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Comment by SurrealSoul | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a personal story, but my fiancé is from Beijing. She found out about Tiananmen square about a year ago. She only knew that she shouldn't ask about the Tiananmen incident growing up and that it was a bad thing that happened.

She has been in the states for several years now and when she found out what really happened with our even blurry images and stories we have now it really changed her perspective on things.

Even though its 28 years old, many of the younger generations don't know a thing about what happened, regardless if it's censored in their country or not.

History should not be censored like this. You should not have to move out of country to know what your country has done. I am extremely grateful for the brave photographer preserving his images for the world.

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A couple of years ago, I spent some time in South Africa. At one point I asked a local friend what they thought about the song "Sun City"[0], which was an anti-Apartheid song from 1985. My friend never heard of the song and was shocked since so many big artists performed on the track. They proceeded to ask their friends on Facebook, many of which were in theirs 30s/40s, if they heard the song, and the far majority of them also never heard of the song. The government was very effective in blocking access to the song via all the normal channels for the time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X36NC-mIbq0

I'm in my mid 30s and remember seeing it on TV as a kid in Shanghai. The news were all reporting on how the PLA rolled in and were holding back and avoiding violence against harassment from the protesters. (And to be fair most were until the orders came down from up top).

Other interesting pieces of media:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_Heavenly_Peace I think does a pretty good job at covering a highly controversial event. Providing its own interpretation of what lead to the protests as well as what escalated and its aftermath. (And when both sides of a controversy complain about "bad coverage" of their side then I consider it worth watching/reading ;))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMUjsbSAZv0 Cui Jian Live at Tiananmen Square in 1989, performing for the students on hunger strike. (Cui's a rock and roll pioneer in China, who was later banned for many years for his support of the student protests)

*Edit: What I find fascinating now is I will see American Idol type of singing shows where the young contestant walk on stage and cover "A piece of red cloth", which Cui sang during the protests to allude to the youth being blinded by the government's promises and became an anthem for the protest. But the contestant likely had no idea what happened at Tiananmen Square nor what the song was alluding to...

The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a must watch if you want to fully comprehend how the whole ordeal went down. Highly recommend.

Just a quick side note. Back ~2006 I had the opportunity to travel to China with Carma Hinton, the director of Gate of Heavenly Peace. Amazing woman with an amazing background.

Would've loved to pick her brains on what she learned. I imagine she had interviewed tons of people in the process of making the documentary.

Yeah, to add some substance to the largely fluff comment I wrote above (I just woke up and was surprised to see someone mention the film), she actually went to school in China, so she is one of the only Westerner's I've ever met who could speak Mandarin natively. One of the unfortunate things is that she actually lost touch with a lot of her old friends due to the volatility of that era, so she had spent much of her adult life reconnecting with the people she's able to find. Many of them are pseudo dissidents now - like Dai Qing (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Qing), who we were also fortunate enough to meet.

There was a lot of dissent in the PLA against firinon Chinese citizens, especially since those soldiers were local. It wasn't until they brought in soldiers from far away (with fewer ties to beijingers) that they were willing to fire actual bullets. Suffice it to say, the CCP focused on indoctrination and loyalty in the PLA after 1989 so they wouldn't have that problem again (as well as building up the PAP so they would have actual riot police to avoid having to use military force at all).

And the worst part about having to move out of country to find out things that were censored/hidden? You'll be inclined to believe foreign nations have a negative bias towards China.

At least, that's China's (and Russia's) narrative.

Isn't that exactly the case in some instances? Every country and, by extension, news channel has its own agenda to push.

Yes, but in places where say news organizations are tightly controlled by the state, it is much easier to push a nationalistic, "my-country-can-do-no-wrong" agenda than in places where multiple parties push for agendas that help point out flaws that need to be mended in a country.

One thing doesn't prove or disprove the other really.

Or extreme emotional devastation that lead to extreme hatred towards the CCP government. Finding out you've been lied to your entire life WILL shock you to the core.

Funny enough for me, neither happened. I left when I was in my early teens but having spent enough time being indoctrinated. I didn't chalk every western report on the CCP to be based on hatred, nor did I develop extreme distaste for the CCP.

I still think Western reporting likes to sprinkle in a few words to demonstrate their distaste for communism and authoritarianism (even when unnecessarily) whenever possible. But above all I think I just learned to be skeptical -- a useful trait for this current election cycle ;)

To be fair I think for the people that are much older who have spent their life dedicated to the proletariat struggle, the truth may be a lot harder to swallow. On the other hand, the older folks aren't blind either. Most will have some idea that there are devious things happening behind the curtain -- but Chinese as a culture has always promoted collective harmony over individuality. So most simply accept the way things are.

To be fair, USA hardly ever reports positive articles about China. We didn't report on their moon landing until a year after it happened and many people don't even know it happened at all.

Same goes with their space station. The only coverage went to their previous one that is leaving orbit into earth.

I know that this is a small sample size and only related to their space program as well as my personal observations, but its really hard (for me at least) to say that the USA media does not have a negative bias towards China

For the past couple months the media has pointed out China's successes in tech in Shenzhen, how they have a much better stance on climate change than Trump, and how they have the most prudent position (that doesn't involve all-out war) on North Korea. That's pretty positive if you ask me.

Maybe it's a bit of her bias seeping in a bit, but I can certainly agree it's getting better

Yes, it is getting better. But even then I can't help but feel like it's said in this "See, even the Chinese do better than trump" manner. Just like 10 years ago the only good news about China was about how well their economy is doing, but not without some "they took our jobs" vibe.

I don't understand that it was voted down. I think it is a fair argument.

I agree the reporting has been getting better.

Nonsense. The 2013 Chinese moon probe landing was literally reported in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNN. What more do you want?

I guess for something that eventful to be more common knowledge. You can find articles from 2016, 2017 even "announcing" the images, but as far as the general public cares, USA was the only country on the moon.

Again, this is my personal bias and I live in the Mid-west so it may be different elsewhere

Various countries have been sending unmanned probes to the moon since 1959. It's not eventful just because China managed to repeat what the Soviet Union and USA did decades ago. It's great that the Chinese accomplished it and they should be proud of their efforts, but so what.

You can't force ordinary people to care about every single space exploration mission. It doesn't impact their lives.

Maybe it is just that sending a robot to the moon doesn't count as "having been on the moon", else the EU, US and USSR would "have been on the Mars" already.

The Soviets landed unmanned craft on the moon too[1], not to downplay China's success. I would imagine most people tend to think of the Apollo landings and nothing else, since getting people there and back in one piece is fairly significant.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing#Unmanned_landings

I'm in the UK and it was reported in the media here, but even so the main news sources I used with the best info were American.

this sub-thread is basically the raison d'etre for n-gate.

http://n-gate.com/

>To be fair, USA hardly ever reports positive articles about China.

That's not true at all. For decades the mainstream media has been reporting about how China has been industrializing at a remarkable pace, and how the life of the average person there is vastly more free than it was under Mao.

But it also reports on the negatives like net censorship and widespread corruption. On the whole, I think the US mainstream media gives a much more balanced picture China than does China's own media.

I saw this video a few years back of a Chinese filmmaker asking others, on June 4th, if they know what day it is. The answers show how such an enormous open secret can be kept from your fiancé's generation.

https://vimeo.com/44078865 (action starts about 1 minute in)

There are a lot of young people who know, but aren't going to just start talking about it on camera. I've known a lot of people who will talk about it eventually, but it's not something they want to immediately jump to. At least in the universities I'm familiar with, most kids seemed to know about it.

How old is she? I was maybe 8 at the time. I was not in Beijing. Even I knew what was happening, the event was broadcasted on TV at the time. It was probably heavily censored, but I knew demonstrations etc were going on in Beijing at the time.

She is 25, so not old enough to comprehend it as it happened certainly.

Why the downvotes? How many british people know about Jallianwala Bagh massacre, shooting at a peaceful gathering killing hundreds, that was committed by them in India? How many americans care about the systematic racial genocide in their land? Most people don't care unless the event is very shocking at that time and place. And, if china is still poor, no one in west would have cared for their human rights violation.

You are verging on whataboutism.

There's a big difference. In the US we've been educated about atrocities against natives since youth. We learned about the Trail of Tears. You know about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre if you've watched Gandhi, a piece of Western film and entertainment.

That's incredibly different from the state overwriting or hiding history.

Tiananmen Square was only less than 30 years ago.

I had about 12 years of school where at least 1/3rd of the time was devoted to the atrocities of American history, in the South no less.

What are you talking about? Americans definitely care about what in the past, but you can't change things that happen in the past. The country, unlike China, is very open about the cracks in its core. There's a huge monument to MLK on the mall in DC. Can you say as much about Tienanmen Square?

The majority of my US History classes in high school focused on things like the trail of tears, the pullman strikes, Jim crow laws, Vietnam war atrocities, Japanese internment, our policies towards European refugees during WWII, the watergate scandal, the US invasion of panama, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima... I learned about all of these as part of a standard public school education, just like all my peers. Plus you'd be crazy if you thought US media was bullish about Guantanamo, the missing weapons of mass destruction, NSA civilian spying, drone assassinations...

Regardless wether people care about those things(a lot don't), it's part of our education and media. I think the claim is Chinese history classes in china and their media are a bit more rose colored than ours, which is why people don't know about tiananmen square.

I definitely agree, and this problem is not limited to what we consider (or considered) repressive regimes..

In 1995 I went to visit college friends in Austin TX (I'm from eastern Canada) and a few of them who had grown up in Buda TX (a small town outside of Austin) told me that until high school (late 80s) they had been told in school by multiple teachers that the US had "won" the Vietnam War.

Obviously an anecdote, but there you go..

I never heard "we won Vietnam," except jokingly, going to a regular public school in the 90's and 2000's in the Pacific Northwest.

My dad always described Vietnam with a little head-shaking regret (he was born in Texas in 1957, so he was too young to be drafted, but we had family friends in the war). We didn't hear about it much in elementary school, but in middle school history classes we learned about the Gulf of Tonkin and the smoke and mirrors surrounding that, and why the war was so difficult and controversial compared to previous wars. In high school I had more in-depth modern American history class, studied the social repercussions of the war, the Kent State shootings, the protests, etc.

I'm not sure if it's the chronologic difference or the geographic distance, but not every schoolchild in the US learned "we won the war."

You guys won Vietnam. You just didn't achieve the best possible outcome. Really, Vietnam had a thriving economy by that time, growing industry in several cities, but after the war the country was nothing for a really long time. You bombed them into stone age, so it didn't even matter whether the country was communist, democratic or whatever else at that point.

Absolutely, and as I said my story is obviously anecdotal (as is yours of course), and I was not implying that this was the case across the board or in every region or school.

Even crazier how china tells its students that Chi a son their Vietnam war, when the PLA lost so many soldiers and failed to achieve their objective of getting Vietnam out of Cambodia.

"I definitely agree, and this problem is not limited to what we consider (or considered) repressive regimes.."

I think the very best example of this (major, shocking news event unknown internally by US citizens) is the Iran Air flight 655 incident, wherein a US Navy cruiser shot a civilian airliner out of the sky, killing 290 passengers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

This airplane was flying in Iranian airspace. The Navy cruiser was in Iranian territorial waters.

You don't run into too many people in the US that know about this ...

It is hard to know about all of the US incidents abroad that are fucked, because there are so many of them, and we make no attempt to hide them at an institutional level. (Other than those made during already classified operations, but those get out eventually because using classification to cover up mistakes/crimes is generally a much more serious crime)

In school I learned about Japanese internment during WWII, The 3/5ths compromise and the trail of tears, and a dozen other US atrocities. I hear about drone strikes against weddings in the news.

The point is there is no institutional censorship stopping me from learning about this stuff, like there is in China with regards to Tienanmen Square.

>You should not have to move out of country to know what your country has done.

Pretty much applies everywhere.

As a shortwave listener back in the day, the invasions of Grenada and Panama were widely broadcast ~8-12 hours everywhere before a peep showed up in US media. Iran-Contra and many other US actions were not uncovered by domestic media, they were exposed by foreign journalists.

People think they're better informed or more worldly after the internet. Surely that explains why the only two US media pundits who got any airtime opposing the Iraq War were Michael Moore and Paul Krugman. You have to watch RT to see someone like Chomsky even today.

>Pretty much applies everywhere.

That's nonsense. The US media is far more open and accurate than that the majority of nations, and far better than China.

> the only two US media pundits who got any airtime opposing the Iraq War were Michael Moore and Paul Krugman.

No, there was intense debate in the mainstream media. I know, I followed it.

I'm amazed at the things people manage to have no knowledge about.

I live in Tasmania. Couple years ago I met a philosophy graduate from Germany who didn't know who Pol Pot was.

How can a person go through a four year liberal arts course at a Western university and manage to evade such knowledge.

fyi, fiancée.

I think the only way for me to get that spelling right is to marry her

there are much better previous pictures and video footage compared to this so not sure why you are so thankful, for starters watch on YouTube The Tankman

I think you're missing the point. It's a piece of history that has been buried. The tankman isn't the only thing that happened. The calm protest before the gunfire is rare to see and the more images of policemen joining the protest mean so, so much.

For the younger people they can't just search "tank man" on youtube in china and find out what happened, because either A: they have no idea what tankman even is or B: the video is censored. These images, just like the ones my fiance found years after she moved to the states will circulate and hopefully find more minds to make sure we don't forget this horrible event.

no, these images will be censored same as all the other images

and for people familiar with Beijing massacre, they know that many gov officials joined people

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