From the Financial Times (link)
Last week a momentous anniversary passed in Beijing, and no one noticed. The silence tells us as much about the present as about history.
Thirty years ago, on April 5, 1976, more than a hundred thousand demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to commemorate the death of former premier Zhou Enlai, who had died a few months earlier.
But the real purpose of the demonstration was to oppose the “Gang of Four”, the party faction sponsored by Mao Zedong (and including Mr Mao’s wife Jiang Qing) that was running the country – and running it into the ground. Mr Zhou was widely seen as a force of reason and decency in a government that had lost its mind and was bent only on destruction and terror.
