Fine print: The ad that embarrassed China

HONG KONG: In the end, a one-line advertisement in a provincial Chinese newspaper was all it took to trip up an emerging superpower. In stark black, the classified ad on the bottom right corner of page 14 in Chengdu Evening News on June 4 read, simply: “Paying tribute to the strong mothers of June 4 victims.”

Now, anyone with even a passing acquaintance with China’s contemporary history will know that June 4 is, literally, a ‘red letter day’: it was on that day in 1989 that China’s authoritarian rules sent in tanks and armed soldiers into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mow down thousands of students who had gathered there to demand democracy.

China’s otherwise admirable rise as an economic superpower over the past 25 years remains forever stained by the blood that flowed on Beijing’s streets that day. 

But the trouble with China is that Tiananmen is one of the three ‘T’s —along with Taiwan and Tibet — that are taboo subjects that cannot be discussed openly.

Given the collective denial of history – and the iron grip that the state wields on information flow even in the Internet age - an entire generation of Chinese citizens has grown up without an adequate understanding of what really happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square. For them, that day is quite literally, a “blind spot” in history. 

This perhaps explains why the young clerk in a Chengdu advertising agency accepted the ad, placed by an unidentified man, and passed it on for publication: she had never heard of the June 4 massacre, and was therefore completely unaware of the significance of the date! 

When the classified advertisement came out, of course, it caused consternation all around. In the rush to blame the embarrassing slip-up, the chief editor and two deputy editors were sacked. 

The episode is a distant echo of a similar incident that occurred in India soon after Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in June 1975. On that occasion, an anonymous person (who was subsequently identified as a journalist) placed a cleverly worded obituary notice announcing the “death” of “democracy”; the classified ad in a newspaper slipped past the hawk-eyed censors who were screening all content in newspapers. 

The difference between India and China is that in India, the excesses of Emergency are not a closed chapter, and the rulers who briefly suspended liberty paid with the loss of political power soon after. 

In China, in the absence of societal and political reconciliation, Tiananmen remains a forever weeping wound, despite official attempts to clampdown on any discussion of it. To this day, the demand from the mothers of the students who were killed or imprisoned in 1989, for an apology and compensation from the government, remains unaddressed.