Open Collections

Chow, Shue Fung

University of British Columbia

This thesis studies how the younger “Umbrella Generation” (mainly those born between 1989 and 2000) views the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and why their views differ from those of the older generations. Media and scholars have observed that the youngsters personally do not care much about the massacre, but they still talk a lot about it in political context. Why? This research project analyzes various texts and in-depth interviews to probe the reasons. Adopting Paul Cohen’s framework of memory and myth, and based on the “social generation theory” of Karl Mannheim, I argue that unlike the previous generations who saw the massacre as their generational traumatic experience and thus had their generational consciousness shaped by it, the Umbrella Generation born after 1989 cared more about the events of the 2010s and the massacre’s inability to resonate with the radically transforming political reality. I historicize the socio-political changes to show how the younger generation’s consciousness was shaped in a different historical context, and how that consciousness clashed with that of their seniors, as reflected by the disputes over the commemoration of the massacre. By applying a generational lens to reveal the internal tensions in memory politics, this study provides a new perspective and a new analytical framework to understand the complexities of the Hong Kong democracy movement and other social movements in the 2010s.

Text

2024-08-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88957

History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/