One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.
We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of "it's X holiday," or maybe some stories about "should we even recognize X as a holiday" (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it's relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.
One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.
We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of "it's X holiday," or maybe some stories about "should we even recognize X as a holiday" (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it's relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.