Tiananmen

Jiang Zemin has almost managed to make the event disappear down an Orwellian memory hole. Even in Western countries, sub-editors have taken to calling it the ‘Tiananmen crackdown’, rather than ‘massacre’, making it seem as insignificant as the endless stories about routine ‘crackdowns’ on smuggling, prostitution, counterfeit goods, VAT forms or corruption, which provide the stuff of daily reporting here in China.