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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Every educated person in PRC knows they can't just buy a ticket and travel to Taiwan easily.

I'm pretty sure they can just buy a ticket and travel to Taiwan easily, and that they're aware of that.

They need to get a special totally not a passport document in order to apply for something which absolutely isn’t a visa, but it’s not much harder than travelling to Vietnam.

2.7 million Chinese tourists visited Taiwan in 2017, mostly as individuals.

And no kind of political police is going to become interested?

Do you honestly believe that an American traveling to Iran, Turkey, Cuba or Venezuela doesn't face magnitudes more scrutiny from their "political police"?

Thousands travel daily between Taiwan and the mainland.

It's too common for it to be a meaningful data point. Taiwan was the biggest destination for Chinese tours around 2015.

I have heard that having a degree from a Taiwanese university is somewhat suspicious.

Interesting to know. Thanks.

If so, what other than lack of interest stops PRC citizens from learning about the Tiananmen square "mystery" when they travel to Taiwan?

Nothing. Why would you need more than lack of interest?

If there is no interest anyway, why make such a show out of hiding it?

You can't talk about it (in public) on the mainland. That's what's protected. You're free to learn about it, anywhere. Nobody cares.

But don't go talking about it in groups. That's how movements get started.

Put another way, "people vacationing in Taiwan" have no more than the background level of interest in the Tiananmen Square Incident, and that level is so low that it doesn't need to be suppressed.

Whereas people searching the internet for 6.4 or 天安门事件 can be expected to have a much higher level of interest in 天安门事件, and need to be suppressed.

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