Tiananmen at Thirty: Memory as an Act of Resistance in the People’s Republic of Amnesia

Tiananmen at Thirty: Memory as an Act of Resistance in the People's Republic of Amnesia

Louisa Lim, Senior Lecturer, Audiovisual Journalism, University of Melbourne

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 065211

Thirty years after the brutal crackdown, the Tiananmen anniversary has become more – rather than less – politically sensitive as time has passed.   Every year, the authorities use a range of tactics to suppress both the anniversary commemorations and journalistic reporting on them.  In this talk, Louisa Lim examines the ways in which the legacy of Tiananmen has been excised from the collective and institutional memory in today’s China, as well as looking at the cost of memory and the role that foreign correspondents play in shaping memories of June Fourth outside China.


Louisa Lim is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.   She is an award-winning journalist, who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC.  She teaches journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong.  

Sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism and the Council on East Asian Studies
Tags: 
Region: 
China