Louisa Lim's timely reminder of Tiananmen crackdown cover-up

It's easy to forget the bad moments in history, especially if you caused them. And in Beijing, no moment has become as forgettable as the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989.

Twenty-six years after the People's Liberation Army opened fire, the central government continues to go to great lengths to hide the truth about this watershed moment through censorship, falsification of history and using nationalism to redirect criticism.

Louisa Lim, a journalist who reported from China for a decade, explores this cover-up operation and the cultural ramifications of selective memory in her enlightening and thoughtful book, .

"Chinese people are practised at not dwelling on the past," Lim writes. "One by one, episodes of political turmoil have been expunged from official history or simply forgotten; from the anti-rightist movement in 1957 that persecuted hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom were sent to labour camps, tortured, or even driven to suicide; to the Great Famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 36 million people; to the suffering - impossible to measure - of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s; to the Democracy Wall movement of 1979; to the failed student movement in 1986 and 1987."

This book carries frightfully relevant reminders and lessons for Hong Kong and the leaders of the Occupy movement. Lim documents how the Tiananmen student leaders have lived a lifetime of sacrifice and repression for their actions.

Another important point the author makes is that Beijing has become extremely skilled at sidelining the June 4 dissidents and undermining their relevance in public discourse over China's openness and censorship. Tiananmen leaders have been overshadowed and replaced by dissidents such as the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng.