For eight spring weeks, the courage of its students gripped the world, their ambition and defiance promising epochal change. At Peking University, though, there is no trace of the pro-democracy movement that flared into an existential challenge to China’s Communist rulers, to be snuffed out in the blood-soaked streets around Tiananmen Square. Thirty years on, those events remain so sensitive that today’s students are ignorant or indifferent. “Is this a military parade?” asks one physics student on the university campus, when presented with the photograph of a lone man standing up to a line of tanks on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace. When asked if he knew about June 4, as the event is referred to in China, the student said he was aware of…

Source: The Times April 16, 2019 16:07 UTC