In a Tortoiseshell
My research project examines why students in major universities in China are unable to express acknowledgement and recognition of the famous Tank Man picture taken during the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 and the implications of “disremembering” in the context of broader historical revisionist practices. In investigating the limitations of the theory of public place memory and generational memory preservation, I argue that the Chinese population actively chooses to engage in “selective disremembering” as a self-preservationist technique. Selective disremembering poses an additional filter, an important consideration when drawing population-representative conclusions, but of which Western scholarly bias neglects; this research is particularly relevant to scholars interested in studying contemporary China.
Excerpt
This picture is on the cover of “Time 100: The Most Influential Images of All Time”1 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize shortly after its release.2 The instantly recognizable image depicts a young man in the lower left corner carrying two shopping bags and defiantly obstructing the path as four tanks advance towards him. The man’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, going on to be conferred the title ‘Unknown Rebel.’3 This powerful photograph, formally known as the ‘Tank Man,’ captured the spirit of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.4 As one of “100 Photographs That Changed the World,”5 the Tank Man became a global symbol for individual defiance and nonviolent courage against an oppressive military force and political regime during the Massacre. What began as student-led protests culminated in a violent confrontation between the Chinese government and its population. An estimated 50,000 to 200,000 students from the most acclaimed universities across Beijing marched from their campuses to Tiananmen Square in demand for national reform and the continuation of burgeoning democratic practices in China.6
25 years later, journalist and author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, Dr. Louisa Lim’s research brings her to the same university campuses of the Tiananmen Square Incident.7 Conducted in 2014 (marking the Protests’ 25th year anniversary), Dr. Lim surveyed students at universities across Beijing, presenting to each student the iconic image of the Tank Man and asking if the student possessed any recognition of the photograph.
Of the 100 students surveyed across the universities that had some connection to the event and in turn, the Tank Man, only 15 of the 100 students recognized the picture. Here, the theory of public place memory proposed by Edward Casey, a leading philosophical psychology theorist, posits that in the context of an event that is significant to public memory (Tiananmen), place and space (the universities of the student protestors) facilitate remembrance of ‘active materials’ heavily associated with the event and the location.8 Yet, the population hails from the institutions at the crux of the event and are illustrative of the places and spaces that Casey espouses.9 Consequently, why is place unable to prompt recognition of the image?
In tandem, French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ theory of generational memory preservation explicates that the temporal quality of memory remains for at least two generations since an event’s occurrence.10 Nevertheless, it has been less than two generations since the event happened in 1989 and when the survey was conducted in 2014 with the next generations of students.11 Alas, why does the absence of generational distance between the event and the survey date further not explain students’ inability to recognize the photograph?
Although standard narratives attribute this gap to be the byproduct of extreme censorship and propaganda employed by the Chinese Communist Party that results in the students no longer knowing about this emblematic image, what other reasons could account for this phenomenon? How might solely looking at the preservation of memory in place and time pose limits to this analysis? This paper investigates the Western bias present in the survey through the concept of ‘selective disremembering’ to faithfully answer the question: Why were only 15 students able to identify the Tank Man?
I argue that while preservation of the past and memory exists in place and time, these elements are rendered invisible in the context of powerful, sustained historical revisionism. Instead, what becomes truly visible is the desire for self-preservation that incentivizes populations to engage in ‘selective disremembering’—a concept that describes the exercise of discretion over memory and knowledge. However, scholarly bias12 makes it difficult to identify that ‘selective disremembering’ poses an additional dimension that researchers interested in studying modern China must be cognizant of. For that reason, data collection that triggers the filter of ‘disremembering’ often produces inaccurate findings and fallacious scholarly interpretations. This research underscores that bias must be taken into consideration when attempting to draw population-representative conclusions.
In this paper, I will first discuss the limitations of Casey and Halbwachs’ theories in relation to the survey conducted with students who face historical revisionist practices and possess different cultural values than the surveyor. Then, I will explain the conceptual framework of selective disremembering in the context of historical revisionism and explain how (1) the artifacts smuggled to Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution and (2) the beliefs that surrounded China’s Great Famine are events that further elucidate the underlying agency of ‘disremembering.’ Thereafter, I will explore the implications of conducting research with scholarly bias and without acknowledging ‘selective disremembering,’ a critical filter scholars should account for when analyzing public opinion and evaluating the reliability of data coming from the PRC. Else, scholarly understandings of contemporary China risk remaining tethered to reflections of Western biases as opposed to the lived realities of populations of interest.
Footnotes
- Kate Pickert, “Tank Man at 25: Behind the Iconic Tiananmen Square Photo.” TIME, June 5, 2014. ↩︎
- “About.” Jeff Widener. ↩︎
- Kate Pickert, “Tank Man at 25: Behind the Iconic Tiananmen Square Photo.” TIME, June 5, 2014. ↩︎
- The event is often referred to as the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ in the United States and has also been called the ‘Tiananmen Square Protests.’ It is referred to as the ‘Tiananmen Square Incident’ in China. In this paper, I will use all three names interchangeably and all three names refer to the same event that occurred in 1989. I will also refer to the event as simply ‘Tiananmen.’ ↩︎
- “Tank Man.” Encyclopædia Britannica, March 14, 2025. ↩︎
- To introduce the incident correctly, it is important to also acknowledge there were large numbers of middle-class workers who participated in the protests and who have died for their fight for national reforms. For the purposes of this paper, I will not discuss the role of the middle-class workers, but focus on the students in universities across Beijing who partook in the protests. ↩︎
- Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 85-88. ↩︎
- Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory. University of Alabama Press, 2007. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Maurice Halbwachs. On Collective Memory. United States: University of Chicago Press, 2024. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- For the purpose of this paper, I will use ‘scholarly bias’ or ‘research bias (which is not the same as ‘human bias’ or ‘personal bias’) because it is important to the realm of research as its implications include the drawing of accurate, representative conclusions; else, it could misdirect future research projects that rely on existing scholarship. ↩︎
Bibliography
“About.” Jeff Widener. Accessed May 7, 2025. https://www.jeffwidener.com/about/.
“Tank Man.” Encyclopædia Britannica, March 14, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tank-Man.
Casey, Edward S. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory. University of Alabama Press, 2007.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. United States: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Pickert, Kate. “Tank Man at 25: Behind the Iconic Tiananmen Square Photo.” TIME, June 5, 2014. https://time.com/2822322/iconic-tiananmen-tank-man-photo/.
Author Commentary / Winnie Lin
This is an excerpt from my Assignment 4 paper written in my Writing Seminar, WRI146: Constructing the Past. When I began brainstorming my paper, I considered dozens of different ideas before solidifying my research topic on the ‘Tank Man’ image taken during the Tiananmen Square Massacre. This topic and primary source has been examined by many scholars—including Dr. Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia—predominantly through the angle of state-sanctioned propaganda and historical revisionist practices. With pre-existingly robust literature, I struggled to enter a scholarly conversation where it seemed everyone had already finished talking.
After meeting with my professor, I researched and re-researched to conceptualize the motive beyond the well-trodden route of oppressive memory and government control. While these assumptions hold ground, I carefully thought about pushing back against claims advocated by scholars, such as Dr. Lim, that the Chinese population has truly forgotten major events from China’s historical tapestry. This meant the scholarly sources I originally intended to use in my argument on revisionism would serve a completely distinct purpose. I pivoted to the idea with a whiteboard and dry-erase marker in hand, sketching out my burgeoning thoughts on orienting sources, motive-building, thesis development, evidence situating, potential analysis, and thinking about the implications of the research. Now, I revisited Dr. Lim’s evidence of revisionism, through the lens of scholarly bias, further contemplating whether the students in the survey could have provided false answers to the question of: ‘Do you recognize this image,’ a limitation that the conclusions of The People’s Republic of Amnesia does not entirely account for. Upon asking these questions, I saw the gap in expressed versus unexpressed knowledge (yet, does in fact recognize the ‘Tank Man’) that could alter the survey results and extrapolated interpretations.
Driven by these inquiries, my thesis investigates the shortcomings of Western-centric discussions on revisionism, specifically through a concept I term ‘selective disremembering’ that serves as a filter to understanding populations that Western scholars often fail to consider and consequently creates scholarly bias. The scholars I brought into my paper, Edward Casey and Maurice Halbwachs, provide the theoretical premise for the lacuna of ‘why only 15 of the 100 students surveyed were able to recognize the picture.’ From there, I found evidence of other historical events that Western scholars would deem to solely fit the ‘historical revisionism’ concept but in my analysis, I explain how the events could actually also be understood through ‘selective disremembering’ as self-preservation and individual agency within a nation that been viewed by the West as having exercised full power over its population.
Writing my paper has been an equally challenging and rewarding endeavor throughout drafts during Writing Seminar to now, revising my paper for publication in Tortoise. The writing journey taught me to unrelentingly pursue the exploration of my ideas; in contending with established theories and data from giants in their fields, I have learned to make room for my voice at the scholarly table—and I seek to continue building these skills in my future works.
Editor Commentary / Doris Lee
Writing a compelling introduction in Writing Seminar can be both challenging and intimidating for many students, especially because the structure is often variable and departs from the conventional format emphasized in high school. Introductions in this context are especially significant, as they provide the space for writers to map the development of their motivating questions, situate their work within scholarly conversations, and ultimately lead to the formulation of a thesis. In this regard, Winnie’s paper is especially effective, as she not only fulfills these objectives but does so in a manner that is both accessible and engaging for the reader.
From the excerpt, it is evident from the outset that Winnie establishes a clear empirical motive. She notes the irony that, despite the Tank Man image being “a global symbol for individual defiance and nonviolent courage” and appearing on the cover of Time 100 as well as being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, it was recognized by “only 15 of the 100 students” surveyed at universities across Beijing. Winnie extends this empirical motive by situating it within a scholarly context, demonstrating how her analysis engages with existing literature. She argues that prior applications of public place theory and generational memory preservation are insufficient to explain this phenomenon, which positions her work as a meaningful contribution to ongoing academic conversations. This careful layering of motive naturally leads to a motivating question that is both explicit and persuasive.
With the components of the motive clearly established, her thesis offers an equally structured and insightful response by introducing the concept of “selective disremembering” – a unique and original framework that she defines and contextualizes for the reader.
The final paragraph of her introduction functions as a roadmap for the paper, outlining how each section contributes to the central thesis: first by addressing theoretical limitations, then by explicating the concept of selective disremembering and linking it to specific historical events, and finally by discussing broader implications. This roadmap gives readers a clear sense of the paper’s trajectory and its intellectual stakes.
Winnie concludes her introduction with a powerful statement emphasizing the significance of her contribution, noting that misinterpretations of contemporary China are at stake. This further underscores the intellectual and ethical importance of her argument while offering the readers a final compelling reason to engage with her argument.
Author
Winnie Lin ‘28 is a sophomore majoring in Public and International Affairs and pursuing minors in History and Environmental Studies. Winnie hails from New York, New York; on campus, she serves as Co-Chair of the Peer Career Advisers program, Co-Director of Events at the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, Chair of Operations for the Princeton International Relations Council Diplomatic Invitational, and is a James Madison Program for American Ideals and Institutions Fellow. In her free time, Winnie loves exploring museums, creating oil pastel art, and writing poetry.
Editor
Doris Lee ‘27 is a junior majoring in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) with a minor in English. On campus, she is a Writing Center Fellow, Student House Manager at Richardson Auditorium, a research assistant in the SPIA department, and Vice President of Baking Bad. In her free time, she enjoys reading, listening to music, and crocheting.