Vad hände den 4 juni?

I London Review of Books skriver Chaohua Wang i en essä om minnet av händelserna vid Himmelska fridens torg i Peking den 4 juni 1989 om en sedelärande händelse som berör vårt kollektiva minne av det förflutna och konsekvenserna av censur:

"On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children."