Very few of today's Chinese university students know about this massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.  Access to information is carefully blocked with the help of some western companies like Google. In China, googling for "Tiananmen Square" either takes you to the square's official website or informs you that the site cannot be shown! No tanks can be seen in any pictures.

There is no mention of the massacre in the history books used in Chinese schools. This policy is in keeping with the policies of all authoritarian societies with regard to their blemished past.

The few Chinese who do know about 4 June 1989 and Tiananmen Square prefer not to talk about it. I don't really blame them. What's the point of of opening your mouth and spending the rest of your life in jail?

A telling example of the ignorance of the young occurred two years ago when a customer wanted to place in a newspaper a small advertisement to "pay tribute to the mothers of the victims of 4 June." The advert made its way to the newspaper as the young person in charge of censorship at that newspaper didn't know what "4 June" meant. As a result, three of the newspaper's leading editors were fired.

36-year-old architect "Li Guohuakin" has come to the square. He appears disconcerted when a journalist asks him about the occurrances of 1989: "It's been such a long time and the situation was different in those days. There's no point in going back to that time. Today's Chinese people are busy contending with other problems and thinking about their own lives and things like health insurance. On the whole, the Chinese government has acted well."

"Shouldn't a nation clear up its past, though?" "There's no need for that."

- Part of the text taken from Helsingin Sanomat, 2 June 2009.

Adrenochrome

“American negro students were shot dead for protesting in the 1960s USA. Scandanavian countries adopted a stance of neutering mentally handicapped citizens in the 1950s & 60s. Britain plundered the Empire for centuries, building its wealth upon the lives of others. I could go on, but I feel that my point is made.”

I know about Westerns sins. However, that isn't the point in this thread, which deals with press freedom. Even if many Western countries don't wish to be reminded of their sins, a free press makes it possible to write about them. If you write about American Negro students who were shot dead in an American newspaper, you won't be put behind bars. If the Chinese write about the Tiananmen Square massacre in Chinese newspapers, they face a bleak future. That makes all the difference.

I fully understand that there are people even in the West who prefer not to be reminded of the lack of all kinds of freedoms in China. This is a free forum and this thread is about press freedom. That's why I write about it. No one is forced to read my posts, though.

I have no recollection of news about neutering mentally handicapped citizens in Scandinavia in the 1950s and 1960s. The term Scandinavia may be a little vague. Read about it here. Which Scandinavian countries do you mean? What happened, when and where?

As the Scandinavian press was one of the freest in the world even in those days, the newspapers would have had a field day had they found out about anything that abominable going on.

"This year IPI focuses on Asia, which proved the region deadliest for journalists in 2008, largely due to a string of killings in India, Pakistan and the Philippines. But journalists in other corners of the

globe died in disturbing numbers, such as in Iraq, Mexico, Georgia and Russia, where the
apparent execution-style killing of an Ingushetian reporter unnerved a journalistic community long accustomed to harrowing violence.

Other developments showed that journalists, a competitive bunch, have good reason for increased solidarity in light of the strikingly similar challenges they face worldwide. Judicial harassment dressed up as national security protection, in the past much criticized in the United States, also permitted authorities to intimidate outspoken journalists in places such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, China and Iran. The European Union’s anti-terrorism efforts subtly encroached on the media, with the implementation of a directive requiring the retention of communications
data for potential use in criminal investigations, a headache for those looking to protect their sources.

Censorship in the name of tradition, religion, culture and national reputation was also widespread. In Thailand, laws protecting the reputation of the monarch prompted judicial proceedings and
led to the shutdown of more than 2,000 websites. In parts of the Middle East and North Africa, laws forbidding insults to Islam continued to carry the death penalty.

Turkey’s government resisted deeper reform to its prohibitions on “insults to Turkishness”, half-heartedly rewording the law to forbid insults to the “Turkish nation”. In Slovenia, a country that held the EU presidency in the first half of 2008, parties angered by media coverage repeatedly pushed for the prosecution of journalists under laws forbidding insults to the state."

If your press is/was so free, then how come you are completely unaware of this matter. The 'Scandanavian Sterilization Acts' were government policy - obviously the shame of this activity has led to your media not discussing them. Perhaps you could by-pass your nations censorship and read books such as

by Gunnar Broberg (Author), Nils Roll-Hansen (Author) '

or articles such as 'as happened with the Scandinavian sterilisation programmes of the 1930s-1970s (Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 1996).'

Strange that you are unaware of these policies, just as some Chinese are unaware of the events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.You seem to be just as in the dark about your own nations history!

You may have noticed that the second article I refered you to is regarding Scandanavian Sterilisation from 1930s up to 1970s. Hitler died in 1945, yet the eugenics continued.

As for me - no I'm from one of the smallest countries within Europe. Only 58 million people, and, despite believing that our genetics lies in the Danish/German/French sphere, most natives have Euskardi DNA. We have the longest continuously sitting democratic government in the world (the Tyndwald) and have suffered terrorist attacks from An Gof and the Sons of Glyndwr.

Our government has never owned a newspaper, though we do have a television channel paid for by a tax. Our newspapers have always been owned by individuals - Rupert Murdoch, Lord Beaverbrook, Robert Maxwell etc - who bring their own personal bias to the media. Generally, a pro-Israel, neo-con slant.

We have more cctv cameras per capita than any other country, yet still suffer one of the highest crime rates in the West. In fact, recently our police force has become associated with killing individuals rather than solving crime. They have even started 'water-boarding' citizens.

That should be sufficient clues to my nationality, but you could simply look at my profile.