Reporting from Beijing — In his baggy shorts hanging below the knees, Puma sneakers and spiky hair, Wang Kangkang is hip to the present, clueless about the past.
Although he comes often to see the nightly ceremony of the Chinese flag being lowered at Tiananmen Square, he doesn't know what happened here in 1989 and doesn't really care.
"Well, it happened before I was born," the 19-year-old said, looking down at his sneakered feet as the crowd shuffled out of the vast expanse of concrete on a balmy evening. "In any case, it's history. Why should we dwell on the past?"
On June 4, 1989, hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed as the army made its final push to crush a pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square. As the 20th anniversary approaches, the government has fortified its extraordinary information blockade on the bloody crackdown. Anybody in the country trying to search on the Internet for information about the square that is one of Beijing's most popular tourist attractions is likely to get the message, "This page cannot be displayed."
But to a large extent, the efforts are overkill: Apathy as much as censorship has pushed the events of 1989 into the dark recesses of history.
The young Chinese -- who one graying activist calls "the stupid generation" -- remain willfully ignorant about the past.
The pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, to many young Chinese, seem so, well, 1980s -- a reflection of a time when communism was collapsing into the rubbish heap of concrete that was the Berlin Wall. From the perspective of 2009's global economic crisis, the Chinese system that represses political choice and speech in exchange for economic freedom doesn't look too bad to young people here.
"Our generation doesn't feel so much pressure as our parents. Even the global recession hasn't hit us much. It shows what a good country China is," said Hou Jue, 26, who along with his friend Wang is studying to be a bartender.
Although he lives only a few blocks from Tiananmen Square, he acknowledges that he is "not too clear" about 1989's events and doesn't feel a need to learn more.
"If the government tells us as Chinese citizens we should not know about something and shouldn't be searching material, we should be responsible and obey," Hou said.
The activists of the 1980s, many of them still involved with political issues, despair over the attitudes of the younger generation.
