Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
You can’t just make up shit. The soldiers weren’t given orders to “murder anyone that moves” or else the tank would’ve run that guy over. Where did you get that? They just looked at each other for awhile. I don’t think anyone even died in Tiannamen Square itself. Battles happened in other parts of the city as soldiers defended themselves, though. It wasn’t peaceful like you said earlier, soldiers died. Not that I think every protest necessarily has to be, or should be, peaceful, but at least get the facts straight.
And of course similar things happened in the US. We bombed an apartment building. There was the Kent shootings, the Haymarket massacre, Whiskey Rebellion, the incident in Waco, the assassination of Fred Hampton, hell, cop shootings happen every year. Not to mention hundreds of years of slavery where who knows how many were killed.
And no, Mao is not worse than Hitler. Mismanagement leading to famines is bad and the Cultural Revolution went too far in some places, and China acknowledges those mistakes btw, but they don’t compare to the targeted genocides, holocaust, and wars of Hitler. And most of those things you said weren’t even Mao. Plus, the US has done all those things of illegally occupying places (that’s how we got a bunch of states like Hawaii or Texas, as well as territories later like the Philippines), we did more than re-education camps of Native Americans, we killed them all and are now helping Israel do their own genocide and occupation in the present day, we have basically taken over the sea in the whole world and kill people who don’t agree (like Yemeni civilians), and have military bases all over including places they don’t want us (like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba), and have massacred civilians protesting peacefully as I said above, and helped other countries do the same, and have people under-fed and poverty stricken in the richest nation in the world.
You say you acknowledge the bad the US has done and then ignore all of them to make it sound like China is the worst places to have ever existed, at the same time an ongoing genocide is happening facilitated by the US. All you’ve proved is you consume propaganda uncritically and without context.
Tank man stood in front of the tank on June 5th, the massacre happened on June 4th.
What was that again about me making shit up? It sounds to me like you’re getting high off you’re own supply.
You know what, that’s a good idea. Let’s get the facts straight, shall we? Go ahead and post your sources that actually support your claims. Shouldn’t be a hard thing to do if they’re facts like you say. I’ll be waiting.
Lol you really had to do mental gymnastics to come up with any examples at all. I mean you had to go all the back to 1791 to the Whiskey Rebellion (if we’re going back that far then look up the Taiping Rebellion) to find something and then used the Waco Seige of the Branch Davidians cult as an example. The only relevant example you have is the Kent state shooting, and even that’s from 1970 and only 4 people were killed. Even then, I’m honest enough to acknowledge that this event was indeed bad and should be condemned.
Highly debatable. Mao has a very good case to top Hitler. He killed way more people and he was just as ruthless. Mao tops Hitler as the worst dictator of the 20th century.
Somewhere between 40 and 80 million people died under Mao’s reign. That can’t brushed off with an “oopsies”. Also, China still hails this guy as a national hero even though his successor, Deng Xiaoping (who’s responsible for the Tiananmen square massacre), had to literally do a de-Maoization like Khrushchev did with de-Stalinization to save the country from collapse.
Don’t get it twisted, Hitler is one of the most evil men in history. There’s a reason why he reached infamy in history. I’m just pointing out that he wasn’t without rivals during the 20th century, and Mao is one of the very few people with a legitimate case as being the shittiest human of that century.
Wow, you are slow. It’s not a competition. The reason why I brought up those things about China was to demonstrate no matter what examples are brought up about the US, China has an endless bag of atrocities to match or even exceed. That’s not the point because nobody is arguing which country has the worse history, the point of contention was that the person that I replied to originally claimed that the US today is worse than China today when it comes to things like Tienanmen Square massacre and their examples had no relevance to their claim at all.
You don’t need to have a ledger of condemnations so tankies can be satisfied with their perceived proportionate amount of criticism being applied towards China or any country. If an event is worthy of criticism then it should be criticized, simple as. If you’re seething over people condemning an atrocity and drowning yourself in fallacies like whataboutism, then there’s a good chance you either support the atrocities or the entity responsible for committing them.
If you made a post about the Kent State shooting, for example, right now on Lemmy or anywhere else really, you’re not going to get a hoard of Americans or non Americans in the comments crying about “BuT wHaT aBoUt ChInA hYpOcRiTeS?!?”, they’re just going to condemn the event and move on… as they should. But when it comes to doing the same thing for a country like China or Russia, you will always get a hoard of tankies defending the reprehensible acts and crying hypocrisy… even though they themselves are hypocrites.
Ironic coming from you
They’re always combined together. They’re considered part of the same event.
Journalistic and diplomatic testimony at the time confirms this. It’s pretty accepted by people who were there, including Western journalists. This is one example of a journalist there for the Washington Post at the time who later wrote a piece regretting writing their article in such a way that contributed to the myth that people died in the square.
I gave more recent examples too. The only reason I went back that far is to show that the US has been shooting at its citizens from the beginning. Keep in mind, China is a lot newer of a country than the US, so it feels fitting. When cou tries are newer, they are a lot more vulnerable to different conflicts and, sadly, these things can result as different factions fight it out. It’s only been around since about the 50’s. And 1970 isn’t that much older than 1989. You act like it’s ancient history.
Once again, Mao didn’t kill more than Hitler. Famines are not the same as purposeful targeted genocides. If you want, we can say that US Presidents are worse than both if you add every death resulting from every war, and every post-war famine, civil war, etc that the US has been involved with. You’d add up basically every death from everything that’s happened in all of South America and the Middle-East since the 50’s in there.
Not to mention that the numbers you quoted aren’t reliable. Their sources are dubious and usually CIA funded. Deng’s numbers are a bit more realistic at 16.5 million but still most likely exaggerated because of the downplaying of Mao’s legacy they were doing at the time, like you mentioned. US numbers are usually wild guesses and extrapolations.
And of course they still hail him as a hero. Even if policy-wise he wasn’t the best, he was still a great and successful revolutionary who freed them from an oppressive monarchy, brought them socialism, cut poverty, increased life expectancy, reduced mortality, increased the spread of education and healthcare, and led them on the path to where they are now as an extremely successful country. And yes, they were increasing life expectancy even while he was in charge.
And yes, the US is worse today. They are enabling a genocide. That’s basically the checkmate of atrocities.
Its not a competition, but the point is that these statements and propaganda always start as a way to encourage war and conflict with other countries. Every single time. It’s why China doesn’t celebrate the Kent massacre every year or the Civil War, or things like that that the US does. They don’t have military bases all over the world and aren’t constantly invading and occupying other countries, so they don’t really need the excuse to drum up propaganda as an excuse for war. And while China has a lot of negative points, that’s what makes the US worse that people in it don’t understand: it’s inperialistic nature.
China doesn’t have a penn state day, idiot.
Also china isn’t arming a genocide right now
Penn state? Wtf are you talking about?
Yes, they are. They’re arming Russia’s genocide in Ukraine and they’re also carrying out their own genocides in both Tibet and Xinjiang.
Can you quit doing holocaust trivialisation? Attrocities have been commited under every ideologies (wanna talk about Congo?). Nazis were the only ones with the explicit goal of ethnic purity
Jesus Fuck, you tankies are god damned children with your logic. More than one thing can be, and in fact are and have been and will be, bad while other things have happened that are also just as bad, if not worse, while not diluting other events, you get that, right? There is more than one atrocity you should be aware of throughout history and every government has been objectively fucking awful, stop sucking so much authoritarian dick. You fuckers are kowtowing cowards.
Pointing out other atrocities in history that are just as, if not more horrific, is not trivialization. The Holocaust is one of the worst events in history, no doubt about it. That being said there are other atrocities in history that have reached that levels in either ruthlessness, death toll, or both. Ignoring the other atrocities in history would just be us trivializing them.
Yes, they have, and yes, we should talk about them. Belguim’s atrocities in the Congo aren’t talked about nearly enough.
No, this is false. The idea of ethnic purity is something that has been around for a long time. The only unique thing about the Nazis was that they industrialized mass killings while carrying out their genocides.