雅明 (@haasbenjamin) June 4, 2014

@limlouisa Baidu Photo translate remembers Tiananmen Square, but just a little differently pic.twitter.com/wr1XUXOcfD — Patrick Lozada (@patrick_lozada) June 4, 2014

BBC’s Kate Adie reporting from Tiananmen interlude:

Finally…

“Live Blogging the Tiananmen Square Anniversary.” (Sinosphere)

Looking back. (China Digital Times)

“This 1989 speech is one of the most important in China’s history — and only eight people have heard it.” (VOX)

“What China Loses By Forgetting.” (Ai Weiwei, Bloomberg)

“The Godfather of Chinese Rock ’n’ Roll Talks Tiananmen.” (WSJ)

“’Everything A-OK in the Square,’ report 4,000 undercover police and journalists.” (China Daily Show)

Get Political Prisoners of China playing cards for $6.40, shipped anywhere in the US. (World Freedom Products)

“Once Marked by Sadness, Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Vigil Now Stirs Anger.” (WSJ)

“The 25th Anniversary of Tiananmen and the Chinese Dream.” (The Durian)

“A Shanghai worker imprisoned following the Tiananmen events remains haunted by her experience.” (Open Democracy)

“Q. and A.: Liu Heung Shing on Photographing Tiananmen.” (Sinosphere)

Finally, finally…

“Voices of Tiananmen,” via SCMP

Via NY Times: “A photograph of Tiananmen Square that was uploaded to the Chinese social network Weibo ahead of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown there on pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989.”

The image — snapped behind the back of a police officer and in front of the flag that is raised above the square each day from a distinctive podium — was uploaded to Sina Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site, before being deleted late last week. The image has also been posted on Facebook and Google Plus, where it was shared and debated by several thousand Chinese users able to evade the Great Firewall.

We’ll have more coverage in a bit, hopefully along with a picture from the square.

The flag-lowering ceremony today is at 7:39 pm, for those who were wondering.

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.

Photo: Catherine Henriette, AFP/Getty Images, via USA Today

Chen Xitong, who was Beijing’s mayor from 1983 to 1993, has died at age 84, multiple sources have told SCMP. The news was first reported by Hong Kong China News Agency (HKCNA) today.

Chen’s exact date of death is not confirmed, but it’s ironic that the public would learn about his passing on today of all days, the 24th anniversary of the brutal military crackdown on Tiananmen Square.

One source said Chen died at 9:45am in Beijing last Sunday. Another source – a close friend of the family – confirmed the news and said he was waiting for authorities to notify him of the date of the funeral so that he might be able to attend it.

Chen – whose name is forever associated with the massacre 24 years ago – was known to be in the final stages of terminal colon cancer. He was released from jail on medical parole in 2006 and died just two months before finishing the jail sentence would have ended.

None other than premier Li Peng, one of the most hated figures from that time, fingered Chen as overseeing the crackdown. Chen described the military action as “correct” and publicly stated that the pro-democracy rallies were orchestrated by a “tiny handful of people,” including foreign agents.

Chen was sentenced to prison in 1998 for corruption. His death announcement today has been called “divine retribution” by Wang Fandi, who lost her son in the massacre.

June 4 crackdown mastermind Chen Xitong dies (SCMP)

(Note to readers: Please beware gifs and copious sarcasm)

By TAR Nation

Global Times chose June 4 to publish two editorials about how the Internet and media need to be brutally censored. One editorial is by Shan Renping — the party’s stupidest editorial lapdog — and the other is from the rat-infested oozing pile of vomit and bile shat through the vagina of a dead yet zombified tapeworm screaming at the top of its intestines, Hu Xijin.

Let’s start with Hu: “Web regulation in public’s best interest” (I’m not linking it, linking it gives them hits).

On today of all days, as sites get shut down, as Weibos get deleted, as encrypted Wikipedia gets a going-over, “Hu who-should-not-be-named” thought this was a good time to remind everyone that unparalleled restriction of the Internet is right, good and will never, ever end. He begins with a tale in Germany.

In mid-May, the German Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe demanded Google clean up its auto-complete function, because it generates results that are offensive and defamatory. The new rule for Google Search is said to be a milestone that marks Germany’s first efforts to regulate its Internet services.

Yes, Hu’ll Stop the Rain, because Google’s lax predictive search abilities are exactly equal to the outright ban on Human Rights Watch, Facebook, Twitter, China Digital Times, The New York Times, Blogspot, Worpress.com, Amnesty International, Wikileaks, Reporters Without Borders, hundreds of VPN services, anything from Tibet not vomited directly from censors, even the god damned Norwegian Broadcasting Company when China doesn’t like who it gives awards to, et al.

Yes, this technological spider glitch choosing from recent/commonly searched…

…is the same as the indiscriminate censorship of international and individual communication and thought. Or, considering China’s desire to destroy Internet freedom, perhaps this is more apt:

Oh, but wait. He’s not done. Hu has more examples.

For example, Facebook has started to provide training for its website regulators to help identify and delete inappropriate remarks.

That’s part and parcel if you read their terms and conditions and is pretty standard for any site that wants to keep stalking, abuse and boobs off its site. It is not the same as… wait… hold the fuck on for a second… Did that motherfucker just use Facebook as an example… FACEBOOK?!?!?

Facebook, the Facebook which has been banned ever since China scapegoated unrest in Xinjiang to “foreign agitators”? The same Facebook that no one has been able to get on without a proxy since 2008? The same Facebook that is an App on my phone I can’t use? Is that what you mean, Hu? IS IT!?!?!?

Despite irony so thick it clogs chainsaws, Hu continues.

In Turkey, where chaos and turmoil are running rampant, the Turkish government criticized social media as the top threat.

This is true, the Turkish PM said, “Social media is the worst menace to society.” Yes, not cancer, or hemorrhoids, or hunger, or authoritarianism, or despots, or meteors, or drugs, or reality TV, or censorship, or terrorism, or when the sun expands and swallows the earth… it’s Instagram. While Turkey is indeed a democracy, press freedoms there leave a great deal to be desired, but GT jumps on it as a reason to not “do” democracy, as it does every time there is unrest in a democratic country: Syria, Thailand, US, ad infinitum.

Similar denouncements have also been heard from the British Parliament.

Weeellllll, sort of. PM David Cameron did, two years ago, mention something of a ban for the instigators of the riots in the UK. This went nowhere and further concreted him and his government as laughingstocks. But this…

…is completely different from what we have here in China, which is this:

A few other idiots in the UK made navel-gazing comments about the dangers of social media, but they — and I can’t stress this enough — would never, ever, ever dare. Those riots were over school fees. If they tried to ban social media, there wouldn’t be a fish-and-chips-eating son of a bitch left alive on the island.

Hu goes on to make the uniform excuses and defenses, all of which I have illustrated before in this column:

Blaming the evil “West”:

This deceptive voice has gained support from Western public opinion, which makes China’s regulation of the Internet encounter more resistance than in other countries.

It is actually part of democracy:

The Internet, to some extent, has been part of the process through which Chinese society seeks “democracy” and “diversity.”

From Admiral Akbar, it’s a trap!:

This virtual community has bred some political and moral traps.

Defense of the status quo and threats:

Internet regulation has to be carried out until those spreading adverse remarks fear the strength of the public interest.

And, of course, a condemnation of free speech in general:

People already understand that free speech can not go against social order.

So, that’s Hu Xijin’s warped thoughts on this solemn day, the day when hope for freedom of expression died in the Middle Kingdom.

What about Shan Renping? You may remember him from this photo, a 2,000-ton pile of burning cow manure:

It tickles me that this shows up on a Google Image search for him.

He’s much like his lord and master, Hu Xijin, but stupider. With Hu beating online freedom with a knobby stick, Shan moved toward the actual press with, “Media professionals should prioritize rational reflection,” in which he inadvertently lays out guidelines for how all journalists in China need to be the government’s bitch and not say things behind its back on Weibo. Normally, his editorials are conspiracy-theory-laced, Western-hemisphere-hating dribble. But in this one, he thinks he has the blessing of the Associated Press.

Media professionals are among the main Weibo users in China. They are unconstrained when it comes to posting news, even if it was not published by the media outlets they serve.

For the use of the word “unconstrained” there, Shan Renping, may you and a hundred generations of your ancestors rot in hell.

There’s a lot of information not published by the media outlets they “serve.” Largely because little bastards like you — on a weekly basis — tell them that they can’t publish what your dogged masters consider “good for society.” So, they turn to Weibo, where an unconfirmed post has more credibility than all of the state-run propaganda rags put together.

They often express their sharp views. These activities are all firmly opposed by AP’s guidelines.

I have been in media and journalism for as long as I can remember (I drink a lot). I have met reporters from every background and field. Not one of them ever expressed a “sharp” view to me. Spreading unconfirmed NEWS is frowned upon by AP (because they’re respected reporters), not opinions. On opinions, they will have to yield to the authority of the GT news desk (because you’re a useless garbage heap).

Then, he said this:

It is hard to identify whether AP is too strict or China’s media management is too loose.

Yes, that’s the international consensus, Renping: that China’s media management is too loose.

He continues:

A strengthening of discipline among media workers would be conducive to the establishment of order in social networks while maintaining the authority of traditional media.

Ahhhhhh, I get it. He thinks anyone cares what the “traditional media” of China thinks. They don’t. No one does. You are a joke. The only reason AP made its rules is because people take their reporters seriously. There is nothing — NOTHING — GT can do to hurt its own credibility. Next?

(On social media)…. problems, such as rumors, foul language and extreme views, are also prominent.

I’m going to start a political party called Obliterate Crossdresser Shan Renping’s Fucking Existence. How’s that? I hate you. I hate you the way racists hate other races. I hate you forever and for always, until fate puts you with me in the bowels of hell (my heaven) where I can rip your throat out with my very own teeth for an eternity. Extreme enough for ya?

Next?

However, it doesn’t mean that all media personalities with verified identities are free to express their views on social networks. Conflicting opinions that differ from the media they serve will aggravate rumors and extreme views.

You and the Global Times are the only ones aggravating my and everyone else’s extreme views. The morning was lovely. I slept well. The air was thick with rain ready to fall to the dry earth, the beautiful smell of petrichor wafting in from the southern air. Then, I read your editorial, and now I’m thinking of fisting you with a coffee mug on each finger.

This is not related to freedom of speech, but is instead aimed at maintaining the rules.

Die.

…clear and precise ground rules should be prioritized.

Die.

A process is needed for eliminating the “politicization” of social networks.

Die painfully.

So, there you have it, the un-remembered dead, soldiers and protestors alike. The big news story today is how China has managed to completely and utterly ignore, censor and ban a national tragedy for decades. Which, really, is what today is all about. I don’t care about dead people, to be honest. They make for lousy conversation. But today was the day when free press got really, really far away. For those of us who have now experienced quite a few June 4ths in China, it can seem that all hope of ever having a free and open media is lost.

Perhaps it is. Perhaps all of us should just go with prevailing economic trends and side with and bow to the authoritarian who so wants to look after us and keep us safe.

Neh, too many bastards need a firm talking to. So, I’m looking forward to June 4, 2014, when — maybe, just maybe — the nation will remember and the Chinese press will find its balls.

Friend and comrade Justin Mitchell recently had an article defending the folks who work at GT (regarding the SCMP piece, “Is it a sin to work for Global Times”), and with good reason. The greatest reporter I have ever personally met, I met at GT. A brave soul who was fired for something he tweeted. So, is it a sin to work for Global Times? Well, I don’t believe in sin or sinners, or the Nuremburg defense for that matter. But I do believe in shame. If you worked there, you might feel it. Not all the time, but sometimes. And if you have never felt it… well, you probably still work there. Why wouldn’t you? I would.

But, aside from shame, I also believe in revenge. Even the CCP gets tired of protecting monsters.

Tick tock, Hu. Tick tock.

|To Serve People Archives|

It’s the lead pic from the New York Times’s story today about how China’s current leaders were molded by the events of 1989.

For four days, more than 400 of China’s brightest political minds gathered in smoke-clouded halls at a Beijing hotel, vigorously debating the nation’s future.

It was April 1989, and after a decade of economic transformation, China faced a clamor for political liberalization. Days later, protests erupted in Tiananmen Square, and the lives of those at the meeting took radically different turns. Several are now national leaders, including Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister. Others ended up in prison or exile, accused of supporting the demonstrations that shook the Communist Party and ended with soldiers sweeping through the city on June 4, shooting dead hundreds of unarmed protesters and bystanders.

The caption for the photograph, which was taken by AFP, reads: “Student protesters faced police officers in Tiananmen Square in April 1989 while grieving for Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party leader and liberal whose death set off the protests.”

Elite in China Molded in Part by Tiananmen (NYT)

Tiananmen Tank Man without the man, tanks

Nothing to see here.

(H/T We Live in Beijing, via)

I’m just going to put this here and admire from afar.

(Via I Love China)

“The most unbearable thing for a political prisoner is to fade into oblivion.” – Li Bifeng, a.k.a. LBH in For a Song and a Hundred Songs

Liao Yiwu was a fledging poet without a formal education, a hot-tempered philanderer prone to fights, a dreamer who actively despised politics — until the early hours of June 4, 1989, when, from the living room of his home in the river town of Fuling, he listened with Canadian Michael Day to shortwave radio reports of Chinese troops opening fire on students around Tiananmen Square. “The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life,” he writes in his prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs, the book that won him the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize last October, for which an English translation was made available today by New Harvest. “For once in my life, I decided to head down a heroic path, one on which I advanced with great fear, scampering at times like a rat with no place to hide.”

His secretly recorded post-Tiananmen poem, “Massacre,” composed in the style of his beloved Beat poets, was cathartic but incomplete, only serving to stoke his revolutionary fever, which burned fiercer in part because it had been ignited so late. “Art was my protest,” he writes, and so it was that he and friends began production on a movie called Requiem. It was ultimately this project that led to his arrest in February 1990 and subsequent four-year incarceration — three months locked in an investigation center, twenty-six months in detention, eighteen months in prison. The title of his book is a reference to one of the many horrific episodes he endured, when a guard punished him for singing a song by forcing him to sing one hundred more. Unable to continue, an electric baton was inserted into his anus. “I felt like a duck whose feathers were being stripped.”

There were countless similar degradations, which Liao renders in ghastly detail. (If there are any poetic embellishments, he is much too skilled a writer to have them show.) Prison is its own hierarchical and overcrowded society, divided into classes with people filling roles, marked with cruelty, madness, and, yes, sexual assault. “As Wang Er thrust back forth violently, Big Mouth yelped in pain. Blood trickled down his thighs and the back of his knees in two distinctive lines. Inmates stood around, astonished. I sat on the edge of the bed and tears welled up in my eyes for the first time in a year.” Others are disciplined with psychological torture, manual labor, beatings; two misbehaving detainees find their hands shackled together, prompting one of the book’s funnier moments: “At the end of the bathroom break, each person would bend forward with two legs parting, waiting for the other person to reach underneath to wipe his partner’s butt. As one can imagine, mishaps occurred frequently, giving rise to bitter recriminations.” And then there is the infamous “menu” of corporeal punishment, with items such as “pig elbows braised in herbs” (“enformer jabs the inmate’s back with an elbow repeatedly until it is covered with bruises”), “saw-cut pork” (“enforcer soaks a thick rope in oil, ties it around the inmate’s calf, and pulls it back and forth until it cuts the flesh like a saw”), and “mapo tofu” (“enforcer sticks a dozen peppercorns in the inmate’s anus and stops him from pulling them out”), among many others. In this environment, Liao twice tried to kill himself — his most shameful moments, he writes, because the attempts were so futile.

Yet the book abounds with tender moments of unfailing empathy, stories of colorful characters who have done and continue to do deplorable things yet are no less human because of it. “You are right. We deserve to die. But even bad people have feelings,” a heroin smuggler on death row, Dead Chang, pleads with a guard who threatens to report he and his cohorts for protecting an inmate who has tried to commit suicide. Another death row inmate, Dead Skin, describes how and why he killed his wife, punctuating his story with this line: “I had to kill her to grow up. From now until my execution, I want to live with dignity, free from humiliation.” No one, under Liao’s observant eye and bottomless pathos, is all good or all bad. He calls Wang Er, the rapist, a friend, one who looks out for him and vice versa. After the prisoners stage a comic and somewhat tender funeral for Wang Er at his request, he and Liao have this exchange:

“I don’t believe that humans can completely turn into beasts. Don’t try to prove me wrong,” I said. “You don’t have to have the whole cell turn against you and hate you before you die.”

“But I don’t want to die. I’ve only had thirty years in this life. I wanted to stay longer in this world,” Wang Er said.

“Spending your long life in a labor camp? What’s the point?”

“I can risk my life and escape, or I can settle down and serve out my sentence,” Wang Er mused. “If they put me in jail for twenty years, I would be released at the age of fifty. I can still get a wife.”

“So, you would rather suffer twenty years to gain back an ordinary life?” I asked.

Wang Er’s face reddened with anger. “I want to live.”

And there is poetry in Liao’s stark descriptions of prison. In the detention center, “I closed my eyes and the world morphed into a colossal buzzing fly that I couldn’t chase away.” Standing before a judge, “I felt like a food particle trapped in a big empty mouth.” To illustrate the stench in the air after a constipated man finally relieves himself: “We dabbed toothpaste around our nostrils.” And to portray the ennui of a caged existence: “Like in a swarm of honeybees, each day swirled in a kind of frenetic repetition, a manic and oppressive sameness.”

The utter shame of China’s crackdown on those who participated or editorialized on the Tiananmen Square Incident, the arrests of student leaders and writers — ’89ers, as groups of them in prison are called — is that powerful, original voices such as Liao Yiwu’s will never be heard in their home country. (Liao wrote For a Song and a Hundred Songs three different times, thanks to government interference.) His status as a dissident supersedes his artistry, to no one’s benefit. Even the book jacket does Liao disservice when it claims the book “will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.” That’s unlikely, considering the intended audience is probably Westerners who retain an easy image of Orwellian China. What the book is capable of doing, if it could at all be viewed outside the context of dissident lit, is elevating the reputation of Chinese writers, who are oft criticized for being stale, uninspired, and unimaginative, plus all the things said about Mo Yan.

Liao burst onto the international scene with the publication of The Corpse Walker, wherein he displayed remarkable talent for recognizing that what is sharply, heartrendingly flawed about us is often what makes us most human. His latest work is deeper and fuller. It has all the stories of China’s underclass that made The Corpse Walker a success, but they are told with a stronger narrative voice unafraid to let us know more is at stake, both for the protagonist and the writer in real life. Liao references the likes of Jack Kerouac, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marcel Proust, Milan Kundera, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an unsubtle attempt to place his own work within a literary tradition.

For a Song and a Hundred Songs documents how a poet’s soul descends into the body of a dissident. Liao spares no punches for himself. “How can you claim to be a poet? You are such a dick,” an officer yells at him while he masturbates. Later, a cellmate shoots him “a look of pity and disgust” after watching him kick an inmate begging him for mercy. “I deserved his reproachful look; years of living with the thieves, murderes, and rapists had transformed me.” Throughout this process, however, Liao tries to stay loyal to the truth. As an old poet and friend, Liu Shahe, advises him about his writing: “You must write honestly. That will be a perfect ending to your story. But remember to tell the truth. False testimony will be condemned by the future generation.”

Bitter and angry and vengeful as he must be, Liao only allows himself the briefest of denunciations of the Communist Party of China: “Sometimes I wonder, am I still in jail or am I a free person? It really doesn’t make any difference in the end because China remains a prison of the mind: propserity without liberty. Our entire country might as well be gluing medicine packets all day. This is our brave new world.”

He has earned the right to say that. The state has robbed him of four years of life, severed ties to his friends and family, even made his wife and daughter hate him — he has been with Miao Miao, born when he was in prison, less than two months in the last twenty years. Under threats of another arrest, Liao fled to Germany in 2011, and chances of him returning to China within his lifetime are slim. “I am my own shrink,” he writes. “I am a writer.” But is it enough? Art has been known to sustain lives, but what about happiness? “These words, which I have shared with you, the reader, form the most sincere and truthful expression of what I have seen and learned. Passing it on has given me a sense of dignity.”

On this, the anniversary of the events at Tiananmen in 1989, China could take a lesson from Liao Yiwu, if it at all understands or cares about the meaning of dignity.

Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and a Hundred Songs, released today, can be purchased on Amazon. He will speak on June 13 with Wenguang Huang, his translator, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library.

UPDATE, 6/4/14: We’ve swapped out the video because it’s no longer available per the original source. Above, the full documentary with Chinese subtitles.

If you haven’t already, watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, with writing by Geremie Barmé and John Crowley. The three-hour documentary was released in 1995 to rave reviews — “the atmosphere of the Beijing Spring is conveyed beautifully in all its pathos, drama, hope, craziness, poetry, and violence,” wrote Ian Buruma; “a hard-headed critical analysis of a youthful protest movement that failed,” wrote The New York Times – and remains the best film ever made about the June Fourth Incident. Instead of glorifying the student leaders or condemning the Communist Party, it explains how a peaceful democracy movement could possibly have resulted in martial law and Chinese troops opening fire on their own citizens, and attempts to sift through propaganda to produce a chronicle — within the context of Chinese, not Western, history – that might stand the test of time. Absolutely moving, riveting, and powerful beyond words.

If you’ve already seen it, watch it again.

Part 1 is above; here’s part 2 The deleted videos we’ll leave here in case the original uploader brings them back:

The Atlantic has posted 50 beautiful photos on its website in a series called “Tiananmen Square, Then and Now,” that should more than justify the five minutes it takes to look at them. I’ve posted five more of my favorites after the jump, but there really isn’t a bad shot in the bunch. You might have seen many of them in the Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” in 2009 to commemorate 20 years since the military crackdown at Tiananmen, but they’re worth seeing again. Cogs in something turning… they were all childs of God.

(Reuters / Asianewsphoto)

Via Buzzfeed: “A monk prays for an elderly man who had died suddenly while waiting for a train in Shanxi Taiyuan, China.” (H/T Alicia)