CULTURE WATCH : Just Forget About 1989

Without even viewing the film at issue, China’s propaganda apparatchiks have barged in to disrupt the New York Film Festival. The film is “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,� an American-made documentary about the 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square that led to hundreds of killings by government soldiers.

The film reportedly gives a nuanced, evenhanded portrait of events, and if anything may be too favorable toward authorities. But apparently China’s thought police prefer to erase this entire nasty episode from domestic and international memory.

When the Chinese demanded that the film be canceled, festival organizers naturally refused. How did the heirs to the Cultural Revolution respond? They punished Zhang Yimou, a leading Chinese filmmaker who had nothing to do with the Tian An Men movie. They pressured him into dropping plans to attend the festival, where his new film about gangs in the 1930s, “Shanghai Triad,� is to be screened Friday. Perhaps censors in Beijing are uneasy about that film too, given its parallels between a wicked past and crime in modern-day China. Last year, Zhang--director of the acclaimed “Raise the Red Lantern� (1991)--saw political bluenoses ban his “To Live,� about the Cultural Revolution, and bar him from attending its showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

With the Internet, video machines and faxes, China cannot much longer censor foreign or even domestic images of itself. The sooner the government realizes that, the sooner it can join the modern information and economic age.