Young Chinese want to talk about Tiananmen Square, and that terrifies Beijing

In May 2015, a handful of Chinese students overseas wrote an open letter to fellow students in China, calling for accountability for the killings of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and around the country in 1989. Global Times, a notoriously nationalistic state-run press outlet in China, swiftly retorted in an editorial that, “Chinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident.” This claim must have left readers puzzled: just how had that proclaimed consensus been reached? Read more