A Chinese police officer stands guard March 4 in front of a portrait of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg News)BEIJING — Hu Yaobang died 30 years ago, but his impact is still being felt in China, especially as the Chinese approach the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In Tiananmen Square, the students hung a large black-and-white banner featuring his portrait and calling him “China’s spirit,” Ilaria Maria Sala wrote in an account of those events for Quartz. Even bigger protests ensued, leading to the hunger strikes and sit-in in Tiananmen, and then the massacre in the square on June 4. All but the most anodyne references to events related to Tiananmen Square are scrubbed from China’s history textbooks, and all discussion of it is censored on the Chinese Internet.

Source: Washington Post April 15, 2019 20:19 UTC