One of the things I hadn't fully appreciated, until reading the link, was how divided even the perpetrators were. Firstly, there are indications that not all the armies worked together, e.g. "Beijing [Military Region] commander had refused to supply outside armies with food, water or barracks", and the suggestion that different armies may have had allegiance to different factions in the State Council, e.g. "we cannot substantiate reports that six military regions (not Beijing) support Li Peng". And secondly, if the information is correct, it seems the atrocities were committed by the 27 Army who were just one of at least 8 other armies present. Furthermore there are even multiple references to troops from other armies being victims of the 27 Army, e.g. "27 Army APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers] opened fire on the crowd (both civilians and soldiers) ... APCs ran over troops and civilians", "27 Army ordered to spare noone and shot wounded SMR [Shenyang Military Region] soldiers". And even within the 27 Army itself "27 Army officer shot dead by own troops apparently because he faltered". Sounds quite chaotic.
The protesters were also beset by factionalism. One issue the government had was that it didn't have a reliable partner in negotiations: different student groups had a diverse range of goals, from anti-corruption measures, to more socialism, to more capitalism, to freedom of speech, to democracy, to better housing standards, to lower tuition. And there was a constant tension between moderate and hardline student groups.
Imagine if Occupy Wall Street was 100,000 strong and had occupied Times Square, and the city of New York was trying to negotiate with them to meet their demands.
That is an incredible read. I knew Tiananmen was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. The part about body disposal is nothing short of terrifying.
The top voted comment from basically the same thread in 2017 [1] does a good job of presenting a point of contention in a relatively neutral fashion:
from the /u/aleyan:
> The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Alan Donald.
> Mr Donald's telegram is from 5 June, and he says his source was someone who "was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council".
Here we have a telegram by a guy (British Ambassador) who heard from a guy (unknown) who heard from a guy (unknown State Council) facts about the events of the day prior (massacre was on June 4th). Where did the unknown State Council official get his estimates from; were those official or just something he heard and repeated (and when did he get them)? Initial estimates of disasters are often quite wrong; here they were produced in game of telephone in a day or less; and they are not collaborated by any evidence we have now.
I rank the quality of new evidence as low. Rumors repeated in old official telegrams are still rumors. I expected BBC to have reported more critically. Alan Donald is still alive; BBC could have asked him if he received any updates to that first number that he trusted more.
I also have to fault BBC for it's phrasing around Donald's source. At first reading it sounded like Donald's source is an unnamed member of the State Council who is a close friend of the Ambassador. After reading BBC's sentence a carefully however; it sounds like the Donald's source is a person who is a friend of an unnamed member of the State Council. This ambiguous sentence is deceptive.
EDIT: I see vote count moving up and down on this comment making me think it is controversial. If you disagree with my doubts on the veracity of this story, write a comment. Maybe I missed something.
> STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO LEAVE SQUARE BUT AFTER FIVE MINUTES APCS ATTACKED. STUDENTS LINKED ARMS BUT WERE MOWN DOWN INCLUDING SOLDIERS. APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER. REMAINS INCINERATED AND THEN HOSED DOWN DRAINS.
Wow, I've never read this before. I have a really high tolerance for this type of stuff but his was still shocking.
Particularly how they brought in a mostly illiterate military unit from a rural area, blocked them from hearing news for 10 days, and told them it'd be filmed as part of a TV show. They also shot ambulances trying to help in addition to other soldiers from other units(? it's not clear what SMR troops means, possible a local police force).
Edit: SMR seems to be Shenyang's military regiments who initially went in unarmed to try to scare the students. Shortly after that failed they were immediately followed up by the armed attacking forces (27th unit from Shanxi, the rural area mentioned above). The Shanxi shot and ran over any "straggler" Shenyang units who were near the protestors. "27 ARMY USED BECAUSE MOST RELIABLE AND OBEDIENT. SOME CONSIDERED OTHER ARMIES WOULD ATTACK 27 ARMY BUT THEY HAD NO AMMUNITION"
"some guy" is, in this case, a British Ambassador. There's no particular reason for him to fabricate this story (in fact, it has the potential to make his job much tougher), and a proper historian could dig through other communications and see how prone to exaggeration he is. My gut instinct is that the cable is more or less true, in the sense that he's reporting claims from a source he's identified as someone he trusts ("THIS SOURCE HAS PREVIOUSLY PROVED RELIABLE AND WAS CAREFUL TO SEPARATE FACT FROM SPECULATION AND RUMOUR.").
The person providing the information is a bit trickier. Chinese politics have always had a bunch of different factions fighting for influence (despite how Western media portrays it as some Orientalist absolute monarchy). Whoever provided the information was likely trying to undermine some faction or another. Perhaps someone from Foreign Affairs trying to undermine some PLA-affiliated faction or another. That'd be trickier to analyze.
One must consider the fact that any conclusions drawn from state archives or on-the-ground investigations will be seen as biased one way or the other. Any evidence which exonerates the CCP will be accused of being manipulated CCP propaganda. Any evidence hinting otherwise will be accused of being pro-West fabrications. "Independent", multinational investigations are not immune either, for instance in the case of Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspections [1]. All you end up doing is preserving the status quo.
With the dearth of physical evidence, an objective conclusion will likely remain out of reach. Something definitely happened, and something bad. But to the extent of grinding up the bodies of 10,000 civilians into meat patties and hosing them down the drain bad? It is likely that we will never know the answer to that.
> With the dearth of physical evidence, an objective conclusion will likely remain out of reach. Something definitely happened, and something bad. But to the extent of grinding up the bodies of 10,000 civilians into meat patties and hosing them down the drain bad? It is likely that we will never know the answer to that.
I disagree. These events are still within living memory, so most of the actual people who were tasked with suppressing the protests and cleaning up afterwards can still theoretically be interviewed. Given the scale and brutality, at least some of them likely feel shame for participating and would testify honestly help clear their consciences (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/world/asia/china-tiananme...). Many others may have hidden diaries or other records (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/tiananmen-squa...). These events also happened in a dense urban area, so there were many uninvolved witnesses. If the political situation allowed all these accounts to be collected and cross-checked, I think we'd know these answers.
" FACT. ON ARRIVAL AT TIANANMEN TROOPS FROM SMR HAD SEPARATED STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS. STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO LEAVE SQUARE BUT AFTER FIVE MINUTES APCS ATTACKED. STUDENTS LINKED ARMS BUT WERE MOWN DOWN INCLUDING SOLDIERS. APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER. REMAINS INCINERATED AND THEN HOSED DOWN DRAINS."
This is contradicted by most accounts.
From wikipedia:
"At 4 am, the lights on the Square suddenly turned off, and the government's loudspeaker announced: "Clearance of the Square begins now. We agree with the students' request to clear the Square."[124] The students sang The Internationale and braced for a last stand.[125] Hou returned and informed student leaders of his agreement with the troops. At 4:30 am, the lights relit and the troops began to advance on the Monument from all sides. At about 4:32 am, Hou Dejian took the student's loudspeaker and recounted his meeting with the military. Many students, who learned of the talks for the first time, reacted angrily and accused him of cowardice.[126]
The soldiers initially stopped about 10 meters from the students. The first row of troops took aim with machine guns in the prone position. Behind them soldiers squatted and stood with assault rifles. Mixed among them were anti-riot police with clubs. Further back were tanks and APCs.[126] Feng Congde took to the loudspeaker and explained that there was no time left to hold a meeting. Instead, a voice vote would decide the collective action of the group. Although the vote's results were inconclusive, Feng said the "gos" had prevailed.[127] Within a few minutes, at about 4:35 am, a squad of soldiers in camouflaged uniform charged up the Monument and shot out the students' loudspeaker.[127][126] Other troops beat and kicked dozens of students at the Monument, seizing and smashing their cameras and recording equipment. An officer with a loudspeaker called out "you better leave or this won't end well."[126]
Some of the students and professors persuaded others still sitting on the lower tiers of the Monument to get up and leave, while soldiers beat them with clubs and gunbutts and prodded them with bayonets. Witnesses heard bursts of gunfire.[126] At about 5:10 am, the students began to leave the Monument. They linked hands and marched through a corridor to the southeast,[115][126] though some departed through the north.[126] Those who refused to leave were beaten by soldiers and ordered to join the departing procession. Having removed the students from the square, soldiers were ordered to relinquish their ammunition, after which they were allowed a short reprieve from 7 am to 9 am.[128] The soldiers were then ordered to clear the square of all debris left over from the student occupation. The debris was either piled and burnt on the square, or placed in large plastic bags that were airlifted away by military helicopters.[129][130] After the cleanup, the troops stationed at The Great Hall of the People remained confined within for the next nine days. During this time, the soldiers were left to sleep on the floors and fed a single packet of instant noodles split between three men daily. Officers apparently suffered no such deprivation, and were served regular meals apart from their troops."
IIRC, that discrepancy is accounted for if most of the bloodshed actually occurred near but outside of the square, which is reflected in the same Wikipedia article:
> The earliest casualties occurred as far west as Wukesong....Several minutes later, when the convoy eventually encountered a substantial blockade somewhere east of the 3rd Ring Road, they opened automatic rifle fire directly at protesters....
> At about 10:30 pm, the advance of the army was briefly halted at Muxidi, about 5 km west of the Square, where articulated trolleybuses were placed across a bridge and set on fire. Crowds of residents from nearby apartment blocks tried to surround the military convoy and halt its advance. The 38th Army again opened fire, inflicting heavy casualties....As the battle continued eastward the firing became indiscriminate, with "random, stray patterns" killing both protesters and uninvolved bystanders....Soldiers raked the apartment buildings with gunfire, and some people inside or on their balconies were shot. The 38th Army also used armored personnel carriers (APCs) to ram through the buses. They continued to fight off demonstrators, who hastily erected barricades and tried to form human chains. As the army advanced, fatalities were recorded all along Chang'an Avenue. By far the largest number occurred in the two-mile stretch of road running from Muxidi to Xidan...
> To the south, paratroopers of the 15th Airborne Corps also used live ammunition, and civilian deaths were recorded at Hufangqiao, Zhushikou, Tianqiao, and Qianmen.[116]
> The killings infuriated city residents, some of whom attacked soldiers with sticks, rocks and molotov cocktails, setting fire to military vehicles.
What did they do to the bodies? But then, since the Party is/was in power the burial sites would be off limits and cleaned many times over.
I wonder what would have happened to China at that time had the Government fallen? Civil war, many smaller states...? They have no history of democracy
>>APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER. REMAINS INCINERATED AND THEN HOSED DOWN DRAINS.
Considering the task at hand, pretty smart. Just burn them so not much remains. Weeks, months and years later, no evidence at all.
In an ABC (Australia) news story this week a journalist who was involved back in 1989 recounted that families were only allowed to collect the bodies of victims from hospitals and morgues if they agreed to sign a document confirming that the victim had died under "accidental circumstances".
This was one means by which the official bodycount was understated.
Read the cable. They (allegedly), pulverized the bodies into a “pie” by repeatedly running them over with APCs, then washed them down drains and disinfected.
Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.
There we a huge number of people involved on both the PLA and protestor sides. There are some reports which claim thousands of people killed and gruesomely disposed of; those people must have had relatives. We (outsiders and history in general) have very little idea what happened, and a single photo which escaped the censorship.
If the gunpoint forgetting is maintained for the lifetimes of the surviving participants, we may never know what happened.
Of course, even in incidents which are hugely documented, there is scope for denialists and propagandists to sneak in misinformation.
Edit: well, looks like there's lots more. I've been misled myself by how prevalent the Tank Man photo is compared to all the other footage!
A single photo? What are you talking about. There are plenty of video footage from the square where you can see the military shoot from cars into crowds of civilians[1].
It seems there's quite significant documentation, even documentaries with video of the event. Perhaps more is coming to light because it's the 30 year anniversary.
Some other commenters point out how there is plenty of evidence and archival footage of the event, but that's all available here in the west - how much of that can be found in China itself? One of the major goals of the Chinese internet censorship is to hide all references to the event; I don't know how effective it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if the generations born afterwards don't know about it, and eventually (within China at least) it'll be lost entirely.
I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
I don’t think this is a fair comparison. some people are ignorant of this, or don’t want to know about it, but there isn’t any active state-sponsored campaign to suppress this. My own experience is that I was at an openly advertised exhibition in San Diego 20 years ago on this very topic and there wasn’t even a scintilla of fear that it could be the subject of any kind of censorship.
> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
An odd comparison to make. It’s taught in public school and there are memorials to this at several locations including the national mall in Washington DC, and at least some of the locations are marked as national historic sites.
Yeah, and it's not taught in a heavily biased way like Tiananmen is taught to Communist Party members.
At least in my school, it was taught as unequivocally wrong and one of the biggest mistakes the US government ever made. The focus was on how painful it was for the families and how much they lost. And this was in a rural, conservative community.
> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
No, it doesn't. Not only is it part of public school curriculum in most (all?) states, it's actively cited by major party politicians as a historical reference in policy debates, usually negatively but at least as recently as the Bush II era occasionally positively by figures on the Right in defense of War on Terror policies.
> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
Yeah - my wife was mentioning such camps near here in Phoenix to one of her coworkers who's younger and they'd never been taught about them at school (here in Arizona!):
I think we have our own version of "forgetting" going on, but we call it "no child left behind" and "common core" and things like that. By this I mean it (and tons of other history and other topics) seem to fall by the wayside in favor of "higher scores on standardized testing" - not because of any concerted government effort or anything like that...
Note:
My wife knows about it because she loves Arizona history, in part because she went to school with and is a friend of our state historian's son (or grandson? can't remember), so she's heard lots of this state's history from "tales around the campfire", so to speak.
EDIT: Rethought my response; it seemed a bit trite or something. Wanted to clarify it.
Perhaps the US would like to forget. But when we have a National Historic Site at one of the camps, we don't seem to be working very hard on the amnesia: https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm . And some years ago, the book Snow Falling on Cedars sold quite a few copies, and there was a movie made of it.
It was taught in school when I was growing up in Ohio in the 90s. The US government even paid reparations to those or decedents of those affected.
I think we can both agree, regardless, that we should be working towards improving our countries and that starts be being honest and calling out the bad thinks our countries do so as to have a hope of not repeating the same mistakes.
The idea that the USA has forgotten Japanese concentration camps is fairly out there.
Which is kind of sad, in that there are plenty of government-driven forgettings we have here. E.g. COINTELPRO. Even the history of slavery is subject to government-sponsored campaigns of mnemonological displacement (e.g. the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery!)
It's the established, standard name for such internment camps, going back to the Boer War. There's a popular assumption that "concentration camp" always means "death camp" but that's not the established definition of the term.
> concentration camp. n. a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area
It's literally a camp where you "concentrate" some minority group in a small area to make them easier to deal with; that's exactly what was done to the Japanese. The fact that the concentration camps in Germany were worse (because they enslaved and killed mass numbers of them) doesn't make the one in the US any less a concentration camp.
The US canps were exactly historically normal concentration camps, designed to concentrate a disfavored population for easier control, as had been used by many powers for quite a long time before WWII.
The idea that the label is inappropriate comes entirely from going beyond accepting the term’s ludicrously euphemistic use for Nazi extermination camps, but to preferring that use exclusively, which is about like saying it's inappropriate to use the term “shower” for washing chambers with overhead water sprayers because the term was euphemistically used for Nazi extermination chambers.
Nor is the MOVE police bombing of 1985. It's always interesting to see which police overreach people choose to remember, and how difficult it is to get them to link it all up into reform.
Because it's a beautiful example of ways in which government authority fails, because you can raise questions about when state violence is appropriate, and when it isn't, whether ends justify means, what accountability processes exist for the infliction of violence against individuals...
Oh, I suppose these are great reasons to not expose high school students to it.
I think it would be awesome for high school students to be taught about the patterns where our government has failed its people - absolutely. I don't know if I find these two cases as noteworthy as you do. I'd probably cover instead:
- Ways that administrations have built the case for foreign wars (Bush & Iraq War 2, Bay of Tonkin)
- Ways that police have been misused against citizens (labor struggles in early 20th century, FBI vs civil rights movement)
> Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.
Indeed, the book "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited" [1] was mentioned recently on NPR's "Morning Edition" in the context of the anniversary of Tianenmen Square.
> Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.
It's only forgetting if you use the GDPR-compliant definition of the word that connotes force.
This is erasure. This is Orwell's memory hole in action. We know exactly what happened, and have plenty of evidence. But there is also a powerful government that would like us to think we're uncertain, unsure, lacking evidence or proof.
We don’t know exactly. We don’t, specifically because of the erasure that you mentioned.
We argue with each other over the details of how people were killed and how bodies were disposed of. We’ll question the reliability of UK cable sources. In our never-ending quest for truth we’ll point out that the propaganda was likely coming from both sides.
That’s the point of it, eh? Ensure that the perpetrators, the dead, and those who fear for the lives of their families are mute. Let those who care do the work of ruining any truthful narrative. Present a very consistent narrative of your own.
It’s already gone from HN homepage, despite being posted 4 hours ago and having 230 points. (I know the algorithm is more complex than just time & points so I’m not blaming the mods.)
The part that irks me is that we still allow companies which preach human rights in Western countries to not only turn a deaf ear to the abuses of China's past and present but to continue manufacturing there without quarrel.
Each time their CEO's get up to preach about human rights they need to be challenged on their activities in China. China to them is a profit center and nothing more.
And you, posting on your phone or PC made partly in China, are also turning a deaf ear and then preaching on HN. That's exactly 'letting' them get away with it right?
This isn't really a good-faith argument. It isn't tenable to live and work in modern society without the use of a phone or PC, and it certainly isn't possible to connect with people to effect societal change at any significant level without using the internet (and by extension a device capable of connecting to the internet). The very fact that the parent comment was pointing out the issues with western corporations outsourcing their pollution-producing practices means that the commenter isn't "turning a deaf ear" to the issue; they're very much aware and talking about it. What you're saying comes across as disingenuous and hostile, when as far as you know the individual you're responding to could be working diligently to fight against industrial pollution and climate change.
My post was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek because I think the GP post is equally absurd. In what way is a current CEO supposed to alter their business practice to make amends for the "abuses of China's past" (presumably including Tiananmen)?
CEO's are not the ones to be accountable for foreign domestic policy are they.
Thats a politician's job. And what you want, if you do want to change how china operates internally, is to strong arm them economically or with the military.
And thats what if you do want china to change their domestic policy you need to back things like Trumps Trade War, and also be ready for a military dispute.
If you are going to preach about Human rights as a CEO and operate in China, it makes the person a hypocrite. By saying it's not a CEO's job doesn't mean the CEO is not guilty.
Aware there is censorship at all? From conversations with Chinese citizens living abroad whom I work with, they say the knowledge censorship is occurring is common, but as to understanding what types of information is being censored they only know in general terms.
Anecdotally, in China, the younger generations can’t get answers from the older generations who lived through these times because it’s verboten to speak of them. It leads to an (academically interesting) censorship feedback loop.
From my perspective it’s hard to know what you don’t know if the Powers-That-Be want to keep it a secret.
For example, here in the U.S. I assume we’re reasonably censorship-free, but by no means am I confident we have access to everything (excluding governmental information requiring clearances).
I do recognize our various media outlets play a major role in determining what the narrative is and which stories/reports/messages are raised to the level of societal recognition. I know people who consider this to be an indirect form of censorship.
> Anecdotally, in China, the younger generations can’t get answers from the older generations who lived through these times because it’s verboten to speak of them.
Chinese speak very freely about all topics in private and with people they know.
> Mark was intrigued by the seemingly unlikely scene, in which his now civil servant father chanted slogans against the government. But before he could probe him for more information, his mother had called an end to the discussion: “Stop talking about this.”
> ....Anecdotes of talented people punished for taking part in the protests are part of the Tiananmen story that witnesses have been passing on. The underlying message is: stay away or you will end up like that.
My dad was a student in Beijing at the time and was going to join in because that was the cool thing to do for students at the time, however he was stopped at a bridge by soldiers and didn't participate. He is pretty chill about the whole thing and says that if he did end up participating, he probably wouldn't be alive or his career would be ruined.
Perhaps that’s the norm, though my coworker commented a few minutes ago about how she has asked her parents questions about politically-related issues or events in private and they still are evasive about answering.
Her experiences may be uncommon and is only a single data point.
>though my coworker commented a few minutes ago about how she has asked her parents questions about politically-related issues or events in private and they still are evasive about answering.
Some people are more skirmish than others. In every country, there are people who won't discuss politics, for fear of "getting in trouble", even more so in a place like China.
But that doesn't mean the average citizen wont discuss them with friends/family/etc.
Agreed, which is why I attempted to make the original statement grey and not black/ white. Skittishness around discussing items is a form of self-censorship.
You might consider this akin to parents being uncomfortable discussing certain topics with their children - much like many parents feel uncomfortable discussing topics about sex and sexual practices here in North America. It's not necessarily that it's forbidden, it's just that many people have been made to feel awkward and uncomfortable discussing sex. I imagine the same mechanism of guilt is at play all over the world for various topics.
Also, there are forums in which the Chinese do freely discuss these topics, obviously with to some degree of discretion. But yes, they generally stick to speaking about sensitive topics to verbal conversation since there's significantly less 'keyboard warriors' over there - especially ones with any strong political lean.
> there's significantly less 'keyboard warriors' over there
HN is not blocked in China. Interesting. What is the sentiment when access to a popular website is removed? Does everyone just VPN, or forget about it?
On that note, apparently Instagram in Laos is blocking "liking" posts related to Tiananmen Square.
> I’m in Laos, a close ally of China, & whenever I “Like” a post on @instagram related to Tiananmen Square it comes up with a message saying “Action Blocked”. When I switch on my VPN it allow me to “Like” the images. I wonder if China provides internet infrastructure to Laos.
I've often wondered how many controls Facebook gives to SE Asia in exchange for being allowed to operate there. Do they get moderator powers or alert systems?
In Vietnam about 5 years ago, you could only use Facebook on your phone. It's hard for me to imagine the dictatorships of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam welcoming Facebook and allowing the population to freely criticize the government.
They're giving them a delusion of freedom so that most won't realize they're censored or passively accept it. If the government goes all out then it might cause a revolt. Soft tactics are always scarier than hard tactics.
Laos is quite locked down, beyond the internet. You technically can't form a group (e.g. a book club) there without the government's consent, and it is very hard for NGOs to operate. I would not be surprised at any level of internet censorship there, except that Vientiane is within cell distance of Thailand, so maybe that forces them open a little.
Almost certainly aware of something certainly given the sheer clumbsiness like shutting down the stock market when the top numbers come up on numbers which are also coded references to Tinamen Square. You would probably be interested in this article of related weird bypasses and defiance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse
What’s the difference, really? One truth is that power corrupts. The power to “prevent people from spreading blatant lies” is the power to be the arbiter of truth; it’s naive to think that power will never be abused.
When overlords and their followers believe themselves and to be benevolent moral authorities (as most do), any criticism is seen as malicious misinformation. It also helps that the overlords are in a position to control the flow of information, and thus define what is fact and what is fiction, according to their version of reality.
I clicked on a couple of other articles from the side bar and they all seemed to have the same "skip line after ever sentence" style, but yeah this article does seem especially simplistic and would probably be easy to run through some translation software compared to some articles.
It's the BBC News web style to have relatively simple sentences, and each paragraph be made up of one sentence. The sentences do often become more complex further down an article.
Partly this was done so as to be readable on the old Ceefax and other mediums. But also so that it would be understandable by a wide audience.
>> I wonder if the target audience of this article is actually non-english speaking people...
> this article does seem especially simplistic and would probably be easy to run through some translation software compared to some articles.
Though, in this case, that's probably not necessary for the main non-English audience for this article. The BBC has a Chinese-language website (https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp).
Interestingly, many of the student leaders are listed as highly wanted fugitives by the PRC to this day. At least one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu%27erkaixi ) has tried to turn himself in for trial, multiple times, in places as diverse as Macau, HK, and various embassies throughout the world, but he's been refused each time and deported to definitely-part-of-China Taiwan.
Wow. That’s really telling. I assume the Chinese gov’t thinks that any effort to prosecute him would just bring more attention to a mostly forgotten episode.
Reminds me of the stories a coworker told me about growing up in Romania under Ceaușescu. A neighbor would disappear and a new family would be living in their house the next day.
Nobody ever said anything. Just acted like they had always lived there.
It always strikes me as weird that 4 june 1989 is both the day when the chinese were protesting for freedom and the day when the poles had their first free election. I'm a pole myself, and when I've heard about Tiananmen Square for the first time (age 14 or so) I was wondering if one event was somehow related to the other, as the movements had some things in common.
Tanks against civilians? Tanks are bullet proof and if you keep the hatch shut you should be pretty safe from your average molotov cocktail thrower, otherwise tanks would not be worth anything at all on the battlefield. As long as the opponent isn't armed with RPG's it's an uneven battle.
Why do you present a strawman in order to then ineffectively knock it down, you could do a lot better than that.
> the Chinese protestors were injuring and killing the authorities in Beijing
Yes, please let's spare a thought for those authorities injured and killed in Beijing.
Seriously, if you want to spout propaganda get better at it soon, and if not maybe don't say anything at all?
FWIW I'm not American, and I could not care more or less about the US using their army against civilians compared to the Chinese using their army against civilians, it is all the same to me.
The facts seem to be fairly solidly on my side that in a battle between civilians and tanks the tanks tend to come out on top.
Dragging in the United States, Los Angeles and the authorities in Beijing has little of anything to do with the statement that tanks vs civilians is not a fair battle.
"was a Hong Kong-based operation to help the Chinese dissidents who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 to escape arrest by the PRC government by facilitating their departure overseas via Hong Kong."
Which has nothing to do with the quote above and even less with your statement.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and please stop using HN for nationalistic flamewar? Or any flamewar. We ban accounts that do this. I don't want to ban you, because you've posted good comments too. But users here need to follow the site guidelines and be using HN as intended.
The free world gave the criminal CCP regime a free pass after the 1989 massacre. The same criminal regime get stronger in the last 30 years and put on a capitalist shell on its bloody skin. But it never stopped its criminal practices but has been doing it more relentlessly just with more concealment. For about 20 years it made large scale human organ sells from people they kidnapped or arrested. It put up huge concentration camps in Xinjing to get rid of some minor race people in the number of millions. That is just a small sample of its crimes still actively happening. I am glad US starts to realize the CCP regime is not a country following normal human ethics.
Would you please stop using HN for nationalistic or political battle? You've been doing that repeatedly, and we ban such accounts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I appreciate the reason for the rule, but in this case, I'm curious who this person was "battling?" Seems like it was a top-level post that didn't argue with the original headline or article, but provided additional context. And I found it helpful since I'd forgotten about the whole "execute prisoners for their organs" thing that was (is) going on in China and that seems relevant.
The article is about a massacre, lots of other threads debated the existence and scale of atrocities in the massacre, and this specific thread just seemed to mention similar atrocities?
Specifically, if they had removed the "evil" and "bloody" metaphor, and phrased it like "Considering the supply chain and trade interactions between the US and China, it's worth considering the significant differences in human rights. For instance, the black market organ schemes of the 1990s and the Uighur concentration camps where millions of ethnic minorities are currently interned." <-- That seems like the exact same content which is completely relevant to conversations here?
(I'm an American with no Chinese connections or vested interest in the conversation, but I'm just curious how it specifically crossed a line, especially given the recent HN conversations about political discussions. I know it's a fine line but for this particular topic, it sparked my interest.
Thanks in advance for your consideration.)
The whole comment was fiery rhetoric against a political enemy. All that people are doing in that genre is shooting flaming arrows at each other. The arrows are predefined talking points and the flames are aggressive language.
Here's something I've learned by studying HN voting data: people's reactions to such posts are determined entirely by which side of a topic they're on—nothing else. Such posts exist not because of curiosity where we might grow or learn, but purely for repetition in which an existing feeling gets confirmed. The feeling might be pleasure (finally someone telling the truth about this important matter!) or pain (yet another asshole propagating lies!) but it's the same mechanism either way, no doubt with some hard core biochemistry behind it. If we want to have a site where curiosity can flourish, which is the point of Hacker News, we have to moderate that in every way we can.
Actually some accounts have a lot of people protesting feeling the opposite - that the "capitalist roaders" had gone too far in laying off state enterprise workers. In other words supporters of what are described as "hardliners" supporting state industry. Obviously the few initial Hu Yaobang commemorators felt differently, but mass movements grow from wider interests. And obviously there was no mass movement as the protest failed.
I have to laugh at recent news reports of students being hassled in China. The students are trying to organize revolutionary unions and want a return to communism and Maoism. It is obvious the same Western newspapers tut-tuting the Maoist students being hassled would be fulminating if they took power and started moving back to the Maoist principles that they are espousing.
