The uprising China would have us forget

— “In the early morning dew on April 4 this year, when 75-year old retired Shandong University professor Sun Wenguang set off in a hired taxi to the summit of Yingxiong Mountain to engage in his first legal act of public remembrance, he found he had acquired an escort of no fewer than nine police vehicles. As he decamped at the summit, he was greeted by a group of men in plain clothes: they threw him down a two-metre slope and set upon him for a good 10 minutes, breaking three of his ribs.”
— “Sun had made two errors. First, he had announced his intentions on bulletin boards around the university, an institution where he’s been harassed as a troublemaker for two decades now, ever since the upheavals of 1989. Second, he’d decided to exercise his new-found right to mourn by honouring the memory of China’s most famous non-person, former party secretary and premier Zhao Ziyang.”