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Comment by _yuow | Hacker News Reader

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> The Tiananmen Square massacre, which originated due to the protesters fighting for more freedom/human rights, from I heard from my uncle, it was because of the influence from westerners

This is garbage. The massacre happened because Beijing responded ham-fistedly to a peaceful student demonstration. It involved atrocities including PLA troops firing on their own ambulances and dissolving bodies under tanks and in vats of acid [1].

And while the protests in Beijing are memorialised by Tank Man, there were protests in pretty much every other Chinese city at the time. They were all brutally suppressed in favour of the ruling elite.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes...

Your response to my comment is silly.

I was talking about the ultimate reason why they protested, it was influenced by the west, human rights.

Not the way they were massacred, or how people memorialized them.

I am definitely stunned to know how hacker news people comprehend

edit: confirmed hacker news upvote/downvote buttons work like reddit's ones, and in turn work like facebook one except facebook doesn't have a downvote button neither

Well, respect of human rights maybe a relatively recent "western" concept, but judging from the fact that so many family members of the top brass of the communist party of China have become citizens in these "Western" countries, it does seem that they themselves do embrace such values (when it doesn't confront their own interest).

> And probably I will get downvoted by mentioning this. The Tiananmen Square massacre, which originated due to the protesters fighting for more freedom/human rights, from I heard from my uncle, it was because of the influence from westerners.

Marxism, or the morphed variety of the CCP, also originates from the West. That doesn’t mean that Mao or the 6/4 movement didn’t have a genuine appreciation of “Western ideas” and want to implement them.

And yes, the West causes lots of problems. At least there is freedom to discuss them, and the probability of being sent to a camp for pointing things out is extremely low. That doesn’t discredit Western ideas; indeed, the self-awareness and capacity for self-criticism of the West is an important feature of its political system that the CCP increasingly lacks.

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