Is China having another Tiananmen Square moment?

+ Americans relying more on chaplains for spiritual care US Edition - Today's top story: Protests in China are not rare -- but the current unrest is significant [View in browser]( US Edition | 1 December 2022 [The Conversation]( Reading over an earlier version of the article that leads today’s newsletter, a colleague posed a question that hadn’t occurred to me: “Will younger readers know what you mean by ‘Tiananmen Square’?” The term had been inserted by me as shorthand for the demonstrations and bloody crackdown of 1989. It is a fair question – those events took place more than 30 years ago. Yet, they are in the minds of many this week for two reasons: the death of Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader brought in after the massacre, and the lockdown protests that have shook China in recent days. Teresa Wright, who has written extensively on unrest in China, explains that protests [aren’t actually that rare in the country](. But whereas most demonstrations in China are localized and about specific issues, the current protests share the broader liberalization aims of 1989. “Indeed in some ways, the protesters of 2022 are being more pointed in their political demands,” she writes, noting that those on the streets have called on President Xi Jinping to step down and demanded the end of one-party rule. “Demonstrators in 1989 refrained from such system-threatening rhetoric,” Wright adds. Meanwhile, Harvard Kennedy School’s Edward Cunningham, explores [how Jiang transformed China’s economy in the post-1989 years](. Also today: - [3 ways to restore voters’ declining trust in elections]( - [Why ‘Black Panther’ success says little about Black film]( - [Twitter just made fighting COVID-19 misinformation harder]( Yesterday’s newsletter note misspelled the name of the Oath Keepers militia group. Matt Williams Senior Breaking News and International Editor Protesters march along a street in Beijing on Nov. 28, 2022. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images [Protests in China are not rare – but the current unrest is significant]( Teresa Wright, California State University, Long Beach Comparisons have been made to the 1989 demonstrations that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre. An expert on Chinese protests explains why that is half right. Arts + Culture - [Resounding success of ‘Black Panther’ franchise says little about the dubious state of Black film]( Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Wake Forest University After the first ‘Black Panther’ shattered box office expectations, some critics wondered if it marked the dawn of a new era of big-budget Black films. Science + Technology - [Ancient DNA from the teeth of 14th-century Ashkenazi Jews in Germany already included genetic variations common in modern Jews]( Shai Carmi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; David Reich, Harvard University A German town needed to relocate a medieval graveyard to build a parking garage. 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