The general who refused to crush Tiananmen's protesters | Hacker News Reader

The general who refused to crush Tiananmen's protesters

economist.com

136 pointsmarojejian55 comments

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archive: https://archive.is/k388E#selection-1339.61-1339.70

video of the trial (6 hours): https://youtu.be/1RBV9i4jaPo?si=oesH721IFLnmzEcW

May his name be remembered and on our lips for ever, and may his memory be a blessing for his family.

It might help to include the name: Xu Qinxian

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

Gutsy move by whoever got it out of the archive and into Wu’s hands.

Acts like this, along with rebellion against malicious use of authority when believed to be necessary (Hugh Thompson Jr., etc), are heroes of humanity imho.

Whitewashing CCP is a whole thing. This story is probably a part of it, somehow. In 30 years or so it will be completed.

Out of curiosity, what were China’s current leadership up to during the Tiananmen Square massacre?

The article mentions where Xi Jinping was.

> China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian during the unrest in 1989. But the PLA’s crushing of that unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse, clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from it all: the PLA must remain the party’s army and it must be kept under control. It all helps explain Mr Xi’s relentless “anti-corruption” drives among the high command.

Xi was 36 years old in 1989, older than almost all of the current Politburo members. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had very minor roles at that time. Xi’s role was at least partly because he was a princeling - his father was a comrade of Mao Zedong from the old days.

Was Xi himself a participant in the atrocities of the Cultural revolution? He would have been 23 when it ended.

Xi was a victim of the cultural revolution. His father was paraded as an enemy of the revolution, his mother was forced to denounce his father and his sister killed herself. Xi was sent to a rural village where he dug ditches and lived in a cave.

Makes his complete commitment to the Party that much more interesting. I think Chinese leaders see the path they took - always venerating Mao (unlike the Soviets who denounced Stalin) and taking brutal action against any who would challenge the party’s power (in Tiananmen, unlike Soviet parties) as vindicating the approach of trusting the Communist Party. They firmly believe that only the Communist Party can control China and make it strong. Any reform like what the Russians did would leave them weak, like Russia is.

Obviously we can’t read his mind, but I’d guess that he justifies the Cultural Revolution as the right thing because the Party cannot be questioned. If you question that it opens up a whole can of worms that leads to the weakening and destruction of the Party.

There is a podcast series about Xi’s rise that I can recommend: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/the-prince

Well, everyone under a socialist authoritarian regime will find themselves a victim sooner or later.

Either abroad or early career cadre in prefectures well outside of Beijing. What's more interesting is where were their parents doing during the Massacre.

I recommend reading Yashen Huang's "Rise and Fall of the E.A.S.T." [0] - it has a good overview of the cadre during Tiannamen - along with the dated but very comprehensive Tiannamen Papers [1]

[0] - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274912/the-rise-and-f...

[1] - https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/liang-zhang/the-tia...

Xi Jinping was probably in a province near Taiwan not at all close to Beijing power, it was a long time ago. His family had seen some hardships in the political game.

> His family had seen some hardships in the political game

Yes under Mao, but after Deng came to power the family regained significant political power.

Xi's father Xi Zhongxun was one of the Eight Elders [0] during the Deng era, and supported the Tiannamen crackdown. He was the Chairman of the Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee until 1993, and while the Chairman of the NPCSC (Wan Li) was in the US during the crackdown. He was also in charge of Guangdong after the Gang of Four were purged [1] and was the party leader who created what became the Shenzhen SEZ. And Xi Jinping's early mentor Geng Biao was the general who purged the Gang of Four [2] and worked with the US to modernize China's military capabilities [3].

The Geng Biao connection is a major reason why PLA Modernization is such a personal ambition of Xi's today - it was what gave him a major leg up in his career, and allowed him to differentiate himself from other Princelings and the Youth League cadre during his climb up the party ladder as well as during the succession showdown against Bo Xilai.

[0] - https://www.scmp.com/article/662093/eight-immortals-who-jock...

[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/07/16/x...

[2] - https://www3.nd.edu/~pmoody/Text%20Pages%20-%20Peter%20Moody...

[3] - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v13...

The video linked in the top post is via HRIC's (Human Rights in China) youtube chan. I used to see them at 2600's HOPE conferences in NYC in the early 2000s. I figure some of you may have seen them there as well. Neat to see that they're still going strong.

I believe some units also refused to do so.

To be perfectly clear, other generals had no such qualms. Many hundreds to thousands of student protesters were massacred by the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Army tanks.

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

Edit: To address latincommie's claims based on one of 250k "cables" (meant to be quick reports without much vetting) from that Assange/Manning leak: I think that a plausible explanation here is deception from PRC counter-intelligence. Chile was in a state of flux at the time, to say the least.

Salute to anyone like Xu Qinxian who refused to give up their own moral principals when facing inhumane commands from psychopath leaders like Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and so on. Also, for anyone who obeyed inhumane commands like mindless shells, you'll eat what you grow.

Note: Historical records reveal that the people behind the coordination of the Tiananmen Massacre (which this post is talking about) is Deng Xiaoping.

The article is paywall, but has anyone attempted to transcribe the whole thing?

Western media always gets Tiananmen wrong. Bro who help up the tanks, for example, was trying to convince them to stay and oppress the student movement. The tanks were leaving on the second day. It's just so very exhausting.

Yes, they were leaving, this was after they had cleared the square, but I can’t find anything that indicates “tank man” was trying to get them to stay. He wasn’t blocking the from entering (people do get this wrong) but was chastising them for what they had done. At least, that’s my understanding,

> Bro who help up the tanks, for example, was trying to convince them to stay and oppress the student movement.

Source?

Wikipedia article says nobody has a clue who he is/was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

Chinese state TV treated him like a protester, and spun it as an example of what nice guys the Chinese Army is:

  CHINA TELEVISION ANNOUNCER: [subtitles] Anyone with common sense can see that if our tanks were determined to move on, this lone scoundrel could never have stopped them. This scene flies in the face of Western propaganda. It proves that our soldiers exercised the highest degree of restraint.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcript.html

These are the sorts of people that deserve national holidays. Many of them come from problematic background, or had problematic politics, but when it mattered they showed up.

Let's include the Russians Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov, who both refused to start a nuclear war. There should be a permanent monument to all these folks in Greenland or something.

True, but they also help create the problems that they help to solve.

The general did not 'refuse' to crush the protests because the government did not want to crush them - the protesters were Maoists, who thought that the government had become too capitalist and wanted the army to do a coup to return to Maoism. They were preventing the tanks from getting out of the square - not entering - for that reason, and that's what the Tankman was doing in the magically cut/edited video of the BBC. Magically, because they cut a ~2 minute footage to almost 10 seconds, to parts showing only the close plane, because if you show it zoomed out, it becomes evident that the tankman was preventing the tanks from exiting the square.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk

And no, he did not die or anything - he just walked away with his bags full of food in the end - the food which he was carrying back to his comrades in the square, who were preventing the army from leaving.

Do you have any sources for that claim? You are correct that scene happened as the tanks were leaving but the rest of what you said isn’t back up by anything I’ve seen.

The rest requires a deep dive into the events:

https://www.quora.com/Was-there-really-a-massacre-at-Tiananm...

https://www.quora.com/Question-That-Contains-Assumptions-Did...

Salute to this guy, Xu Qinxian.

Funny how (possibly worse) anti-democratic massacres done by US allies (and much more recently) don't get continuous coverage US/Western/Business/Tech press.

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

Well I remember being taught about the Kent State massacre in school and how it was a stain on our country, and that we were learning about it because things like that need to be remembered, not forgotten.

Compare that how Tiananmen Square massacre is taught in China.

I assume the outsized focus on it is somewhat related to the lack of contrition and accountability.

> Well I remember being taught about the Kent State massacre in school and how it was a stain on our country, and that we were learning about it because things like that need to be remembered, not forgotten.

School taught you the wrong lesson about it. ~Half the country (guess which half) supported it... And I've no doubt that they'd do so again.

What specifically is the wrong lesson that you've inferred school taught the original commenter about it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you agree that it was "a stain on our country" and that it needs to be remembered.

The wrong lesson is that while the teacher may think it's a stain, and you and I think it's a stain and how any civilized person would think it's a stain, the country doesn't think it's a stain.

What's important about it isn't that it happened, or what we think about it. What's important is how many people didn't think it was a mistake - and wouldn't when it happens again.

It reveals a major blindspot.

I don't think that's right. I've never seen anyone claim that it was no big deal and doesn't reflect negatively on the politics of the 1970s.

There were people who argued that the shooting was the students' fault, certainly. But the students knew at the time that they were antagonizing people, and felt that it was worth the risk, predicting (correctly: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/50-years-after-kent-state-...) that future generations would see why their cause was worth fighting for. The only lesson I can see to take away from that is that violence is not the last word, and you should (as students at the time did) keep protesting even if people get shot for it.

I suppose there's also the lesson that de-escalation is an important tactical skill. But that's not controversial at all. Many recent National Guard deployments have been extremely conflicted (I'm still mad about them!), but both guard members and protestors have done a solid job at not needlessly antagonizing each other.

There are alternative stories about how the students attacked the soldiers who fired in self defense.

If the Chinese government had said “yeah, that happened” instead of denying there were protests at all, the obsession over it would vanish.

The gaslighting is ongoing, IMO that’s what keeps it in the western consciousness.

Not really, what keeps every media outlet doing that is the fact that China is the biggest economy in the world, and is an active enemy of western bourgeoisie. That is explicit defined in USA/UK and all major central capitalism countries currently.

You want another example of western hipocrisy? Everyone started worrying about a "massacre" on Xinjiang, WITHOUT ANY EVIDENCE (the source was... Radio Free Asia, which is CIA). But then, the Palestian massacre came to news again with Israel large-scale deleting women and children from existence, and suddently everyone forgot of Xinjiang and genociding middle-east people is allowed. Wonder why?

You and I experience very different media environments, if Palestine is not a topic of discussion in yours.

To others: if you’re downvoting a link a massacre because it feels like the wrong kind of comment, I encourage you to at least read through about the event. I had not learned about this before. It’s perfectly interesting and I think the comment is worth considering in its intent.

“On 14 August 2013, the Egyptian police and to a lesser extent the armed forces, under the command of then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, used lethal force to clear two camps of protesters in Cairo. Estimates of those killed vary from 600 to 2,600.”

Not that I’m one to do so, but comments like that usually get downvoted as it’s a quintessential example of whataboutism.

Egypts government is abhorrent.

I think there is room for a certain reasonable reaction to propagandized information like this. We focus certain bad things while ignoring others. Recognizing that we do ignore other bad things can be valuable context for how we interpret these stories.

I’m not sure this is whataboutism. To me at least, the distinguishing feature is using a whatabout as a form of deflection or absolution.

Well we’re talking about Egypt & rhetoric now, so …

"yeah, yeah, that's bad, BUT HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT"

Whataboutism doesn't give absolution, it's only meant to deflect, as ks2048 did.

Not only US allies but the US himself.

Every time one points out western hypocrisy, one gets accused of "whataboutism".

We aren't representing Western civilization here, so it's not hypocritical to believe that massacring civilians is wrong no matter who is doing the massacring.

More to the point, none of us control their country's relationship with massacre-friendly allies, making these discussions less than useful. If there's a useful point to be made by illustrating these relationships, it's that no one is really in control except those in the tanks and airplanes.

You seem to suggest the other person does not think it is wrong to massacre civilians. Where have you seen that?

And the point about "whataboutism" is very much true: used as a tool to silence people who dare to think differently.

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