“Hong Kong June 4 candlelight vigil 2009” by Lok Cheung is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Until today, I’ve tried to avoid commenting too much on the anniversary of the events that happened 20 years ago in Beijing because I don’t really feel qualified, and not being Chinese, I am not sure if it’s really my place to do so either. That said I do have very strong feelings about the current issues which have become starkly oblique in the light of the Internet crackdown we are currently experiencing. To me, this is all the more staggering considering it’s 2009, and despite the most advanced and pervasive communication networks available to man, we are still facing some extremely dark realities within hidden truths.
I think the Chinese artist and designer Ai Weiwei put this best in his recent blog post (translated):
Without freedom of speech, without freedom of news, without freedom of elections, we are not people, we do not need to remember. Lacking the right to remember, we choose to forget. [continued]
With a generation of offspring who are almost totally apolitical, there seems little hope for change in the future.
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