Oddbean

berlin wall came down in november, chinese gathered around tiananmen from like April of that year. i agree that the events surrounding the fall of communism inspired each other i didnt realize my peers across the Strait had no idea the tiananmen protests were real, imagine high school students in the early 00s who thought tank man was from a movie 😬

20 years ago, I spent a summer studying in Chengdu. My Chinese friend, highly educated, who spoke English and had an engineering degree, not only didn't know about Tian'anmen and looked at me like I was crazy at first, and then simply waved my "crazy story" away as an anecdote... She also told me some the insane version of history that she had been taught and believed 100%: the Red Army had expelled the Japanese from China, after years of fighting them on their own, without foreign help. The Americans? What did the Americans have to do with the War of Resistance? Mao caused the surrender of the Japanese and sent them packing. The KMT? Well, the KMT was allied with Japan during the war. That's why the Japanese gave them Taiwan. To make it all even crazier: her parents, who had been members of the Party, had been expelled and lost their positions in some university because they had her -- she was a second child in a "tier 1 city", so she was illegal. They didn't send her to an orphanage or killed her straight away because of who her parents were, but as I said, they did receive severe punishment. My point being, she considered herself, and really was, quite "anti-government". And still, all she knew was the pile of absolute bullshit propaganda she had learnt ever since she was a child. She could not help it.

i know the type all too well by the time i got to college, rather than give those girls a history lesson or sit them in front of gruesome documentaries, i suggest them to read some Amy Tan instead🤣