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Comment by coupdejarnac | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the post, but I don't think it's constructive to argue that the Gwangju Uprising was bloodier than June 4. That's only true if you go by official numbers put out by the CCP.

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Your post is less constructive: your only argument is an appeal to the lack of trustworthiness of the Chinese government. Even so, it would have been better if you stated what are your opinions on the number of casualties regarding both events.

To give a starting point to the discussion; the English Wikipedia gives about the same summary for the independent estimates of casualties related to both events: from hundreds to thousands.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

Appeal to the lack of trustworthiness of the CCP: this is the level of discourse?

No idea what you're saying now.

OP is saying CCP is known untrustworthy.

We also have strong reason to believe that south korean figures are a gross underestimate (if you read the linked wikipedia article).

Victims have a hard time coming forward if there is a strong possibility of being victimised again (korea has a long history of blacklisting victims families for generations, it's not just a north korean thing).

Jesus is also well-known if we go by that logic

Also it doesn't mean anything. If you're saying the numbers we have might be wrong, that is an useless statement for the purpose of comparing the two incidents.

I initially understood "bloodier" as in literal blood due to how corpses were handled. In which case I would agree that it was not as bloody. But I do think the term was for body count, in which case they're probably comparable.

My point is that the body count is not an apples to apples comparison, because neither number is precisely known. On the the China side, the information suppression and disinformation campaign started immediately regarding the number of casualties. This is very well documented. I have in my lap the book The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim- this book contains lots of evidenced that the body count was underrepresented. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the Gwangju Uprising to comment further on it.

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