kinds of sexual assault cases to how women are dowdy, disbelief, told it was their own fault. and in some of these cases they are retaliate against because they disclose what happened. i, too, have very brave women come to my office we want to meet. i got to meet with him and these two women told me these stories about how they were both raped on campus. they reported the rape. the school didn't believe them. abe lincoln and then they retaliated against them. -- they start a movement. they went college to college, campus to give us can recruited others who suffered the same. they have now created a nationwide advocacy network to deal with sexual assault on college campuses. they are working with senators on writing legislation. legislation will be passed in the senate, and they will make a difference. ..

after that doris kearns goodwin and >> i was an exchange student studying in china in 1989, so i'm very, very excited to be able to introduce our next speaker. i think most of us here may not recognize her, but we certainly recognize her voice. t i'm here to introduce louisa lim to talk about her book, "the people's republic of amnesia." she is the voice, as i said, from china for national public

radio or has been, and appreciate that she work -- prior to that she worked for bbc. that she worked for bbc. over a decade of reporting she has earned many prestigious prizes and broadcasting awards for her work. during the previous academic year 2013 to 2014 louisa was a mic wallace fellow at the university of michigan and i just learned for the next academic year she will be teaching at the university of michigan in journalism school. for me reading her book brought back to me a flood of memories from my year in china and especially the events that surrounded tiananmen. having been in china around that time i found a reason quote in "the wall street journal" about her book to be especially relevant. in that article benjamin reid said her depictions in and this is why quote enhancer sense of the human cost of suppressing

the past of doling the understanding of the world and capacity for critical thought of severing people from a homeland that they yearn for and of trying to pretend that none of that is happening. what that please join me in welcoming luisa lim. [applause] [applause] >> thank you so much david for that introduction and thank you to the library of congress for this incredible opportunity and this wonderful book festival. i am here to about my book, "the people's republic of amnesia" tianamen revisited. it's really about how the events of 1989 changed china and how china then changed the events of 1989 as it rewrote its own history. it's about amnesia which one famous chinese author called a state-sponsored support. my book is about those people

who refuse to play in the state-sponsored sport, those who refuse to forget what happened. my story started with one woman, a mother and i remember her by chance. i was working in beijing as a correspondent and i was sent to chung on a completely different story. i had just met her by chance and her name is -- and we met in this shiny new apartment block in this brand-new part of the city. she was almost like a throwback from another time. she was in her 60s. she was a very small woman. she was like an old-school dispossessed peasant farmer shuffling around in flip-flops smelling of garlic with an incredibly strong accent. when she began talking i discovered this was a uniquely determined woman and she was the

one who put me on a path towards this book because she told me how she had lost her 17-year-old son on june 6, 1989 in chung. she said he disappeared from his home and he was killed. i said what crack down? she there was a crackdown and chung as well and i hadn't known that. so that was the thing that started me on this trail. i wanted to find out more so i started to look for other accounts. i started to look for eyewitnesses, people who had been there 25 years ago to have taken photos and written diaries and i started to look for chinese propaganda accounts in u.s. diplomatic cables and piece by piece i tried to piece all of these different pieces together and i discovered this completely forgotten story. there have been a crackdown in

chunzhou as well. in 1989 while the demonstrations were going on in beijing they were also going on all over the country. in chunzhou hundreds of thousands of people are taken to the streets and after people died in beijing people also died in chunzhou at the hands of government forces and acknowledged by the government. that brought up the real essential question that i was asking. how is it possible that an event like this that happened 25 years ago within living memory how could it be forgotten and how could it be deleted from the collective memory? that was when i realized one thing. that memory depends on geography. here in the west when we talk about tiananmen in 1989 it invariably brings to mind the one iconic image and i have brought it along as a visual aid.

tiananmen. the skinny man in the white shirt carrying his two plastic bags staring up to the power of the state. this is an image that is so iconic that in fact a plane has recently been written about this image and the playwright lucy kirkwood said this is a picture at the moment when china exchange democracy for an economic miracle for the opportunity to live, work, spend progress. i just wanted to do a quick experiment. raise your hands if you have seen this picture before. that's almost everyone in the room. raise your hand if you haven't seen this picture. i would say that probably 98% of people in this room have seen this picture. it has become such a well-known image that it's been used in the simpsons.

it was even a chick fillet advert that use this image. hard to believe it is true so it's become part of our popular culture. what i wanted to know was how well-known is this image in china when we read an awful lot about the power the internet to break down the control of information. we know china has 642 million internet users and i wanted to know if they also knew about 1989 and could recognize this picture. when i was working in beijing i did this very crude experiment. i went to four universities in beijing and i took this picture around. there were four university students who had been most instrumental in 1989. i asked students there, do you know what this picture is? they said yes. i said well tell me. i was surprised to find only 15%

of chinese students knew what this picture was compared to 90% 8% of people in this room. to me that really shows the success of the state in expunging this whole episode from its history and continuing to block access to information about it. it was a pretty crude experiment but also quite interesting because i discovered really quickly that it was very effective. before i went i thought maybe i wouldn't be able to tell if people are lying to me but i discovered the power of this image is such that those people who knew what it was that almost a visceral physical reaction to the picture. they would see it and they would shy away from it. one man said oh my god but this was only a small proportion of the students. most of the students, the 85% who had no idea would not shy

away from his image. they would lean in to try to look at the details and also there was no flicker of recognition on their faces. they would ask me questions. one student, a ph.d. student from south korea and astronomy major asked me is that kosovo quiet 19 students believed that this was a picture of a military parade. that's more students than those who actually knew what it was. of those students that did recognize it was interesting that quite a lot really defended the government. they said what the government did was necessary. china would be much worse off today if the government had acted any differently. so it's really a retrospective justification based on china's phenomenal growth rate over the past 30 years.

i think that is a very mainstream view even among some of those that went out and protested in 1989. for me personally this experiment was also very interesting because i suddenly realized how nervous i was when i was on those campuses asking those questions. if you bear in mind at this point i was a reporter based in china for 10 years so i had done an awful lot of sneaking around and dressing up as a peasant and trying to sneak into police checkpoints in closed areas in this kind of thing. when i was walking around the university campuses with that picture i became convinced that i was detained and i was sweating like anything. i suddenly realized this is the extent to which i myself have

internalized the censorship. i too am carrying a journalist card which gives me license to be answering these questions makes me so nervous to talk about 1989 what is it like for ordinary chinese people? you may ask why don't people in china know what happened in 1989? one simple answer is it's not taught in schools at all. in university only history majors learn about 1989 and what they learn is very limited. the textbook they use has 529 pages and only four of them, four pages touch on the events of 1989. even that account contains what one french professor called a monumental historical truth, a lie basically. if you are young chinese kid how would you know your textbooks

contained lies? i think we should also remember that even in the west now a quarter century has passed and there's a lot about the events of 1989 that are still unknown or have been forgotten over the years. actually the young man who stood in front of the tank, we don't know who he is. we don't know what happened to him and although this is the iconic image of june the fourth but didn't actually happen on june 4. it happened on june the fifth day after the killings. we also don't know how many people died in beijing as the army moved in. the figures range from the preliminary figures which were just over 200 to estimates in the thousands at the time the red cross put on an estimate of 2600 people had died.

we really don't have the numbers. it's also forgotten that most of those killings did not happen in tiananmen square itself but on the approach roads as the army came in. we also don't know what happened during the power struggle in the echelons of the communist party but we do know the loser in a power struggle with the then leader of the communist party who spent the next 15 years until his death under house arrest. the other thing that is forgotten is that the protests were not just in beijing but all over china. they weren't just students. it was a mass movement, not just about freedom and democracy. it was also about wealth and equality calling for action against corruption and nepotism and profiteering for the communist party to reform itself.

of course none of these things were forgotten by china's own leaders. they know that those demands made a quarter-century ago are much more pressing today than they were 25 years ago. that's one of the reasons why the party is still so afraid of tiananmen's legacy, because it leaves it vulnerable. so the government has really tried to cover up what happened. if you go into any bookshop in china and tried to buy a book about 1989 you wouldn't be able to find anything. on line mentions it and china's internet users find all sorts of ways to try to get around this. they may say june the fourth and they may say may the 35th and they find at may the 35th is -- and this year they started saying april the 65th but then

that was senseless. this is really led to this really event which is happen on an individual level but also connected level and there are all kinds of side effects. for example in 2008 a chinese newspaper actually ran a picture of a student protester from 1989, a young man being rushed to a hospital on the back of a flatbed covered with blood. it appeared in a beijing newspaper alongside a profile of the photographer who had taken a picture, a hong kong photographer. interestingly, the reason that it appeared was because nobody working at the newspaper, not the picture editor where the page editor or even the newspapers censor, none of them recognize this picture so none of them even realized that it

was so sensitive that it should be censored. so i see that as a measure of success and the failure of chinese censorship. it's been so successful that the institutional memory of june the fourth has disappeared now the success of that strategy is threatening the ability to continue it. this year we even saw these attempts to muzzle the foreign press as well as the chinese press. for the first time journalists were visited by police in their offices and they were told to not go to tiananmen square on june the fourth or there will be consequences for you. it's not the first time the government has tried to control reporting. in the past all kinds of different measures have been taken and my particular moment was on the 20th anniversary in 2009 where the journalists that

went to tiananmen square found there was this new security apparatus innovation and every time the cameraman turned on the camera to try to film them they would discover plain clothes policeman with big checkered umbrellas standing in the way, standing between them and the cameraman. it became the focus of a lot of the newspaper reports. people call them the umbrella man of tiananmen square because it was such a bizarre strategy to use men with umbrellas to stop people from talking about tiananmen. so when i started thinking about writing this book i knew that it was an incredibly sensitive topic and i knew that it would be difficult to write a book like this. so i took all kinds of

precautions in order to try to make sure that i had done my research that i needed to do, that i could do the things that i needed to. i set myself all kinds of rules, so i decided never to talk about my book at home and i never talked about it in the office either because i lived in work and a diplomatic compound which was widely believed to be bugged. i also never talked about on the telephone and i never send an e-mail referring to it either. so when i went to interview people i wouldn't even tell them what i was doing. i would say i'm a journalist, a foreign journalist, i meet you? it was only when we were face to face that i would explain what i was doing. i had a brand-new computer that had never been on line and i typed into this computer.

at night i kept it locked and in a safe in my apartment because i was worried about the consequences of writing the book particularly for the people that i was talking to. and i was right to worry because in this kind of environment and the acts of remembrance are a challenge to the dominant narrative and those who refuse to forget are punished. we saw that this year. the 152 people were arrested or detained or placed under house arrest in the crackdown in the run-up to the anniversary. they were even cases, there was one unfortunate factory worker who went to tiananmen square and took a selfie of himself making a v symbol of v for victory in tenement square. he ended up arrested for that

for creating a public disturbance. several other people in my book were also harassed. there's a woman called -- who lost her 19-year-old son to an army bullet in the head and she later went on to cofound a group called tiananmen mothers. she took part in a form in beijing. 15 people were there. it was a commemoration for him in a private apartment where they just got together to talk about 1989. finally the people who attended that were detained again for creating a public disturbance although it was a private apartment. another person i profiled was a young soldier. in 1989 he was one of the soldiers who were sent to clear

tiananmen square and afterwards he became an artist and he was so haunted by what he had seen that day that he used and he uses his art to express and remember what happened. so he cannot show his art in china. but this year he did an installation where he had an empty studio with one wall and he painted dates from 1989 to 2014 on the walls of that studio and then he whitewashed them out. he was detained for more than six weeks for that sample artwork. he said history is like a blank. it has been wiped out. nowhere is that more true than in the city of chunzhou the city

image in the beginning, the city with a forgotten crackdown. there is while there were huge student protests. so many people were out protesting that instead of the normal greeting have you eaten yet people would ask each other have you demonstrated get it? and chunzhou as well they had a hunger strike. they had a big square with a huge statue of chairman mao and under chairman mao's feed they have this hunger strike. it became known as little tiananmen. on june 4, after the killings in beijing people in chunzhou got to hear what happened in chunzhou came out against the streets against the killings. they carried signs saying things like we are not afraid of death and these big traditional

funeral wreaths. it was a big -- on an unarmed protesters in beijing. there was of course the inevitable crackdown in chunzhou as well as in beijing. in chunzhou it was different. it was not the army but the people's armed police, the paramilitary police that were called in, and they used water cannons and they used batons and it was very brutal. they targeted protesters and they targeted their heads. people sent me pictures that were taken inside the hospitals and the showed rows of people with their heads bandaged. you could quite clearly see that they had been trying to beat people up and do maximum damage. i was even sent a secret report

that was written by an elderly communist party member who had been on the streets as the streets's and he had been so appalled and disgusted by what he saw on the streets that day that he smuggled himself into the hospitals and interviewed the injured people to write a report about it. and then have that smuggled out of china but nobody did anything about it. he received a 25 years too late. but the government could not hide what had happened. the geography is such that it was right in the middle of a town where there were so many witnesses. instead of trying to hide what happened they instead try to fill the information space. they release this book called the whole story of the chunzhou rights which was released a month later, 700,000 copies. in this book the government said eight people had died that day.

1800 people had sought treatment. to me, this was shocking but i was even more shocked to discover this actually wasn't the bloodiest episode that happened in 1989 in chunzhou and i found out about that just there are eyewitnesses and other documents because what happened after the initial crackdown was the people were so angered by the brutality that they began retaliating against building -- buildings that belong to the state they began setting on fire buses and police cars and burning down this huge market which took up an entire city block. and then on the night of june the fifth, a mob of people raided a hotel, the chunzhou hotel and still exists and is

still a very small hotel. at this time the u.s. consulate general was based and not hotel so they were all kinds of accounts of what happened that day. so the police were called and they tried to restore order when this crowd was breaking into this hotel. there were a lot of westerners staying at the hotel and for a while they were sheltering in the residence at the u.s. consulate general. then they were told order is being restored and it's safe to go back to your own rooms. they returned to the front of the hotel and from their windows at the front of the hotel they saw this very shocking scene. they saw protesters lined up in rows kneeling in the courtyard with their hands wired or tied behind their backs in a way which the witnesses said would have required their arms to have been broken. and they watched out of the window as these plainclothes

policeman walked among the kneeling man. they watched as an order was given to them and the policemen went around and one by one they beat the protesters slashing their schools with iron rods. and they watched as two trucks pulled then and the bodies were thrown into the trucks like garbage, like sacks of potatoes, like slabs of meat. like carcasses. those were four different descriptions given to me by four different witnesses none of whom even knew each other and knew that anyone else had same the same things that they saw. one of them actually said to me i don't remember anyone screaming. there was no noise, just the bodies piling on top of each other. there were definitely lifeless bodies. i i imagined if anyone was alive they would not survive in that pile.

so i really wanted to find out more. i went back to the chinese sources and the whole story of the changzhou riots about this whole episode and even gave numbers. it said 17 people were detained at that hotel on that day and the newspapers even acknowledged that police use of violence against protesters there. but what actually happened, what all those people killed, 70 people in the full view of the foreigners? i don't know for sure. i can't say for sure. too many years have passed and there's too much this unknown but what i do know is those eyewitnesses that i spoke to they really believed that they had witnessed an atrocity. and they were very traumatized. many of them were repatriated back to their own countries and many of them went to the press. they went to the amnesty international and they try to tell the story of what they had

seen but what it happened in beijing was so much bigger and so overwhelming that people weren't really listening. so i still have this question, could all these people have died and no one and no one knew? so it brought me back to the woman who had lost her son that day. she told me her story. she told me that fairly early on after her son disappeared she was told by another person who was detained at the same time as her son that he had been beaten to death in police custody. she has devoted the last 25 years trying to find out more about the exact circumstances of her son's death. she has visited beijing five times and each time she was caught and sent back. she was detained. she was beaten. twice she was locked in an iron cage and she told me she had a

police car outside her house for two full years. after 11 years in the year 2000, all of these efforts had this very surprising result. she was actually given by the police a photograph of her son's corpse. it was a black-and-white photograph which showed him lying on the cement floor. you could see quite clearly from this picture that he had been beaten because there was blood around his nostrils and his face was bruised and it was very swollen. in the year 2006 she was even given money. she was given a payment of almost $9000. it was the first payment ever made in connection to a death in june 1989 although it was called a hardship balance, not compensation. so i went to her and i asked her, are there other people whose relatives have been beaten to death in the same way that your son died?

she just looked straight at me. she looked into my eyes and she said even if i knew, i wouldn't say. i then realized that if this woman, this feisty determined fighter of a woman who has been through so much, if she couldn't talk openly about what happened in 1989, then maybe no one could. because forgetting is not something that's been imposed from above. it's something that people have taken part in. they have cooperated and collaborated and polluted with the forgetting because it isn't convenient to remember what happened in 1989. in beijing or changzhou or anywhere in china and there's no benefit to remembering. in fact it's a very large price to pay. i'm just going to tell you one last story about an artist that i met a man who was not in

tandem and square in 1989. he was very sympathetic to the students and at that time he was in his hometown. when he heard what happened, about the deaths in beijing in 1989 he said it was almost as if he had lost his mind. his senses took leave of him and he did this very very drastic act. he took a meat cleaver and he cut off his own little finger as a protest. and for years he used the image of his mutilated hand in his artwork. he had a whole series of portraits with his hand holding pictures of a younger more innocent self which he called

myself. but now everything has changed. 25 years have passed and he has a child, 12-year-old boy. i asked him, what do you say to your son? what do you tell him about what happened to your finger? and he said well, sometimes i tell him that i left it on the bus. ..

it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. does that really matter anymore? and i would argue yes it does matter. it matters because history matters. in history matters so much to the communist party, the chinese government ayer willing to spend all this money and manpower would just want to find out what just happened to her farm. so it is not just at the top. the memory, which is the most personal space inside your own head, but it has become a political space and people have allowed that to happen. they've allowed themselves to become party to state-sponsored amnesia. as one visitor bro, a massive secret has become a massive

vacuum. the crimes of the state are slowly being replaced by the cards of silence or not is the crime in which almost everyone is complicit. thank you. [applause] so we have some time for questions if anyone has any questions. we have a microphone that does front, so please come down. >> five. so, i grew up with the same that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. and i was wondering, do you think that the chinese will keep a history knowing that we have not learned about tiananmen?

>> it is a good question because this is not the first time that this has happened in china. there have been cycles of process. there were killings in tiananmen square in 1914. 1919 and the 19 primates. also this event passats in 1987. so these cycles to repeat themselves kenda pablum for the governments that is is that the events of 1989 are forgotten, dead in the last end of 1989 would also be forgotten. if you stop people from talking about what happened to him and they won't realize how the government put down the process. so this is a major danger, yes.

>> i've always enjoyed your reporting on npr. i'm wonderfully leather protest to china after writing this book? >> i don't know. i don't know. i was on fellowship last year, so i didn't try to go back and i haven't tried to go back since. i said i'll be able to go back sometime. >> journalism of this caliber often requires a great deal of courage. i'm most familiar with the philippines that is the most numbers of journalist deaths in the last hundred years or so. how often are your work there that led to this presentation did you fear for your life as opposed to or appear that you would be jailed personally. obviously you were very concerned about the people you're interviewing that they could jailed or worse. could you describe that in a little more detail? >> i never feared for my life.

i was most worried about the people that i was talking to. as a foreign journalist in china, in most cases the worst that happens is you might get deported and china has deported more journalists of the last couple of years or refuse to give them the those that may have been a very long time. so i wasn't concerned for my life, but i was very nervous. you know, once people started talking to me and telling me the stories that haven't really been told before, once i realized also very trusting me to tell their stories. these are stories they would not really able to tell. people who live in china couldn't really tell them or publish themselves. they were trusting me to tell these stories. i really felt that it was my duty to do that and to make sure that these stories were told. so i was nervous about not being

able to do that to the extent that they know today. and i was nervous about the possible consequences for the people that i was talking to a child because you know, it was very difficult to judge because are also, i was talking to people well before the book came out and you couldn't tell what the local climate would be like when the book did come out. and then they fear when the crackdown was so intense it was, you know, much worse than it has been in previous years. it was a matter of great concern for me. but i never worry that much about my own life. for man safety. >> thank you. i was an exchange student in beijing. as they were saying, hindsight is 2020. looking back, he begged in the

last appears to leave the square of the original plan was to leave the square once they got to the statue was made public, but due to some odd decision making a minority wanted to stay and they stayed in the crack that occurred. looking back at tiananmen square demonstrated more or less like a whole commune or buses were running, businesses where open. any government would do before they started cracking down. looking back to the situation, the 11 billion peasants who were basically not aware of the protest was 100 million. the web with 1 billion peasants is how the communists came or perhaps looking back it could be

accomplished with your own personal feelings i'm not? >> i mean, first of all you have to remember they were extremely young. they're 18, 19, 20, no experience whatsoever of political participation. yes, they were naïve. yes, they make mistakes and they have no-frills trust either. as many different factions of students. they really, you know, argued a lot between themselves and they really didn't -- some factions didn't know what each other were doing. so yes, they were naïve and they made mistakes. but i think that does the team that they are necessarily -- the the government passed with delta fit in that kind of way. there were many other kinds of ways of dealing with protests. the way in which it was dell,

sending him 150,000 troops, opening live fire on unarmed protesters was designed to send a very distinct message and not message was found. >> okay. have you ever read the book fragile superpower by season trades? i think it's a very good vote and tells congress leaders think. i don't understand why the communists did what they did come they did, read that book. it's a very good to hear >> yes, a very good. i second that. >> high, when you open, you mentioned he spent the early parts of your research talking to students at universities and i was wondering if there are any studies you know of that are more formal research of people's awareness of tiananmen. i know would be really challenging, but is there anything out there that exist? >> if there's anything out there, i couldn't find it. it's incredibly difficult to do this kind of research, even for

foreign academics if you want to go do research in china, you would be sponsored by some kind of chinese academic institution and they would search you not approve of this kind of research. i think we have seen a move away from covering topics such the chinese government might deem is controversial because a lot of academics to worry about getting blacklisted and it has happened. there was a case a few years ago were 13 academics were not given the events because they had contributed to a book by uighurs in northwestern china. i think it is a very large obstacle to try to carry out a study like this if it has happened, i looked hard. i couldn't find anything. >> hi. i recently read this book, the man on mal's race. i don't know if you've read that

book, but it was really interesting that it was turkmen are and i'm sure i am corrupting names and pronunciations, but what is so interesting to me with you with ivy league educated here in the intensely wanted to go back during the revolution and he did. in the book is so slow to realize the harm that was doing as well as the good until he personally was affected. pms have been the main diplomatic interpreter during the korean war. what was really interesting to me as he ended up in london as a diplomatic came back to visit during tiananmen. his account of that is you know, he got so scared from the mall that he saw violence he really in the book says he sort of went away from tiananmen and he was sort of villainize back in london. i guess the point i want to make

about it is he really had a schism. this i.t. with such that the deputy invasions, their perception of the korean war, so many harm done into the chinese effect that his passion for revolution and i think that all the harm that mao did in this discussion then sort of carried on. nac is the national diplomat that can run away from the problem, i wonder how foreign students today, what about chinese today who are common or educated in this country and learn about tiananmen from the western respect theirs. heavy dell didn't do that is all? do they try to carry the stories back or how did they react to that? >> yeah, it is a good question because there are increasing numbers of chinese students in the u.s. i think more than 200,000 now and the students they suddenly

have access to all this information. it is interesting, some students are really very interested. i taught at a number of universities now. i've talked to chinese study departments and student organizations and it is often the case with chinese students will -- they will want to ask russians to play because of a looking at the other chinese student and they will be nervous. but at the end, they will come up to me and asked a question and i'll be very, very interested. you've also i think it another another -- there is another quite different response from some students because the way history is taught in china would make such great years of the humiliations, the hundred years of humiliation.

it does mean that a student in china has really had this imprinted on their psyche and they're really quite nationalistic. when they hear these other versions of history, which are in the millionaire to them. in some cases they simply don't believe that is true. they think this is, you know, a sort of western of their history that this is all biased. it's impossible. it just could not happen now play in assist another example of the western world and how it is biased towards china. and so, this too is one of the reasons why wanted to write this book because i really wanted the students coming out of china to read something and she read other versions and at least consider the possibility of order to try and break that silence. thank