24th Anniversary of 6/4/89 Beijing Incident - Was it justified?

Sources to back all of that up?

Like this?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...hed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html

 

I just got back from China, so long Great Firewall, and while Tiananmen wasn't as bad as first reported there should be no doubt that many were killed by very heavy handed tactics of the PRC military and police. Obviously on the PRC there is no remembrance of June 4th but did see a memorial in Hong Kong that had eyewitness accounts including pics from then.

 

Tiananmen Square is the greatest tragedy in modern human history.

 

Just to add as the wiki leaks confirmed most of the bloodshed wasn't in Tiananmen itself but in other areas around Beijing.

 

it's Kent State with Chinese characteristics, 19 years later

 

Great OP. wondering if the whole thing was actually an inside job....

 

Your English is quite good for a Chinese operative.

 

Slightly off topic, but you could have purchased a vpn account for as little as $8 a month. Yes, they are extremely easy to come by.

 

The army unit was ordered to open fire on the mob to make its way to the Square IF necessary. This fact is well documented by many sources. You can find video footages showing skirmishes between the mob and the PLA using live bullets that day on the internet. The fact that the student exdous from the Square was peaceful was also well documented. I am not sure what else was leaked by the wiki leak document that was not known.

Onto the 6/4 event and everything leading to it, my view is that the student movment, while idealistic, has its significance. You can't just reduce it to unruly protest without clear agenda, which rendered the whole country in chaos for three months. Maybe some of the accusations were true, but to me, at bottom, the open urge for more democracy by the students was not all that irrational in the context at the time. To some of the extent Arab spring has been applauded for its signficances, maybe 6/4 deseves similar reviews, albeit unsuccessful in actually bringing about changes.

All in all, there are many other ways to dispense the mob besides using live bullets. That, IMHO, is a dark spot on Deng's record.

 

What happened to the little man who stood down the tanks? Reeducation camp?

 

Nobody knows. I hope not and probably not.

 

Oh good

Are we finally moving back to China topics after the Great Islam Debates ?

As for the topic, of course there was no massacre. It was just CIA propaganda.

 

I don't think our govt would act much differently if 100,000 people quickly organized and showed up to camp out on the steps of Capitol Hill. Look at how we handled Occupy Wall Street protest sites when only a few hundred people showed up to camp out and protest in each city across the country.

One thing that Americans don't realize is that the Chinese govt is afraid of its people revolting whereas in the US, the people are afraid of its government.

 

I feel that in general, your argument really really underestimates the capabilities of modern oppressive regimes.

For example the ability to control information. In such countries, it is COMMON (for example) to run into a situation which is perceived negatively by say 90% of the voting age population, but communicateed 70% positively by the local press. This may give the perception that both arguments hold roughly equal weight since most people understandeably don't read more than 1 newspaper, let alone conduct an analysis of the evidence and a variety of sources.

Generally speaking, if I only look at:

- PRC report
- All student statements/information

... then I assume that the events were somewhere between these 2 views, it would still be well worse than the US embassy report (which I only just read now).

Perhaps it's a good question to ask why the embassy report is so shockingly similar to the PRC's, if the PRC is to the US what US foreign policy claims it is.

 

The interesting thing about the original post is that the words " Tiananmen Square" are not in it.

 

what I don't even understand is that the OP understates a government murdering its' own people (it's not that bad), then throws it open to "was it justified?"---insofar as I can tell, Chinese citizens don't have democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, are forced under the repression of the one-child rule, party to terrible crimes committed under their name against anybody the CPC deems to be deviant---

The average Chinese might be slightly materially richer, but I don't exactly credit the CPC's increasingly erratic mismanagement of Keynesian principles for that either. And it remains the fact that politically speaking, Chinese citizens have about the same amount of rights as they did when the student protests first broke out in 1989. I'm trying to wonder what there is to justify Tiananmen.

 

Oh yeah, the United States has a track record of declaring martial law, suppressing freedom of speech, and then plowing in and massacring its' own civilians.

hell, DOJ subpoenas are a scandal in America. Even in countries like Egypt, where rule of law is much less established, the military had the dignity not to fire on the civilians they were mandated to protect!

 

I think most Americans underestimate how violent the US crackdown would be, but it would still be far less lethal than even the most favorable report above with respect to the Chinese government response.

Both the Chinese and the US fear the government/ police, though Americans fear their government a lot less, with the exception of the more lunatic Fox News/ Tea Party types. Both governments fear the will of the people at least to the extent that they might lose their offices. Likewise CEO's and corporate leaders fear losing their positions.