Many of those students were Maoists/Marxist book club members. They were upset with Dengist reforms. There was some noise maybe 2-3 years ago about similar student groups raising their hackles again but nothing came of it. Maybe Xi is more reassuring.
Same thing applies to HK - many of the early protestors in the last few years were trade unionists, anarchists and communists. There are legitimate reasons to criticize China and some of their labor policies, at least among friends. But then it got co-opted by empire, like it always does. Really sucked.
I think it's reductive to try and lump the June 4th Protests under any sort of tendency when it was more a broad umbrella movement that just included everyone who was sort of dissatisfied with Deng, from MZT who thought he was going too far (which is a fair assessment to make, given the events of the intervening decades) to liberals who thought Deng wasn't going far enough and Nationalists who disliked detente with NATO. Because so many tendencies were represented, it's easy for anyone of any political standing to point to x part of the riots and say they stood for y - they sang 'The Internationale', so they must have been true communists, they wanted bourgeois democracy and free markets, so they were liberals, so on and so forth. The TLDR is that it's complicated and the reason why you'll hear so many conflicting opinions on what the June 4th Protests stood for, when the protestors themselves probably didn't even know, making it very easy to project one's own beliefs onto the movement.
I think it's all goods to speak your mind on a subject, and I don't believe it to be fair to consider yourself as having 'spoken out of place'. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be perfectly knowledgeable on everything, and I'm sure everybody on this sight knows more about stuff like US labour movements, for instance, so it's cool to share information with fellow comrades.
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Many of those students were Maoists/Marxist book club members. They were upset with Dengist reforms. There was some noise maybe 2-3 years ago about similar student groups raising their hackles again but nothing came of it. Maybe Xi is more reassuring.
Same thing applies to HK - many of the early protestors in the last few years were trade unionists, anarchists and communists. There are legitimate reasons to criticize China and some of their labor policies, at least among friends. But then it got co-opted by empire, like it always does. Really sucked.
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glad we dont live in the bleak timeline where every socialist project was wiped off the earth just in time for the 90s
I think it's reductive to try and lump the June 4th Protests under any sort of tendency when it was more a broad umbrella movement that just included everyone who was sort of dissatisfied with Deng, from MZT who thought he was going too far (which is a fair assessment to make, given the events of the intervening decades) to liberals who thought Deng wasn't going far enough and Nationalists who disliked detente with NATO. Because so many tendencies were represented, it's easy for anyone of any political standing to point to x part of the riots and say they stood for y - they sang 'The Internationale', so they must have been true communists, they wanted bourgeois democracy and free markets, so they were liberals, so on and so forth. The TLDR is that it's complicated and the reason why you'll hear so many conflicting opinions on what the June 4th Protests stood for, when the protestors themselves probably didn't even know, making it very easy to project one's own beliefs onto the movement.
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I think it's all goods to speak your mind on a subject, and I don't believe it to be fair to consider yourself as having 'spoken out of place'. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be perfectly knowledgeable on everything, and I'm sure everybody on this sight knows more about stuff like US labour movements, for instance, so it's cool to share information with fellow comrades.