How many Chinese know about the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident?

Q: Given the Chinese Communist Party's media and Internet censorship, how much does the average Chinese citizen know about the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident?

A:

At that time, I was in Guangzhou. Students of public schools were not in the classroom but at home watching the report from Hong Kong TV. Everyone was watching Hong Kong TV at home day and night. Many units (in the planned economy, factories and institutions were all called a unit) erected an antenna pointing to Hong Kong and had a cable linked to every household so that people could just put down work and school and watch TV every day. They are still alive today. Chinese people know better than Westerners about the incident because it is about their country and happened in their country. During that period, the news was really free and not censorship at all. Why are they keeping silent? Nobody in China feels good about the incident, not the officials, nor the common people. They don’t want to mention it, just as Americans do not mention the slave trade every day. That’s why they don’t want to mention it. But they still think the government made the right choice and avoided the fate of the collapse of the Soviet Union. They don’t mention it doesn’t mean they don’t know it. Chinese people feel lucky that they had Deng rather than Gorbachev at that time.