The reason why most Chinese people care about completely different issues is not because they are uninformed. The average person in Chinese is much better informed
about China and its domestic issues (including Tiananmen) than most people outside of China. After all, they actually live in the country and experience it every day. Many people personally lived through the events of Tiananmen, or know people who did. But frankly, after 30 years of massive societal change and (for people in the developed world unimaginable) improvements in living conditions, it isn't on the top of people's minds. There are other issues - issues that are rarely covered in the foreign press - that are much more pressing.
I find that many Westerners believe that because they can read the New York Times or Washington Post, they know more about what's going on in China than people in China do. The problem is that those newspapers only cover a tiny sliver of what goes on in China, and they focus almost exclusively on a small set of negative stories (and very often, this reporting is extremely inaccurate, partial or exaggerated). Imagine if you didn't speak English and had never been to the US, and all you ever read about the US was how terribly prisoners are treated and all the wars it fights around the world. You would have an incredibly skewed picture of the country.
What do people actually care about? Things like the corrupt local officials who may be colluding with property developers (and consequently, the ongoing anti-corruption campaign is very popular), or the rat race to get ahead in an ultra-competitive society.
> Hong Kong and Taiwan are considerably more wealthy on a per-capita basis, at least largely because they don't live under the sane ultra authoritarian system.
The gap between the more developed parts of the mainland and Taiwan is rapidly closing, and is not that large any more. Beijing and Shanghai are not far behind Taipei, and may catch up in the next few years. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is considerably wealthier than either Taiwan or mainland China.
I just think that most of the Western press does a terrible job of covering China, and is actually significantly misinforming its audience in this regard. The quality standards for China coverage are just incredibly low (and because the audience is mostly uninformed on the topic, they mostly can't tell), and the geopolitical rivalry seems to color and shape the reporting to a huge extent.