Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

A day to Remember (10 Min) : https://vimeo.com/44078865

Liu Wei, a Chinese artist goes around the streets of Beijing on June 4th asking people ‘What Day is it today?’ hoping for an answer on the lines of ‘Today’s the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre’ but what he gets instead is a lot of ‘I don’t know’'s from the people whose faces clearly say otherwise.

I asked my graduate school classmates who were from China and got similar result. Very few of them said they heard of the event after they got to the U.S. and Googled it, but couldn't believe what they read since none of it appears in their life before they left China.

That's a different reaction. In 2002, people still remembered what happened but were unable to say it out loud due to fear (hence the facial expressions).

In 2017, the people old enough to be grad students truly don't know about it because the Party has successfully erased it from public discord within the mainland.

This may be a one-off thing, but I remember playing an online trivial game with some Chinese post-docs. They had no idea who Chung Kai-Shek was! It was almost as if pre-CCP history didn't exist.

He's name in Chinese was 蔣介石 (courtesy name 蔣中正). If they came from mainland China, they would definitely recognize both, since they're in the history book for everyone. The same goes for those 2 names' Pinyin (the Chinese romanization system used by PRC) Jiang Jieshi or Jiang Zhongzheng. Chung's story (along with the civil war between CCP and KMT) is well-known in China and depicted a lot in TV shows and movies.

Chung Kai-Shek is the romanization of 蔣介石 in Cantonese. If those post-docs weren't native in Cantonese, there's almost no way they can connect the pronunciation of Chung Kai-Shek back to 蔣介石.

In another romanization system used by ROC, 蔣介石/蔣中正 is Chiang Chieh-shih/Chiang Chung-cheng. Mainland Chinese can probably recognize them, but no guarantees.

Exactly!