The People's Republic of Amnesia

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited is a nonfiction book by journalist Louisa Lim and published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

Lim’s interest in writing the book arose from her curiosity "to discover how memories could be reformatted and how China’s population had become complicit in an act of mass amnesia.

[2] Lim uses soldiers' recollections to show the events from their perspective, including Chen's memory of the ground floor of the Great Hall of the People "turned into a makeshift hospital" and his conflicting feelings when he saw it.

[9] The author explores the amnesia and censorship which the Chinese government has instilled into its young people, and how it has affected their knowledge of the Tiananmen Square events.

[15] Lim paints a portrait of Chengdu, a city in southwest China, after the protests with "memories, declassified U.S. diplomatic cables, diaries, hastily written reports of the time, contemporaneous photographs, and Chinese government-approved accounts".

Dennis Rae describes mourning wreaths and signs carried around the city, its "panicked urgency" and the injured people in the local hospital.

Jonathan Mirsky of The New York Times wrote, "Lim's accounts of the amnesia of many Chinese, make [her book] one of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989".

[18] According to Jennifer Altehenger of King's College London, "The book is accessible, fluidly written and offers rich accounts of one of the most complex chapters in contemporary Chinese history", but Lim's citations are "unnecessarily complicated".