Additional reading:
BBC Reporters, CBS News, and New York Times reporter who were actually in the city the day it happened who report mainstream news got it all wrong. BBC Source | CBS Source | NYTimes Source
Readings into what happened with the protests:
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen
https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/
My view on this is evolving but it still doesn't sit right with me.
Let's say nobody died, it wasn't a massacre. Those are all flattened bicycles and scared people on the ground. This is still the state sending the military to put down a protest. Those are tanks from the national government designed for defense against state level enemies, directed at unarmed young adults from the same country right?
What would've happened had people not dispersed? Were the tanks and guns just to scare people? What would you think of Biden or Trump calling our military to put down protests like what happened in summer of 2020 in the U.S.?
The cops in America literally use military gear on protestors. Unmarked vans literally grabbed people off of the street in 2020.
Yep, effectively just as bad, maybe not as dramatic w/o military and tanks. You assume because I question China I'm gung ho American power, this is an error in your thought.
An error in my thought? I was responding directly to something you asked:
They do this and that's bad. Your "hypothetical" implies you didn't think it was happening, so I pointed out it is happening. There are examples all throughout the last century in America: Kent State, when Reagan used the military to go around the air traffic control unions, the battle of Blair Mountain.
This person isn't ready to engage honestly yet, so might as well leave it. There are plenty of thoughtful responses but the user only responds to ones that they can easily dismiss as "whataboutism" or say things like "i'm against every state" in some kind of weird all lives matter style...
I'm anti state, every state. I don't apologize for Kent State or anything else.
The reason why people here will say you're apologizing for American actions is because we don't equate China and the US on the basis of being states. We see the USA as far, far more harmful to the world, regardless if China has truly authentic socialist ideology in is government. I really think you'd agree to this.
It's a valid ideological premise to be wary of states, sure. That's fine, we can talk about the details of that after we organize a revolution.
I don't think you're a bad person or that you're truly trying to defend the US. I think you're just saying things that come across as rhetorically inauthentic because you're repeating things we more closely connect to liberals.
The US is a far more violent state and it's not even remotely close.
No one is saying no one died (though no one died in the square, which is helpful for spotting when someone is lying)
Yeah, that's what's in the one picture
The protest had been going on for weeks right on the equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the WH and, critically, a couple of unarmed PLA soldiers were burned alive by incendiaries and had their corpses strung up in the open. Some people also stole some guns from inside an APC that got burned (though I think that fire was an accident).
Most protestors left well before the tanks got there because they listened when the state said "disperse by this deadline". One of the big holdovers besides militants was from people following the leadership that was deliberately trying to instigate bloodshed so they'd have propaganda to exploit (and they said as much in private beforehand!).
The entity centered a stone's throw from the Square, yes
Afaik the tanks never fired and they and the other military elements weren't there to attack protestors. In the Square itself, the highest level of violence was hitting some people with batons to get them to leave. As far as I know, there were no major physical injuries from this. The lethal violence was between soldiers and militants elsewhere.
Soldiers would have kept getting killed and there probably would have been an attack on the federal buildings right nearby.
The tanks? Yeah, they wouldn't even be very useful against the militants unless the CPC wanted to knock down some buildings (which they did not). The guns were mostly for intimidation but also to kill militants who fought the force sent to disperse people.
Considering the level of militarized violence used against protestors who killed zero people and the fact that one dude who shot someone in self-defense was literally black-bagged on the President's direct orders, to say nothing of the many organizers who were killed deliberately outside of the protests and were written off as "suicides" with no note or history of depression . . . I don't see what you're trying to say.
They were looking at a protest with very right-wing, reactionary components and a significant US backing, and before the bulk of the casualties occurred the protestors burned alive a PLA soldier. You can't have the tanks rolling in on every protest, but you certainly don't just lay down and accept a right wing coup attempt.
Some students and soldiers did die though, and the government has not denied this. Of note here, if we are concerned about the scale of the bloodshed, is that many students vacated from the situation peacefully. Many who were remained in the square were certainly influenced by the most hardline leaders such as Chai Ling (working closely with the CIA), who all but admitted she wanted the students to die for her goal. She said, in her own words:
So, the tragedy of the June 4th incident was not a cold blooded massacre of dissidents, where the military rolled in the tanks and murdered thousands of people. There was chaotic skirmishing between soldiers and a congregation of students and workers with largely nonuniform political demands, with the more animated among them seeking to overthrow the government. Several hundred people died as a result.
The distortion of truth around this event is genuinely alarming. It's clearly a story that defines of a lot of westerners' views on the entire country of China, when even their understanding of this single event is so far from reality it is practically pure fabrication. Below I'm quoting this essay on the topic: https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen
Could bloodshed have been avoided? Had there not been that ever-helpful US meddling... we can discuss that as well as other hypotheticals ad infinitum. What happened in reality was a tragedy and cannot be changed. It also cannot, with any amount of intellectual honesty, be used to completely discredit and dismiss the Chinese socialist project wholesale the way it has always been used.
Quite likely right here, but my position is rather than suppress knowledge of it like the Chinese government wants, all authoritarian atrocities should be equally talked about.
But China does talk about it. A lot. There are MANY studies done, by journalists and historians, talking in details about what happened (even the student deaths).
There were even western journalists there, reporting live. Many had to publicly denounce the newspapers they wrote or reported for for manipulating and distorting the truth.
the thing to know about Tiannanmen is that there was several things going on at once
1: a riot where people were lynching PLA soldiers and setting them on fire outside of the square
CW: unspeakably horrific photos of, and I cannot stress this enough, unarmed, PLA soldiers getting lynched
2: a protest that had a broad coalition of issues inside the square
unarmed PLA soldiers with the protesters
3: #1 is where most of the violence happened, #2 is where most of the media attention was focused
4: one of the leaders of #2 specifically wanted to provoke a massacre in order to make the govt. look as bad as possible and was disappointed when that didn't happen
5: western media was not only allowed into the country to film the protests, that is how we have the tank man "photo" that people know about more than the video. Jeff Widener, an american photographer and pulitzer prize winner, took the "photo" of tank man "about to be run over" that everyone in the west thinks is "censored" in china. Why was jeff widener and others allowed in to film this "massacre" that the chinese covered up
What would you say on the Kent State Massacre where the Ohio National Guard opened fire on college protesters? What of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia where cops dropped bombs on a residential street and allowed people to burn alive, the remains of some of the children being kept in a university storage until only recently. How many people woke up one night to the sound of their door being caved in only to be immediately shot for trying to defend themselves from a no knock warrant. The terrible forces of the US government terrorize us far more on a regular basis.
Just like GaveUp said, the use of the military made sense, the US has a long bloody history of interference in other nations' affairs. Look at all the coups the US had started in South America alone, how many despots and dictators were installed to allow US multinationals to pillage these nations as they murdered thousands. Were other socialist nations supposed to just lay down and not fight to keep the hard won victories?
The protests were heavily astroturfed and backed by the US government looking to coup China and regime change the nation
I'd say showing the military was an appropriate response given the scale, influence, and success the US government has when it comes to couping and sabotaging foreign states
https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/
The protestors had intercepted several buses full of PLA soldiers and beaten them to death, and then had taken their weapons and body armor. The eventual tank man incident was after days of escalated skirmishes and fighting, which involved molotov cocktails and firefights. There was at least one instance of protestors hijacking a military APC and taking it for a joyride.
The tanks showed up three days after initial attempts to disperse the crowd had failed. The guy in front of the tank happened on June 5th. The previous day of June 4th, protestors had dragged a soldier out of an APC and burned him alive.
I'm not gonna comment much on the merits of what the protestors wanted, or the escalation or force, or any of that. It's not my place and I'm not from China. I'm not going to tell them how to organize their society. All I know really is the protestors were there for various reasons, probably a lot of them for legitimate grievances.
However I am American though and I can tell you that if a protest movement here in the States had set fire to an American soldier, everyone there would get shot. And that's not what happened in China. These are smaller scale examples, but I only know to compare it to something like the Kent State massacre or the 1967 Detroit riots. By a comparison to those, the Chinese soldiers were extremely restrained, using standard riot-control methods. The only instances I know where PLA soldiers opened fire upon civilians were when the civilians were armed and shooting at them first. Whereas the American national guard was much more willing to fire fully-automatic rifles into crowds to kill unarmed people indiscriminately.
Fair enough. I don't know much myself, but I suspect many of those protesters were not fighting against the working class. Maybe this was the the people fighting against authoritarianism after being exposed to the external world and realizing how they'd been kept like pets by Mao?
That situation would not arise in the U.S. The U.S. military rising against it's own people would likely happen only if the country was about to fall, in that case all bets are off. Was China about to fall to college students?
as you've been told a few times now, that's a highly reductive view of an explicitly CIA-backed movement
I don't know where you've gotten your ideas that China was insulated against the external world or that's even what the protests were about. The protests happened in 1989. By that time Mao had been dead for 13 years, diplomatic ties to the west had long since been established, and emigration was at an all time high. The first KFC was opened in China in 1987, two years before the protests. China by 1989 had achieved a massive amount of success in their education reforms and were nearing full literacy. Tens of thousands of exit student visas were issued per year. Please don't characterize Chinese people as confused or unaware of outside countries. They have a robust education system and have access to foreign media and literature. I mean half of China right now is addicted to South Korean TV dramas.
The protestors were there for various reasons, and I believe initially many were protesting against the impacts of the 1983 economic reforms, which...were liberalization reforms to ease restrictions on things like international business and travel. Many of those Tiananmen square demonstrators were pro-Mao if you want to wrap your head around that. You can find multiple images of demonstrators displaying images of Mao prominently if you go looking for them. I should also mention many of the issues the protestors raised were addressed with the 1992 economic reforms, which was an attempt to overhaul the economic stagnation China had during the 1980s.
And I did give you two examples of the US military being used against American civilians. Kent State and the 1967 Detroit riots. Both instances had soldiers firing automatic rounds into crowds.
I'm assuming I'm talking with you in good faith, by the way. I hope you'll read some of the other comments in this thread because they're a lot smarter and well informed than I am.
I'm not accusing the Chinese people of anything. I'm saying it's possible they were victimized.
You just described the external exposure that had previously been denied to the people, victimizing them.
Whataboutism -- One country harming people does not justify it for another country. I'd never heard of the 67 Detroit riots, I neither not condone them nor Kent State.
I don't think you're engaging in good faith at all, sorry. I'm out.
the situation in china was such that after several years of liberal economic reforms, the social situation was rapidly deteriorating due to the smashing of the 'iron rice bowl', that is, the tenured jobs and generous welfare that had previously been provided by the state under mao. this made a lot of people very poor and miserable, but it also made a lot (albeit to a lesser degree) of people very rich and happy. also of note was the amount of political suppression going on at the time: the liberal reforms basically began not too long after the excesses of the highly traumatic (at least to the urbanized people who's opinions actually mattered) and highly political Great People's Cultural Revolution. political discourse was discouraged and ideology was highly de-emphasized in favor of 'non-political' matters of efficiency and production (sound familiar?). this set the stage for the rapid polarization of society into haves and have-nots, neither of which were terribly educated regarding the historical forces acting around them.
broadly speaking, there were two groups of protestors:
the first group were the students. of a generally bourgeois or otherwise privileged demographic, they were located mostly in and around the square in the duration of time (several months) leading up to the incident in june. they were more or less backed by the cia, or at least their leaders were, as evidenced by the speed at which they were evacuated during operation yellowbird. these guys were funded, ideologically motivated, and organized. their aim was to bring about even faster economic reformation (read: looting of the public sector) and along with it, privatization of government itself, mostly so that their families could benefit from leveraging their already privileged positions. these guys left the square when asked politely and were for sure way too rich to go around dying for a cause like chai ling so wanted.
the second group were the disaffected workers. proletarian in character and much larger in number, they were mostly ideologically illiterate and completely disorganized. primarily motivated by the hardships they were suffering under liberal reformation (unstable currency, uncertain job market, homelessness), they wanted a return to the maoist welfare state and reinstitution of the various benefits they had enjoyed therein. hilariously, they had tried to join the student movement in the previous months since general sentiment was not directed at policy but rather at the people in charge, but the students generally looked down on them as useless lumpen and excluded them from most events. these were the guys out and about lynching soldiers and getting into firefights and were the primary victims of the violence aside from the soldiers. it's unclear if they were provided with weapons or they just looted them off dead soldiers (though nobody entering the city was supposed to have weapons in the first place, that was a famous fuckup that resulted in one of the first violent clashes) but as with everything cia, it's best to remain healthily cynical.
china was about to fall to a bunch of disenfranchised workers disillusioned with the liberalism of 'the external world' and wanting a return to pethood under mao. the college students were there to be photogenic and try their hand at opportunism.
Tank man happened after much of the fighting and violence that had happened in the previous days (and nights especially) so the tanks were definitely there for pre-emptive defense/a threat to escalation.
Even western reporters like the BBC's John Simpson (very much part of the British establishment class then and now) reported at the time that there was violent clashes less in the square itself, but mostly in the side streets between armed protestors (many of whom have since admitted they were funded or straight up supplied with weapons by the US) and Chinese state police and military - with shooting on both sides plus a lot of beatings and firebombs from the insurrectionist elements.
John Simpson himself has told the story for decades of how he witnessed a smaller group amongst a bigger amount of protestors firebomb a military truck killing the driver. The passengers who jumped out were then set up and beaten to death or almost by the protestors. He apparently intervened, waving a stick/post and his press badge at them to try and drag one of thr badly beaten soldiers out of the mob. His reporting at the time and in recounting that story afterwards makes no secret of the fact that he saw those groups of protestors/insurrectionists as a murderous and bloodthirsty mob, not as peaceful protestors defending themselves. In recent years during the new cold War and red scare against China he's soften his criticism of the protestors and upped his anti-China rhetoric a bit, but has never disputed his original reporting or it's conclusions.
So there absolutely was violence and bloodshed. Innocent people on both sides were likely caught in it. But basically no one at the time, including explicitly pro-West, anti-China reporters, saw a one sided massacre of the state firing on peaceful crowds.
Similarly you can go and look up interviews with the Canadian photographer who took the famous tank man photo. Most of the more recent ones are him getting visibly annoyed at news presenters undermining his account by trying to force this fictional narrative that only came about many years later as anti-China propaganda. And like John Simpson, he's absolutely anti-China in general, but doesn't like that the risks he took for his reporting has been undermined by a sensationalist fiction.
I've seen obvious evidence about this, e.g. they used petrol bombs at a time when petrol was heavily rationed in China, but I've never seen an admission like this. Do you have a source?
I don't to hand and it's really late here. I can try and look tomorrow if work isn't too busy. I have a feeling it's in an interview with people from the various groups that was in a non-English documentary, maybe Dutch. But I think I've read it too. I'll do my best so long as you don't mind waiting a while.
No worries! I'd really like to see it, so feel free to tag me in a post or send a DM whenever it is that you come across it again. I'm sure others here would be interested as well!
We're definitely not saying nobody died. The only disputes here are details of the event, location, and the cause of the conflict. The original narrative is that a bunch of unarmed students were massacred because "evil communists" inside the square. Whereas the correct narrative is that a series of issues led to protests that were coopted by people who sought to end the state altogether, and the foreign influence involved wanted a massacre to occur (hence the immediate media blitz). Protest leaders are on video directly saying this (but they won't participate). What actually happened was that the protesters were intentionally riled up to the point of doing incredibly extreme things, the first casualty of the event was an unarmed PLA officer who was tied up, stabbed and burned alive, while another was hung. What later transpired was a series of battles between armed protesters and the state in many different streets across several miles.
None of this is to say that the event was not a tragedy. It certainly was. But if you understand it in its correct and truthful light these events are a quite different narrative to that pushed by the west for the purposes of anticommunism.
One of the biggest reasons this narrative is pushed is because this was the turning point, this was the moment that they thought China was going to go the same way as the USSR. But it didn't. It was the time China came closest to an actual defeat by the capitalists. This enrages the liberals that understand this.
around 300 people died, that is not disputed. but those deaths did not happen in the square, and iirc a bit more than half of them were army or police
You have to look at the broader world context. This wasn't just a simple protest. This was a Western backed movement (even wikipedia acknowledges the CIA was actively aiding the movement) to overthrow the Chinese government happening at the exact same time similar movements were ending socialism throughout the entire Eastern bloc. This entire purpose of a socialist state (we can debate about whether the PRC was one at this point, or w/e, but they at least ostensibly were) is to defend socialism against counter-revolutionaries. Is that not what happened here? If anything I think the response was rather lax.
If the leadership of the DDR, USSR, Poland, etc. had taken decisive action like this, then they wouldn't have collapsed. Of course, that would required them to not all be miserable revisionists; which they sadly all were.
Imho this is an entirely valid view to have.
The military being used the crush a protest doesn't sit right with me either, regardless of who's doing it and whether or not people died.
That said, I do not buy the western™ narrative on Tiananmen Square in the slightest.
This person should watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and honestly a lot of Hexbears probably need to see it too.
It's not that the documentary is "correct" in everything that it says, but it's thorough at over 3 hours long, and had plenty of criticism from "both sides" (yeah, I'm an enlightened centrist :D)
Agreed, Im sure there are cases where its appropriate, but I don't know where that line is and it should be avoided altogether whenever possible
what makes it tough is that we live in a world with the USA and the CIA who can and will get up to some bullshit
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Probably -- we can't assume they would have started firing into the crowd. There weren't any confrontations like this that tturned violent during the fall of the USSR, for instance, and Cuba has also broken up protests without simply shooting people. Most states do everything they can to avoid getting to that point; AES states are not an exception. Crowd control is its own discipline and intimidation is part of it. We also have the fact that they rolled all that stuff out there and backed off.
What should they have done? Do you just open the doors to any unelected group that shows up on the doorstep of the capitol?
There actually were some brief instances of crowds firing rifle rounds at the Kremlin and getting return fire in response during the August 1991 protests. I don't think it escalated though and I don't think anyone died.
Although these were pro-government demonstrators who wanted the USSR to remain intact.
There were a bunch of soldiers killed and a whole lot of military vehicles destroyed, so to me that contradicts the narrative that the protestors were just hecking harmless smol beans.
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Neither am I, I just don't trust any state to wield it in the interests of me or a healthy sustainable planet.
As long as there is capital, there will be inequality. As long as there is inequality, there will be those who have power and use it in order to gain more power. And when that happens, no matter what you've done to make things better for everyone, it will get taken away.
That's why there is no socialism without a proletarian state that wields the force of that power to ensure the strength of the working class. Until global capital can be completely defeated, there is no socialism without communism.
Of course the sending of tanks is a threat of violence, but the threat was enough that most walked away. There were discussions with protest leaders and necessary changes were all considered. The ones which the party determined to be valid were taken and others rejected. It was a largely liberal and student-oriented protest, though, with many feelings which were opposed to working class interests, and those were dismissed. Then, after weeks, one of the busiest areas in the world had to be cleared for the resuming of life there as it was for the people living there. This is already fine, to me, because the debates occurred and the interests/benefits were considered in a democratic way. Also, note, this ignores that many unarmed army were murdered and therefore the threat of force had to be much more direct (not just an soldier who will be defended by more/new ones with guns, but actually just sending the guns so those soldiers could defend against their own lynching)