Remember Tiananmen Square? The Chinese Communist Party would much rather you didn’t. Thirty years after student-led uprisings in Beijing and other big cities rocked the regime, memories are bleached by repression inside China and apathy abroad.

In eastern Europe, celebrations this year will mark the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 as a joyous expression of the power of the seemingly powerless in the face of oppression. In the words of the playwright Vaclav Havel, who started that miraculous year in jail and ended it as Czechoslovakia’s president, “truth and love must triumph over lies and hate”. But in China, where the Communist Party’s rule is also based on falsehoods and mass murder, no commemoration of the protests is permitted. The only mentions, fleeting