As China is now emerging as a world economic powerhouse, the Communist leadership has tightened its ideological control by systematically whitewashing history and using the powerful state-controlled media to brainwash its citizens. Nowadays, if you ask a young person born after the 1980s about the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement, or the student pro-democracy protest movement of 1989, it’s highly likely that he or she hardly knows anything. You can’t get a lot from the internet in China because of the censorship.

Wenguang Huang – Chicago-based journalist, writer and translator.