Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

The Chinese government should certainly be judged based on rumors such as these, until they open up their archives and allow free investigation of the events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Student_Protection_Act...

I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.

I wonder if there was a heightened instance of disease in the area immediately afterward.

`An unknown protestor bravely stands in front of a column of armored tanks as an act of defiance against the Chinese government following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.`

`This photo is one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century and has since been widely used to represent the protests. It was a set of student-led popular demonstrations in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989 aimed at exposing the deep splits within China’s leadership. It was also known as the ’89 Democracy movement. The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of a communist leader.`

Some more context behind the photographer who clicked the photo - https://pastebin.com/aGVLYDVz

It doesn't sound terribly plausible as a disposal method to me. Not something I would believe without more sources / evidence.

People don't have the energy to protest everything, because we're poor, exhausted, distracted, and yes, often confused and hypocritical. It doesn't mean the observations we make about atrocities are insincere or untrue or that they are unworthy of attention. And independently of our sincerity or consistency, I think the observation is simply true on its merits anyway, and it's bewildering (to me at least) why anything other than that should matter.

Stop buying stuff from China. Just stop. Support local made.

My family comes from Bangladesh. In the 1970s, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan, and enshrined principles like secularism into its constitution. But in the 1990s, Islam was made the official religion, women were forced to don head coverings, etc. Today, Islamists are killing journalists who espouse the same secularist principles the country was founded on. As a Bangladeshi-American, I want Americans to criticize these things! It pains me when (often well-intentioned, but misguided) people apologize for and accommodate these things. It's a slap in the face of people in Bangladesh who are fighting for a more just society.

That is not to say I don't want Americans to feel shame for the bad things America did. But, at least on the east coast, at least, I grew up hearing about all the evils of slavery and the genocide of indigenous people. We can try to help the world move forward without forgetting that we also have things in our history for which we need to feel shame. I think Americans broadly recognize that.

My parents and wife were born in Syria. I lived and studied there for 5 years, and spent some time in then-liberated Eastern Aleppo in 2013.

I, and most Syrians I know, despise Obama not because he said Assad should step down; we despise him for not following through, or at least getting out of the way and letting regional players help Syrians get rid of Assad, and kick out Iran's sectarian militias.

Western powers are responsible for a lot of horror and misery around the world. But unlike Iraq in 2003, Libya and Syria in 2011 experienced genuine popular uprisings. Most of the death and destruction was caused not by the West, but by Gaddafi and Assad.

Despite what Noam Chomsky seems to believe, the West is not the source of all evil in the world.

Surely.

EDIT: whoever modded me down, take a look at http://blog.samaltman.com/china or https://techcrunch.com/video/sam-altman-of-yc-china-remains-...

It is becoming very clear however, that a serious crackdown from Beijing is coming. Not on this particular incident, but in general on the political freedom in Hong Kong. It is becoming undeniable China demanded Hong Kong back in order to destroy it.

But when it will arrive. Good question.

Edit: Apologies for the bare quote - I've always found the concept of the "mutability of the past" a fascinating and particularly troubling aspect of Orwell's work.

I heard about one other aspect to Tiananmen - 20 years before Tiananmen the young generation back then perpetrated the Cultural Revolution with all the related mass crimes and violence, in particular against the representatives of the older generations. To them, now 40-50 years old, the students at Tiananmen looked like the start of possibly something similar to Cultural Revolution and having been perpetrators themselves, they were very afraid of such a new thing starting, especially with them now possibly being the target, and this is why the society was in general ok with the thing crushed mercilessly right at the beginning. Again, i'm not a China expert, just heard/read things along these lines, and being from USSR (where in particular young revolutionaries fervor had been a thing) find such situation and its explanation pretty plausible.

Most of the deaths occurred throughout the city as the people rioted (because who the hell likes having the military in their city), few deaths happened in the square itself, few of the deaths were actually PKU students, most of whom had gone back to campus before the real shit show began (you can find many in the tech industry today, though they don’t reveal that they were involved easily).

China back then lacked riot police, they lacked any form of non-lethal crowd control capabilities. Then you had confusion in the army, soldiers who didn’t load their weapons getting killed, then civilians getting mowed down by other units in retubution.

I honestly think that if the government went to find an accurate account of the event, they would find many mistakes made, many tragedies occurred, but they wouldn’t lose the confidence of the people. That they don’t bother just shows how far they have to go.

- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...

- France couple in China unreachable after Liu Xiaobo tribute - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42454865

- China Continues Hunting Down Liu Xiaobo Commemorators, Rounding Up Dissident Writer https://chinachange.org/2017/12/22/china-continues-hunting-d...

I downvoted you because you are best case ignorant, or worst case trying to cover this up. I suggest you read through Amnesty Internationals documentation about the incident.

You might as well say the current government in the US is the "Same government that mowed down innocent college students at Kent State".

It's actually not the same government. Some parts of it are significantly better, some parts of it are significantly worse. Either way, it does the discussion a disservice to call it the same.

They're certainly a threat in Hong Kong, where they have a degree of control and influence, but how and where else?

While they lay claim to Taiwan, what harm do you think they are going to cause to South Korea and why would they even think of something as insane as enabling North Korea to strike Tokyo or Los Angeles (or anywhere else) with nuclear weapons?

People are tempted to bury it in a larger narrative of global complexity, thinking that treating it like a trick question is evidence of sophistication. But what if it's not a trick question?

Still lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused, and its a pity they rely on rewriting history and suppressing subversive thought to preserve the government’s legitimacy, but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted, blindly dogmatic and ignorant of the way the world works these days.

The truth about who really controls China is obscured.

Just a century ago, China was a backwater nation that got conquered by Great Britain. Within 60-80 years, they got nukes and became a super-power. Within 30 years, every nation sold out to China by giving them all the manufacturing technology. Bill Clinton sold them nuclear secrets. Israel regularly funnels intelligence and technological secrets to China.

What do you think is going on? Does anyone think the Brits who worked very hard to rule the world 200 years ago and had an advanced intelligence network just gave up and walked away? I don't.

That 10,000 number is contested, you do the truth a disservice by assuming it to be true. We hold ourselves to higher standards here. Other sources assert the figure was in the hundreds, still a lot but two orders of magnitude different.

I hope I don't sound like a China apologist: the Chinese government has done a terrible crime, and it's a shame that not enough Chinese people are demanding justice, and sooner or later they will have to look back and recognize what happened, hopefully sooner rather than later.

However, packaging that as "the threat of China" is a self-serving narrative that will harm people. I guess you mean well, but in the end that justifies America interfering with other small countries and supporting their dictators, because, hey, otherwise China will be doing the same and at least "our guys" won't be as bad as "their guys". (Just don't look too closely at what our guys are doing.)

More personally, as a South Korean, America having such an opinion basically means my country is forced to "choose side", hurting our economy and destabilizing military balance in East Asia. The only benefactors are military complexes of China and the US.

I doubt this number. And let's not forget that they let them protesting for some time. An highly unusual event in China. Problems occurred when protests did not stop.

"threatens democracy and freedom worldwide." China is not totally undemocratic and I doubt that democracy is necessarily the best solution at all times and for all states.

"This psychopath will eventually cause harm to a few countries (Taiwan, South Korea)"

South Korea?

On the other hand I am sure the people in Syria, Libya and Iraq were happy about the US bombings. Remember "highway of death" in Iraq?

"when said and done, maybe enable North Korea to strike a few nuclear missiles into Los Angeles or Tokyo, who knows."

North Korea is a buffer sate for both, China and Russia. China has NO interest in a war in North Korea.

By the way, North Korea. The Soviet Union fought an existential war against Germany and lost 10% of their population. This war DEFINED the Soviet Union. In Europe the second world war was basically a Soviet-German war (9 out of 10 German soldiers that died, died on the Eastern Frontier).

This being said, this is NOTHING compared to the war that North Korea fought: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/11/state-fear...

Yes, North Koreans are paranoid. They may have reasons to be.

You can't directly implant process X from culture A to culture B. The checks and balances and social norms between different cultures are different. You can implant an industrial process, if you educate a workforce, i.e. transform culture B to A onsite. Changing the culture of an entire civilization is considerably more difficult.

That's not to say I don't like democracy or markets. But a country does not become a western democracy by having an election an privatizing everything.

Labeling china as bad guys trivializes several aspects of differences between cultures. I'm not sure there are any good guys in global politics, so I'm not sure how the labels good or bad should be applied.

The US destroyed literally every single town. A State Department official in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.” For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population and the Khmer Rouge killed ~21% of Cambodia's population during Pol Pots reign of terror.

Western media fails to ever mention this grievance when trying to give a reason for the state of NK's behavior, instead painting a picture of a zany regime that operates without rhyme or reason. For them, it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened and have not forgotten the devastation.

That's just one example. I could substitute in the US's use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Cambodia (who we were not at war with), the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed a democratically elected leader, the 1973 coup in Chile that put Pinochet in power, or the shooting down Iran Air Flight 655.

To be clear, I'm not excusing China's behavior at all. I think it's sad that Americans forget the atrocities it committed. I don't think there can be a peaceful way forward if we are on a high horse, believing that we possess some moral superiority. Although we are correct to criticize the Burmese treatment of their minority Rohingya, the US is still a country that had race riots in the 21st century and a violent Neo Nazi rally in 2017.

P.S.

The US is the unchallenged global leader at hiding messaging behind marketing, propaganda, consumerism and strong arming other countries, and we are ruled by a powerful group of multi-national corporations.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

-Edward Bernays (often considered the father of PR), from his seminal work, Propaganda.

Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”

He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows. And yes, he was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.