I talked to a Chinese guy (he was living abroad so maybe biased view) who said they talked about it briefly in school and the teacher could tell you more if you came after class. tbh it is almost like 50 years ago now so I don't know why people expect them to act like it was Chinese 9/11, it doesn't really matter that much to people anymore.
Sure. They see it as the government defending them from dangerous radicals who had no idea what they were going to do once they got control of the country. How were they planning on feeding, clothing, caring for a billion people? Nobody bothered to say.
They also spoke for nobody but themselves. They were university students, not from the people.
"The students are nuts if they think this handful of people can overthrow our Party and our government."
-- Wang Zhen, Chinese Communist official, May 1989
Reading some of the other comments on this it seems like I may have been misinformed or at least ended up with a fairly warped view of the information available.
Because I lived there and talked to college students there. All of them told me they had never heard about it. Two of them went looking for information after we talked about it and told me they couldn't find anything at all. So I'm not sure what the reality is but that's where I got my info.
Could just be a phrasing thing, the west calls it the tiananmen square massacre and I think they call it the June 4th protest? Kinda like asking a random American if they remember the Fatherland Liberation War and them not being able to come up with anything after a cursory search because we just call it "the Korean war" here.
It's definitely a bigger part of American curriculum, mainly because on America it's taught as a massacre by a heartless communist government and the tank man hero that stood up to authoritarian socialism.
The actual history is a lot more boring, there's tons of leadup, lots of different players, a slow burn, and a brief explosion of violence that subsides pretty rapidly. It's much more memorable when stripped of context and presented in easily digestible scenes (a poster of tankman is literally on every history teacher's wall).
If you want a good example of negative censorship, look on YouTube for the full uncut video of tankman. It's impossible to find through search and all the results are western talking heads giving commentary on cropped/cut footage.
If you watch the whole thing, you see that the tanks were actually leaving the square when he stopped them and not entering it. It's also kinda crazy how the whole narrative around the event is that they used tanks to run over protestors until they were pulp, but they refuse to run over this guy.
I'm convinced the reason this example is pushed so hard as "resistance to power" in America is that it creates a bunch of people with a death drive. Like fuck no, standing in front of an armored vehicle is dumb as hell! If you want to make a point, flank it and throw something in the hatch. Convincing a bunch of people that standing in front of military hardware is resistance is how you get Kent State. Or the dozens of instances of cops mowing down protestors during the BLM protests.
Do they know about the Tienanmen Square events though?
I talked to a Chinese guy (he was living abroad so maybe biased view) who said they talked about it briefly in school and the teacher could tell you more if you came after class. tbh it is almost like 50 years ago now so I don't know why people expect them to act like it was Chinese 9/11, it doesn't really matter that much to people anymore.
Sure. They see it as the government defending them from dangerous radicals who had no idea what they were going to do once they got control of the country. How were they planning on feeding, clothing, caring for a billion people? Nobody bothered to say.
They also spoke for nobody but themselves. They were university students, not from the people.
-- Wang Zhen, Chinese Communist official, May 1989
How will we solve it? Freedom and democracy! When will we solve it? After we sell off our public infrastructure to Exxon and GE!
No everything remotely related had been scrubbed from anything publicly accessable.
Bullshit. It's openly taught and discussed as the "June 4th Event". They might censor the Western narrative but that's different.
My Tiananmen take.
Reading some of the other comments on this it seems like I may have been misinformed or at least ended up with a fairly warped view of the information available.
if you're just relaying word to mouth why speak? its a propaganda-critical topic
Because I lived there and talked to college students there. All of them told me they had never heard about it. Two of them went looking for information after we talked about it and told me they couldn't find anything at all. So I'm not sure what the reality is but that's where I got my info.
Could just be a phrasing thing, the west calls it the tiananmen square massacre and I think they call it the June 4th protest? Kinda like asking a random American if they remember the Fatherland Liberation War and them not being able to come up with anything after a cursory search because we just call it "the Korean war" here.
If that's the reason I'm gonna feel like such a dumb ass.
It's definitely a bigger part of American curriculum, mainly because on America it's taught as a massacre by a heartless communist government and the tank man hero that stood up to authoritarian socialism.
The actual history is a lot more boring, there's tons of leadup, lots of different players, a slow burn, and a brief explosion of violence that subsides pretty rapidly. It's much more memorable when stripped of context and presented in easily digestible scenes (a poster of tankman is literally on every history teacher's wall).
If you want a good example of negative censorship, look on YouTube for the full uncut video of tankman. It's impossible to find through search and all the results are western talking heads giving commentary on cropped/cut footage.
If you watch the whole thing, you see that the tanks were actually leaving the square when he stopped them and not entering it. It's also kinda crazy how the whole narrative around the event is that they used tanks to run over protestors until they were pulp, but they refuse to run over this guy.
I'm convinced the reason this example is pushed so hard as "resistance to power" in America is that it creates a bunch of people with a death drive. Like fuck no, standing in front of an armored vehicle is dumb as hell! If you want to make a point, flank it and throw something in the hatch. Convincing a bunch of people that standing in front of military hardware is resistance is how you get Kent State. Or the dozens of instances of cops mowing down protestors during the BLM protests.
damn.. do you know anything about their history curriculum?
I took a couple classes (in english) on China's ancient history and that was cool as fuck but I know nothing about how modern history is taught.
There is just so much propaganda out there. We all absorb some of it. It takes a while to deprogram, comrade.
ok that is totalitarian, they need to respect rule of law
For real though? I understand why they'd do it (I just wanted Nike shoe) but lol