June 4 (II)

choi

(3) 高雨莘, 被遗忘的天安门. 纽约时报中文网, June 4, 2014
cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20140604/c04gao/

, which is translated from

Helen Gao, Tiananmen, Forgotten. New York Times, June 4, 2014 (op-ed).

Quote:

"The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change. When I returned to China after finishing college in the United States in 2012, I was shocked to discover how few of my friends use VPN [virtual private network], software that allows one to scale China’s Great Firewall and access blocked sites like Twitter and other media platforms. Well-educated and worldly, they nonetheless see censorship more as a nuisance of daily life, something to be begrudgingly endured, rather than an infringement on their freedom of speech.

"Today, most of my high school friends, having graduated from top Chinese universities, are working at state banks and government-owned enterprises.

My comment: my research shows that Ms Gao is a translator for cn.nytimes.com.


(4) 杰安迪, 25年前，我身边的中国大学生. 纽约时报中文网, June 4, 2014
cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20140604/c04students/

Andrew Jacobs, Resigned to Dreary Fate, Students Awoke as Word Spread From Beijing. New York Times, June 3, 2014 (blog)

Quote:

"I was a 23-year-old English teacher at Hubei University, and until that spring [in 1989], I had thought my students were hopelessly quiescent, cowed by the suffocating repression and resigned to their dreary fates.

"An internal history of the military’s role in the turmoil, smuggled out of China and recently acquired by Princeton University, devotes several pages to Wuhan, the gritty manufacturing hub where Hubei University is located

"The denouement in Wuhan was not as bloody, but hundreds of protesters were arrested and jailed. The lives of many of my students would never be the same.

"Like those in Beijing, the protests in Wuhan were triggered by the sudden death of Hu Yaobang * * * With newspapers heavily censored, my students learned about the outpouring of public grief in Beijing through Voice of America and the BBC.

"In the middle of this tumult, I returned to the United States to attend my sister’s wedding. I came back to China 10 days later, at the beginning of June

"The exuberance was cut short two days later when news of the military onslaught in Beijing arrived, via the VOA, with reports that hundreds, if not more, had been killed. * * * Word spread across campus that as many as a dozen Hubei University students were among the dead in Beijing. Rather than duck for cover, the students went back to the streets, this time converging on the Yangtze River bridge with renewed vehemence [until the end of June 7].

"During a conversation last week, one of my former students said that most of his classmates had missed out on the economic boom