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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely wrong. The official mood in China seems to be swinging ethno-nationalist, which is a recipe for human rights violations in any country, let alone one with limited juridical recourse and free speech. I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing.

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> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing.

Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

Can they even know that it happened? AFAIK China is very censored and they may not even be aware that such a thing occurred at all. Even assuming they were around at the time it happened, there may also be no way for them to find out.

People talk. In China I've also heard people say that even if they don't know all the details, they know something happened.

> Can they even know that it happened?

This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation.

In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th)

https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...

People who grew up under such regimes are fairly ingenious about getting around censorship. The more the government tries to clamp down, the more people want to know and they will find ways around the censorship.

People talk. My grandmother passed down first hand accounts of her living through the Japanese occupation during WWII. There are also stories passed down from the Cultural Revolution, etc.

Believe me, the Chinese know something happened in 1989 at Tiananmen. Hong Kong has been a torch bearer in keeping memories of those events alive.

Now the better question is if many Chinese still care in face of growing prosperity and what version of the "truth" they have.

Or for that matter Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Oh that's a pretty much accepted history in China. You can't hide that because so many people witnessed it and so many of today's leadership in China were also victims of it. Xi Junping's own family suffered greatly during that era (Edit: Cultural Revolution, not Great Leap Forward, but one followed the other because Mao was trying to salvage his legacy after the first mistake).

State censorship isn't as simple as not talking about something. The cleverer way of doing it is to spin the truth. As they say in China, Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. That's how they spun it. Sure the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions were terrible but on the whole Mao was good. Then add in some story about liberation from the Japanese and the corrupt KMT and Mao's legacy survives.

You mean TS 1989? Taylor Swift’s most recent album right? Suffice it to say, those T-shirts did not go down well in China.

People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “wrong”, but maybe not for the same reasons as the west (China has invested a lot more in riot police since then).

Strange, how come there's no mention of the name's allusion to the protests on Wikipedia, if it was deliberate? (genuinely curious.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album)

Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.

It wasn’t deliberate! Taylor Swift’s initials are TS and she was born in 1989, so she is just unharmonious by coincidence.

As a dedicated Swiftie, I feel obliged to point out that 1989 is not her most recent album, that would be Reputation, which she is performing on tour currently.

Interestingly, she performed (4 I think) concerts in China for 1989, but none are scheduled in the country this time around.

Thanks. As an aging techie, I have trouble keeping up on the music scene.

In 2007 or so, I was having a conversation in a bar with a bunch of student friends, one of whom was newly arrived from Beijing to start her graduate studies in the US.

For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about.

This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page.

The look of utter horror on her face, followed by pain and grief and rage, was a little much for a friday night out with the gang...

On the other side, I know people living in china who have known all the tricky ways to get around the censors since forever, and are totally up to speed on things.

So it's probably a mixed bag.

My very limited experience with Chinese "commoners" outside China is that they view Xi Jinping as an adored celebrity, if not a god figure. "Very very great man!"

Same with some Filipinos' opinions of Rodrigo Duterte, who said all the bad news being posted about him were "American propaganda."

Have other people here asked a Chinese expat what they thought about their government back home? What kind of answers did they give?

the only expats i know got the bum’s rush in the 70s, and are unsurprisingly sharply critical of the state.

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?

Firebombing of Japan

Bombing the shit out of Laos

Massive numbers killed in the CIA operations overthrowing governments in South America

The duplicitous and two-faced foreign policies which fund genocides and killings all over the globe while we try to put on some good face about making the world a better more democratic place

Selling arms to murderous regimes who torture and kill as we turn a blind eye to profits

Repatriating Nazis responsible for the war crimes we decry in order to get their tech/medical advancements

The extent at which Native Americans were murdered

Lots and lots of things get rose-colored glasses because the populous lives rather comfortable now...

> The extent at which Native Americans were murdered

This is the only one you gave that actually was committed against Americans in the US.

• The CIA's experiments on American and Canadian citizens [0][1].

• Plans to nuke the Moon [2].

are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Not sure if they count as "that most of us don't know about."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119

Being the first nation on the globe to bring in eugenics based compulsory sterilisation laws, which influenced Nazi ideas. Some survived surprisingly long after the war, the last until the 1970s.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs.

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

My go to for this is question is the `Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male` (aka. Tuskegee Experiments). Where government clinicians withheld the diagnose and treatment of syphilis from the 'participants'. The men were instead told they had 'bad blood'. This lasted into the 1970s. Only ending due to an upstanding epidemiologist, Peter Buxtun, going to the press.

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

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

"Buying" human experimentation data from Japan in exchange for amnesty for prosecution of war crimes (Patton).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

https://warpardons.wordpress.com/unit-731/

MKULTRA? Difficult to guess how many americans/Chinese know about a topic, however.

MKULTRA is my go to, because it sounds just like a crazy conspiracy theory (down to the wacky name), but it actually happened.

maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot where a large, fairly wealthy neighbourhood of black people was firebombed by the local militia.

I'm not sure I'd attribute it to ethno-nationalism, in that I don't know for sure that China is applying a policy of Han supremacism. It seems to be more of a particular concern with the Uighurs in particular.

We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they are trying to build, and are trying to suppress and change this culture in a deeply authoritarian way.

Communist regimes, including China, have a history of suppressing religion and pre-existing traditional culture (e.g. the Cultural Revolution of the 60's and 70's).

What set of distinctions could we reasonably draw to say that the authoritarian imposition of norms based on the overwhelming Han ethnic majority is not fundamentally Han Chauvinist or racist?

The fact that China has a history of authoritarian imposition of cultural reforms on the Han ethnic majority themselves.

Hah, you think the country that ground their own citizens up with tank treads and washed them down the drain cares?

Missing context here being that this specific allegation was made, within the past few months, by a British foreign service official who was posted to Beijing at the time.

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