Okay, so background: I'm your average pro-gun fuck-the-police, fuck-trump zoomer honed by years of unsupervised internet access and I've just discovered this community and started lurking for a while. But I still hold extremely negative views on China, which I still think are justified.

"Which views?" I'll throw them out real quick: child labor! internet censorship! media censorship! anti-LGBTQ! uygher genocide? positive and pro war relations with russia! (because fuck putin)

So I get really confused anytime I see people expressing pro-China sentiments. Have I been spoonfed by the media or are some of these points actually justified?

  • iie [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I'm busy, but if someone doesn't write one in the meantime I might write a little about Tiananmen later.

    TLDR the west has been telling big lies about China for decades. There was no massacre in the square. Wikileaks released diplomatic cables admitting this. Western reporters who were there have admitted this. Liu Xiaobo, one of the organizers of the protests, admitted this. There is footage on youtube of the crowd peacefully evacuating the square at the end of the night (fucking impossible to search on youtube, I'll have to dig through my favorites later). A Spanish film crew was present in the square all night. Reporters who described seeing shooting in the square from their hotel rooms were later shown to be staying in rooms with no view of the square.

    CIA and NED buildup in Beijing prior to the event were widely acknowledged. Protest signs were suddenly in English. People suddenly had gasoline, a smattering of people suddenly had guns. Western intelligence has exploited its near-total control over foreign reporting on China to construct an almost entirely fictional narrative about the events at Tiananmen, and then amplify that narrative through dozens of media outlets until it took on a self-reinforcing life of its own in the public consciousness.

    • Gimasag [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Here is another detailed debunking of the Western public view of what happened

      https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/

      • iie [they/them, he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Thanks! I recognize the URL and article title, this is one of the articles I would have been digging around for.

    • corgiwithalaptop [any, love/loves]
      ·
      2 years ago

      So, a friend of mine has been to China. We don't talk politics much, but they said they know people who know people that died in Tianemenn.

      Next time it comes up, should I say "lol no you dont?"

      • iie [they/them, he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        iirc ~200ish people died in violent clashes with police in various other locations around the city. Very different from the image of police mowing down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen.

        Also worth noting that police were frightened after transport vehicles had been stopped and set on fire earlier, with unarmed police burned alive and their corpses strung from nooses in public. There are googleable photos online if you feel like seeing that. Articles I've read speculated that the protesters who did this might have been western agitators, since they were described as older and not looking like students. I'm remembering this from an article I read a few months ago. I can try to dig it up later, it might have been the one on redsails but idk.

    • meth_dragon [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      students: in the square, proponents of bourgeois democracy, politically organized, bourgeois demographics, didn't get massacred

      workers: outside the square, against inflation brought about by economic liberalization, politically disorganized, proletarian demographics, massacred due to agent provocateurs a la 2014 maidan