Louisa Lim

An award-winning journalist takes to the protest-riven streets of Hong Kong to write this startling landmark account of the island city’s complex past and precarious future.

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Indelible City

An NPR correspondent explains how the Tiananmen Square massacre changed China, and how China changed the events of that day by rewriting its own history.

Tiananmen Revisited

The People's Republic of Amnesia

An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.

Finalist for the 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism Longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Award for the Best Non-Fiction book in the world on Foreign Affairs An Economist Book of the Year, 2014 A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "One of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989." --The New York Times Book Review On June 4, 1989, People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, killing untold hundreds of people. A quarter-century later, this defining event remains buried in China's modern history, successfully expunged from collective memory. In The People's Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4th changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4th by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square. She also introduces us to individuals whose lives were transformed by the events of Tiananmen Square, such as a founder of the Tiananmen Mothers, whose son was shot by martial law troops; and one of the most important government officials in the country, who post-Tiananmen became one of its most prominent dissidents. And she examines how June 4th shaped China's national identity, fostering a generation of young nationalists, who know little and care less about 1989. For the first time, Lim uncovers the details of a brutal crackdown in a second Chinese city that until now has been a near-perfect case study in the state's ability to rewrite history, excising the most painful episodes. By tracking down eyewitnesses, discovering US diplomatic cables, and combing through official Chinese records, Lim offers the first account of a story that has remained untold for a quarter of a century. The People's Republic of Amnesia is an original, powerfully gripping, and ultimately unforgettable book about a national tragedy and an unhealed wound.

Pe 4 iunie 1989, soldații Armatei Populare de Eliberare au deschis focul asupra unor civili neînarmați în Beijing, ucigând sute de persoane. Chinezii care își mai amintesc astăzi acest episod de mult șters din memoria colectivă sunt condamnați să trăiască la periferia societății, căci uitarea trecutului a devenit un mecanism de adaptare esențial. Louisa Lim reconstituie evenimentele din Piața Tiananmen și, pentru prima dată, vorbește despre represiunile brutale din alt oraș chinez, care au fost eliminate din istoria oficială chineză. Ea dezvăluie poveștile unor oameni cărora acele zile le-au marcat viața, de la tânărul soldat trimis să elibereze piața până la unul dintre cei mai de seamă politicieni ai țării, devenit un cunoscut disident după ce a stat șapte ani în închisoare. Bazată pe declarații ale martorilor oculari, pe telegramele diplomatice americane și dosarele oficiale chineze, Republica Populară a Amneziei readuce la lumină o poveste care timp de un sfert de secol a fost trecută sub tăcere – povestea unei tragedii naționale care a lăsat răni imposibil de vindecat.

Louisa Lim

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