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.
As an American I think it’s helpful to put this into some sort of perspective.
Things the US won’t forget:
Things the US will forget:
Korean War (3mil civilian dead)
Vietnam War (2mil civilian dead)
Iraqi War (1mil civilian dead)
Violent overthrow of East Timor (widely considered a genocide)
Violent overthrow of Afghanistan (twice, over 1 mil dead)
Violent overthrow of Nicaragua
Violent overthrow of Grenada
Violent overthrow of Panama
Violent overthrow of Libya
Coup d’etat of Guatemala
Coup d’etat of Iran
Failed Coup d’etat of Syria
Failed Coup d’etat of Indonesia
Many failed Coup d’etat attempts on Cuba
Coup d’etat of Congo
Coup d’etat of Laos
Coup d’etat of the Dominican Republic
Coup d’etat of Iraq
Coup d’etat of Brazil
Successful Coup d’etat of Indonesia (1 mil dead)
Coup d’etat of Chile
Multiple Coup d’etat of Bolivia
Coup d’etat of Haiti
Multiple Coup d’etat attempts on Venezuela
Coup d’etat of Palestine
Mass civilian casualties, destabilization of many governments, people subject to a lifetime of torture without a trial, all under the War on Terror
This list could be so much longer, but I gotta get to work.
Hey, the difference is, you can post this list here, and nothing will happen to you.
Become a Chinese citizen, and then post that single bullet item about the TS incident in China, on a Chinese social media. Then see what happens.
That may be true, but it doesn’t excuse the list at all.
My country is responsible for the majority of international violence since WWII. I find that morally unacceptable.
I make posts like this because I want my country to do better. But the sad reality is we have yet to learn our lesson. We have been aiding and abetting an ongoing Holocaust for almost two years now.
WHATABOUT.
Name a more iconic duo than tankies and misinformation.
That shit gets brought up all the fucking time, in their own threads. Notice how people don’t bring up Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, or the many other atrocities the CCP has committed whenever an American atrocity gets mentioned.
Your comment ignores the context that the US is doing anti-Chinese propaganda here, and there is no parity.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and China was releasing PR statements on every anniversary of every US atrocity. They would still be issuing multiple statements every day.
China is also doing anti-American/anti-West propaganda. It’s just favored differently because of different cultural values of the target audience. Still stinks the same.
All the fucking time? Really? When was the last time the Coup d’état against Aristide was discussed around here?
Post about it on it’s anniversary then. Don’t bring it up as a whataboutism in unrelated threads.
I didn’t bring up anything, the comment you responded to did. My comment was my first intervention in this thread and I was responding to you specifically. You said that things like that get brought up all the time. I am asking you for the receipts. When was the Haitian coup d’état brought up before today?
And we know the extent of US involvement in these coups and conflicts because the US declassified the info, becauase all info becomes declassified eventually.
When is the Dictatorship of China going to admit that this happened, when will they declassify the internal documents about this atrocity they were responsible for?
That’s the problem people have with the Chinese government. They can’t even acknowledge reality because they seek to eventually change the records of what really happened to pretend they did no wrong.
I agree that declassification is a great thing, but it is not so black and white. Not all info becomes declassified eventually, so much is covered up and destroyed.
For example, much is known about the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. Most of this information is known due to declassified documents. But these declassified documents also mention that there were over 100 My Lai-level massacres that occured, most of which we know nothing about. Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland was quoted saying we do a “My Lai each month”.
One of the largest, codenamed Speedy Express, reportedly killed 11,000 people, and was covered up at the highest levels.
I don’t care about your whataboutism meant to deflect
When is the Chinese government going to admit that they were responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre?
If you can’t answer that then fuck off tankie
My best guess is that the Chinese government will admit fault long into the future, when most of the accountability and backlash has already faded into history.
Which is no different than how the US has handled many of the atrocities I mentioned.
When will the US acknowledge and release info on the 100s of Yemeni and Pakistani civilian targets that were destroyed by drone strike? When will the US release the warcrimes reports from the War on Terror? Does the US even still have these warcrimes reports, or were they destroyed (as whistleblowers and Amnesty International have suggested they were)?
If you can’t answer questions like these without resorting to cries of “Whataboutism”, then fuck off hypocrite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
This makes perfect sense, it’s one thing for Taiwanese and Chinese people to remember it but its absolute hypocrisy for the west to comment. Especially as they fund the genocide in Gaza and Western Liberals make excuses for it.
I can critize and dislike the US involvement in Korea, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, AND the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I can rank which ones killed more people, but no one should be committing any crimes against humanity like these regardless of scale
No, it doesn’t. Only people who are full shit use and defend this fallacy. People who have principles call out shitty behaviors and actions whenever they see them, that’s because principles are universal. If you selectively choose when to apply them, then you don’t believe in them.
If you acturally call out genocide and shitty practices wherever you see it than its being principled. If you only call it out when a “bad” country does its hypocrisy, and tbh I have seen people do the later far more often while claiming the former.
Tell me, when Western Europe plunders the global south to subsidize their social programs do you complain? Or when the Zionist Occupation slowly takes more land away from the natives? What about the western funded dictators committing genocide across the third world and selling their nations for scraps?
Do you acturally call for freedom, an end to the exploitation, or do you demand a compromise? Do you demand native Palestinians give up half their land to the occupation? Africans half their resources to Europeans? And dictators to kill half as many minorities?
When somebody supports said “bad” countries, they’ll view any instance of these countries being called out for any shitty actions as hypocrisy. What this actually shows is that these people are in fact hypocrites themselves. If they were principled, then they would’ve acknowledged the shitty actions of whatever country is pointed out and moved on. Instead, they go on they go on the brainless rants that are filled with fallacies to distract from the original issue and dismiss criticism, misinformation, and endless crying about how the country being called out is a victim for the atrocity they committed. These rants don’t change the reality of the issue being raised originally.
This entire post is about western governments who are currently engaging in genocide calling out an event in China that if you look at the proper context is bad but not an atrocity
the Tiananmen Square Massacre,
yep, tankies gonna tank.
No the post is about the Chinese massacre.
By all mean call out genocide but it’s not relevant in post.
Don’t try to dismiss criticism of one massacre and its continuous censorship by bringing up another massacre.
It’d be a bit like if China and it’s entire sphere once a year went crazy commemorating the Kent State or Haymarket Massacre. They wouldn’t be wrong to say these are bad things, but it’d clearly be in service of some ulterior motive.
Honestly, even with an ulterior motive, I see no reason they shouldn’t.
The thing is, only the US and West do this shit of constantly complaining about other countries and celebrating their historical tragedies every year. And it’s not a coincidence that they’re also the countries to invade and constantly engage in imperialism all around the world the most, and have the capacity to, with hundreds of military bases around the world.
It’s such obvious propaganda against foreign enemies, especially ones we want to fight. You think it would make it super obvious how propagandized Americans are, but they don’t see the hypocrisy at all because of that very propaganda.
What would be the point in China bringing up the Haymarket massacre or Kent state every year? And for that matter, what’s the point in the US bringing up the Tiannamen Square every year?
Glass houses indeed.
The US brings up its own horrible events all the time.
I learned about The Trail of Tears, the era of segregation, and of the KKK in my history class in America. We make conscious efforts to be aware of and criticize our own faults - as well as those of other nations.
There is currently LOTS of criticism of the US government for its participation in the massacre in Palestine. Claiming otherwise is lying. China is relatively unique in that it has committed atrocities, and refuses to allow anyone in its own country to acknowledge them. Both countries have done bad things. One country recognizes those facts and attempts to learn from them.
The US is not allowing criticism of Palestine. Not sure if you’ve seen the stuff happening in college campuses, job applications, the DNC where they didn’t allow a speaker, even local elections where foreign policy shouldn’t matter, etc. And it’s only going to get worse according to the 2025 plan, where it details additional attempts to shut it down. It’s also been downplaying other stuff in schools, such as the negative parts of slavery, Jim Crow, basically everything bad the US has ever done. The problem with our education system is that it depends a lot on which state, city, and even school you are from (private or public, charter or not, etc.).
The whole conflict about critical race theory and the Moms for Liberty stuff is all about them trying to roll these things back.
I agree their censorship is too high in China, though, but I think it’s a result of siege theory. Essentially they’ve seen the US do a million coup attempts and color revolutions in other countries, often successful, and so you if you’re a third world country you basically need a tight control of your press and elections if you want to resist US control. And I doubt seeing us fall to propaganda in the US from billionaire backed media organizations and foreign countries is going to encourage them to not censor though. Unfortunately, if anything, it will do the opposite.
Buddy, fuck right the hell off. The USA is not the only country with free media. Small countries do it too. Al Jazeera is quartered in Qatar, and is critical of both the USA and China. China enacts the Great Firewall because they’re power-hungry, not because they want to fucking stay safe, and they are not in any regard a third world country.
Agreed, dont throw stones from glass houses
The implied issue with that phrase is you risk your own glass house being pelted, correct? The glass house, in this case, being atrocities each government is implicated in?
I’m fine with all the atrocities being called out. Otherwise, how do we learn not to do them anymore?
I want to belive that people here genuenly call out atrocities everywhere but they dont, if you personally call out evil in every place it resides then I respect you.