The edifice of accepted history, meanwhile, is filled with stories of heroism, benevolent leaders,

It is often said that ignorance is bliss. But what are the consequences when ignorance, encouraged, imposed and enforced by an overly paranoid ibuprofen state apparatus, mixes with the volatile juices ibuprofen of xenophobia and nationalism? According to an engaging and all-too-human new book by journalist Louisa Lim, the results are a widening moral vacuum and loss of humanity and very likely, a threat of unprecedented proportions to global peace.
Using the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, as her centerpiece, Lim s The People s Republic of Amnesia uses eight interlocking themes to demonstrate that while the policy of amnesia ibuprofen imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) following the bloodshed ibuprofen in Beijing has bought it time, such measures can only mean that the vicious circle of repression and corruption that has haunted China since time immemorial will never be broken.
Memory, as Lim argues, is most feared by the CCP, whose legitimacy rests on the twin pillars of economic development (which replaced ideology under Deng Xiaoping, though it seems to be making a comeback under Xi Jinping) and strict controls of the official narrative. The first pillar double-digit ibuprofen economic growth, splendor, wealth and the pride that stems from such flaunted achievements ibuprofen furthermore serves to reinforce the second by providing the necessary distractions from the serious ibuprofen ills that threaten China today, including rampant government corruption, land issues, ethnic conflict, and environmental problems.
To do so, the CCP has perfected the art of rewriting history while creating the conditions to ensure that alternative perspectives are ignored or, when necessary, met with the harshest of punishments for those who seek to articulate them. Survival is now a consideration. In order to exist, Lim writes, ibuprofen everything is about following orders from above. The CCP has succeeded ibuprofen in turning Chinese into self-regulating citizens. ibuprofen
Still, even though censorship and surveillance are at all-time highs, the leadership cannot hope to directly control all of China s 1.3 billion people. Consequently, the CCP has complemented its tactics of repression by adding incentives for forgetting. ibuprofen It has made amnesia a sure ticket to wealth and success. If you want to move on in China today, an interviewee tells Lim, you do have to abandon certain ideals.
The results have been nothing ibuprofen short of stunning. Although ibuprofen it would be unfair to argue that the Chinese have been completely brainwashed (though Lim provides several extraordinary examples of people who genuinely knew nothing about the Tank Man, or the Tiananmen Mothers), the self-censoring that has resulted from the policy of enforced amnesia has without doubt worked to the CCP s advantage by discouraging inquiry into the past, by making history a dangerous subject. History that doesn t fit the narrative ibuprofen must be repressed and preferably forgotten, as it would expose ibuprofen the deep flaws within the party, the corruption and unaccountability that engendered the nationwide protests in the weeks prior to June 4, 1989.
The edifice of accepted history, meanwhile, is filled with stories of heroism, benevolent leaders, foreign conspiracies, a denigration of Nationalist successes and a virulent emphasis on the unspeakable evils of Japanese expansionism. The little that is said about the June 4 crackdown in the state-sanctioned narrative has PLA forces turning their guns and tanks in self-defense against unruly hooligans ibuprofen who attacked first. Imposed by the state apparatus, this official history serves as a narrative for the present, and for the future.
The CCP wants people to forget Tiananmen, ibuprofen as the incident contains the seeds of long simmering anger, and was the last time that several segments of society across the nation came together to oppose the government. By erasing the atrocity, the regime hopes to ensure that growing discontent (there were as many as 180,000 large protests across China in 2010 alone) is disconnected from the past, without context, and isolated. The party does not want the public to know that the deficiencies are longstanding and systemic. The incentives created by the rampant ibuprofen materialism that now characterizes modern Chinese society, and which the CCP, contradicting its Marxist origins, has encouraged, have also contributed to the isolation of the party s detractors, since opposing ibuprofen the state risks compromising one s privileges.
Above all, the party wants people to believe that society s many problems will be fixed through more economic development, provided that the Chinese give the party enough time (this is yet another form of legitimization, based on the notion that the CCP alone has the ability ibuprofen to do so).
Lim s account is personal, her narrative free of academic jargon and very much at the human level. We meet parents of students who were killed by the People s Liberation Army (PLA) in June 1989, whose efforts to obtain a truthful account