Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Readings on the 35th Anniversary of the June Fourth Massacre

James T. Areddy, “35 Years After Tiananmen, China’s Conduct Again Triggers Alarm”

The magnitude of calamity during Tiananmen can render any sensible soul speechless. But for those of us who are spared the firsthand trauma and accorded the luxury of critical distance, bearing witness demands not melancholia but to examine how the past is curated and what purpose it serves. A memorial for Tiananmen, like the June 4 Museum, is not just about loss. In these spaces, grief is singed with rage, and each recollection is a call for political change in China.

— Yangyang Cheng, “Grieving Tiananmen as US Cops Crush Campus Protests”

ChinaFile, “35 Years Later: A Retrospective of Our Work on the 1989 Tiananmen Protests and Crackdown”

Alex Colville, “Talking Tiananmen with a Chinese Chatbot”

Johanna M. Costigan, “Shades of Amnesia”

Helen Davidson, “China and Hong Kong reportedly detain dissidents before Tiananmen Square anniversary”

Louisa Lim, “China’s crackdown on Tiananmen memorials shows its obsession with security – and growing paranoia”

Lingua Sinica, “Keeping the Memory of June Fourth Alive”

Recommendations

China Stories

Chi-hui Lin and Helen Davidson, “Pride before a fall: water pipe helps cherished waterfall in China stay flowing”

Katrina Northrop, “Alec Ash on Finding Freedom in an Unfree Country”

The stop-and-go pace of repression is characteristic of a city long associated with both chaotic speed and considered slowness, as seen in domestically produced action comedies and languorous Wong Kar-wai classics like “In the Mood for Love.” Every time a crackdown is ordered from Beijing, those with only a passing interest in the city assume that the struggle for its future is over. But beneath the surface of mass arrests and police repression, there is another story unfolding — that of the resistance by local and diasporic Hong Kongers, striving to make the most of whatever space they have left. This story is routinely reduced and obscured in order to tell a tale of Hong Kong as a city that has already died.

— Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Sharon Yam, “Saying Hong Kong Is Dead Does a Disservice to Its People”

Li Yuan, “As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’”

Wanderings Around the World

Few countries since World War II have experienced this level of devastation. But it’s been impossible for anybody to see more than glimpses of it. It’s too vast. Every battle, every bombing, every missile strike, every house burned down, has left its mark across multiple front lines, back and forth over more than two years.

This is the first comprehensive picture of where the Ukraine war has been fought and the totality of the destruction. Using detailed analysis of years of satellite data, we developed a record of each town, each street, each building that has been blown apart.

— Marco Hernandez, Jeffrey Gettleman, Finbarr O’Reilly and Tim Wallace, “What Ukraine Has Lost”

Jordyn Holman, with photographs by Hiroko Masuike, “The 7 Grueling Months to Reclaim the Bookstore Dream a Fire Stole”

Lingua Sinica, “Coding Ethics in Malaysia’s Media” — interview with journalism professor Benjamin YH Loh

The Immigration Act of 1924 is arguably the most restrictive and racist immigration law ever to have been passed by the United States Congress. It was not unprecedented in its restrictive nature: since 1882, Congress had imposed qualitative exclusions on persons deemed likely to become public charges, or otherwise morally or physically deficient. Nor was it unprecedented in its racism: notably, the Chinese and Asiatic exclusion laws of the 19th and early 20th century paved its way. Nevertheless, the 1924 Act marked a historical turning point in immigration policy. And this was because it imposed, for the first time, a numerical ceiling on the number of immigrants admitted into the country; and, in so doing, the law applied a racial hierarchy of desirability to all countries in the world.

— Mae Ngai, “The 100-Year-Old Racist Law That Broke America’s Immigration System”

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Featured photo: Reproduction of the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Goddess of Democracy at the June Fourth vigil in Hong Kong, June 4, 2014.