Listening to Thunder in Silence: Memory and the Forgetting of Tiananmen 1989

The 1989 Tiananmen incident, many claim, has been forgotten within China. This is viewed as a form of complicity that allows the government to erase an unsavory history and Chinese people to evade their moral responsibility.

However, Bin Xu argues that such uses of forgetting are conceptually unclear, analytically ineffective, and ethically problematic. Instead, he advocates the term silence: the absence of discussions in certain realms of society.

Drawing on various cases in China, he shows that people may remain silent on Tiananmen for many reasons.

Recognizing the multivocality of silence helps establish an ethical neutrality and develop an empathetic understanding of the moral-political dilemmas that people under a repressive regime have to face.

Serious academic research and public discussions of Tiananmen, Bin Xu argues, should listen to thunder in silence.