Editor’s note for June 2, 2023
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
Dear reader,
This Sunday is June 4, a day when nothing happened on Tiananmen Square in 1989, according to the animated TV show The Simpsons. From 2021, the episode featuring that joke was no longer available from the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong.
From about 2002 to around 2012, June 4 was also known by wags on the Chinese internet as “internet maintenance day” (互联网维护日 hùliánwǎng wéihù rì) because so many websites would suspend operations “for maintenance” in order to avoid any troubles from government internet censors or security agents.
That joke does not really work anymore: The Chinese internet has by now been so neutered and social media platforms are so well trained in “content management” that no one really worries about the anniversary of the crackdown on the 1989 protests. The internet is already well “maintained.” And Chinese citizens born after 1989 are mostly blissfully unaware of what happened that year, unless they are very curious or have spent time abroad.
But the questions raised by the events of 1989 about the relationship of the Chinese Communist Party to the Chinese people have not been answered yet, and they will continue to haunt Beijing.
This year, jailed activist Xǔ Zhìyǒng 许志永 managed to get a message (in Chinese) out to exiled supporters saying that he was continuing his decade-long tradition of fasting on June 4, and calling on Chinese people to commemorate the day. And in New York, a new June 4th Memorial Museum has opened. It will be the only such museum in the world following the 2021 closure of a similar museum in Hong Kong.
Our Phrase of the Week is: Three makes a crowd (三人成众 sān rén chéng zhòng), a phrase that was used last week about the Cathay Pacific flight attendants who were accused of ridiculing Chinese passengers who could not speak English or Cantonese.
