China Snuffs Out Discussion of Tiananmen | Hacker News Reader

China Snuffs Out Discussion of Tiananmen

kahimyang.info

85 pointskulims28 comments

It is amazing the lengths the PRC takes to cover up this issue[1]. You would think at some point the party would disavow the actions of their predecessors or try and marginalize connections to the past event rather than keep sweeping it under the rug.

Next year will be the 25th anniversary, that will be interesting.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-censors-block-big-yel...

But it is working so "well!" Is this a cultural mechanism or just the poor way that the PRC handles it?

All the important things get stored in the memory hole.

Sustained double-digit growth rates work very well as an unrest suppresion device. Seriously: the Chinese people are simply too busy being vastly wealthier than their parents to notice their lack of personal freedoms or representation in government.

It's sad, but true. But it will correct itself eventually, hopefully with less bloodshed this time.

Parts of the Chinese nation are too busy being vastly wealthier than their parents. China has a decent-sized first and comparatively large second world economy embedded in the world's largest third-world economy.

This is true, but the third world economy is not the one that tends to revolt. Tiananmen was driven by students. And that demographic has been effectively pacified by the fantastic urban growth China has experienced over the last two decades.

Putting aside the reasons the third-world economy doesn't revolt or isn't seen actively revolting (being too busy trying to survive, having to deal with local officials and police that are part of the Confucian machinery, not having any significant outbound information channels in their geographic area, etc), the demographic of "student" is a constantly shifting one, and one that has been blocked from learning anything about Tienanmen for a quarter of a century. It is hard to form concepts about something that has been so effectively and actively suppressed, right to the level of the Great Firewall.

By contrast, we can still talk about the various Occupy movements (some of which continue to smolder in various corners of urban centers), just most people don't really care that much, the street theater got stale; that sort of effect is real, and could conceivably contribute to a nonchalant attitude in China towards Tienanmen today, but we won't know, because the Party has decided that everyone must not care by keeping anyone from trying to learn about it.

It's amazing the dogged persistence of the west in digging up events from more than 20 years ago and trying to carve the narrative of Chinese history of 1 billion people over the last 30 years around this event that lasted maybe two weeks and involved a few thousand. Think of the billions of people, their lives changing, the greatest mass migration in history to the cities, the greatest uplift in economic standards of people in world history and all that matters is this one event. The issue here is focus. What events are picked out of the trillions and magnified to encompass the whole expanse of our understanding about a particular topic and which ones are completely ignored yet hugely significant to people's lives?

But the PRC is still censoring it, right?

And the west is still endlessly editorializing about it. Excessive repetition is a kind of intellectual violence.

I can understand how it must hurt to get run over by an intellectual tank.

Since "the west" isn't a secret cabal, but rather a generally broad and open concensus opinion; I'd say that "their" editorializing on the actions of a secretive cabal to suppress information is rightfully poignant.

If the PRC didn't go to so much effort to censor this event (which was, beyond just the human cost, a very pivotal moment in authoritarian china development), it would likely get less attention. Streisand effect, writ large.

A few years ago I read that censorship around Tiananmen was becoming harder in places such as newspaper classifieds (not sure if this is the term used in North America, at least?) because the staff taking the calls for these ads were less likely to know what it was referencing.

That is to say, it was becoming easier to make a veiled reference to the event because the person doing up the ad didn't know that it happened, and so can't really censor anything that, I guess, isn't already on their 'censor radar'.

Like I say, it was something I read once and I have no link available. Interesting nonetheless (even if it isn't true).

The term "newspaper classified" has been replaced by "Craigslist".

Most newspapers still have classified sections. The term hasn't been replaced, it's just more common for people to use Craigslist (at least among younger people) than to use newspaper classifieds.

I don't know if it's common, but what you're talking about did happen. In 2007 someone slipped an ad into the Chengdu Evening News that said "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims".

The clerk who took the ad didn't know about the 1989 protests, and so let it go through. The mainland Chinese I've brought it up to certainly knew about it though.

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1253135/chinese-ev...

Article from the South China Morning Post on how people are commenting on this discretely.

The TV screenshot at timestamp 12:07 has a seemingly innocuous vox populi question, however the first character of the four options A, B, C, and D gives 毋忘六四 - don't forget 6-4 [Tiananmen Square incident].

It always amazes me how we like to talk about Tiananmen, but never ever mention Tlatelolco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre ).

Maybe, because a week after the massacre, and only 2 km away, we happily inaugurated the Olympic Games.

And not one Western country even got upset about what happened. After all, the Mexican one-party-state of the time were one of "our bastards".

(The same party that governs Mexico today).

I'm absolutely not downplaying what happened in Tlatelolco but I'd wager that in addition to the Olympics aspects, there are other things at play:

October 1968 was the height of the Vietnam War and a US Presidential election was less than a month away, US (and much of the world's) news coverage would have been focused on those. The Soviet Union was still the big ugly monster in the room which means most world history classes focused on that period would talk Cold War and detente.

On the other hand, June 1989 was a time of relative peace in the western world. The Soviet Union was around but waning as the Berlin Wall would fall just months later.. which makes Tiananmen stand out that much more.

I think most importantly is that cable news and the 24 hour news cycle had been born in the interim. It meant that we saw footage from Tiananmen Square practically as it was happening.

Here is also a good round-up of the Tiananmen '89 at Epoch Times: http://epochtim.es/s9Nz

What I didn't know is that according to the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, the "Tank Man" life ended that day, when he ran out in front of another column of tanks from a different unit, which didn't stop and smashed him...Wei got this information from his former classmate, who was a commander of that tank column on the iconic photo.

Just like they snuffed out those students? Commie cowards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Not to be that guy (everything bad said about someone else must be followed up with something bad about yourself), but we have our shameful moments also. At least we let you talk about it, though.

EDIT:

Thanks for the replies. For some strange reason, I actually thought that the Tiananmen square was a low casualty count incident - I didn't actually realize the full extent of it. Pretty fucking horrible, actually. No wonder they don't like to let you talk about it.

I feel the Kent State shootings give some kind of scale to the event. There, four people were killed, and we still listen to the Neil Young song about it. It's hard to imagine what hundreds or thousands of deaths (Wikipedia) would feel like.

Well, we do have hundreds-of-unexpected-deaths events in recent memory (Sep. 11 2001 ~= 3000) though, conspiracy theory notwithstanding, that's not our own government doing it. Also, there were fires and explosions and billions in property damage and clouds of toxic smoke.

Oddly enough, I can't actually name any songs about the event off the top of my head, though.

Here's a few:

Alan Jackson - "Where were you when the world stopped turning" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvj6zdWLUuk

Pete Schmidt - Lost in New York

Darryl Worley - Have you forgotten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6yLQRF-cEU

Springsteen - The Rising (lower link includes plane impact footage) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNnB4dkVRJI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmSllqr6Qzs

Comparing the two is ridiculous. At Kent State, you had 13 seconds of shooting by 29 national guardsmen resulting in 4 deaths, with no investigation yielding the suggestion that it was sanctioned by anybody higher up. At Tiananmen you had hours of shootings by two units of the Chinese army with mechanized brigades resulting in hundreds of deaths (some sources suggest into the thousands--another key distinction is that in the U.S. we know exactly who was killed and indeed memorials stand near the site for each one), while there was communication with the top level leadership the whole time.

Aside from the scale, look at what followed. The followup at Kent State was shameful by Western standards, but at least the response included: 1) A President's Commission which concluded that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." 2) A state grand jury investigation; 3) A probe by the DOJ, which pushed for prosecution of the guardsman; 4) A federal grand jury investigation that resulted in indictments of 8 guardsman; 5) Two Supreme Court decisions in favor of the students; 6) Two civil trials resulting in a settlement between Ohio and the victims.

At Kent State, there were multiple opportunities for ordinary people in civil and criminal juries to punish those that pulled the triggers. There was nothing like that after Tiananmen.

Exactly. Thank you for saying so.

The Chinese army surrounded the block, sent flares up into the sky, and then mowed down the entire crowd with machine guns ... a deliberate massacre.

A few members of the US army, in a tense situation with rocks flying at them, lost it and fired a few shots that shouldn't have been fired. It was over almost immediately when the soldiers realized what they had done. It was terrible, but it was also a mistake, and not an orchestrated, deliberate mass-execution. I don't want to make light of the event; it's just nowhere near the same.

And as you said, every single American student is taught about the Kent State event, and the American military is carefully trained to avoid a repeat. The Chinese government, on the other hand, lets everyone know they'd gladly do it again by working so hard to cover up any knowledge of the event.

So while the one response involves shame and consequences for those involved, the other uses the event to accomplish even more intimidation against free speech.

It's telling that the Tank Man photo is only famous among the 84% of the world outside China. Within, if you ask a young person what it's a picture of and what event it represents, they'll be genuinely confused.

We should also give praise to the heroic measures American journalists of that era used to ensure we had the infamous photo & video footage of the event. They caught it from their hotel rooms, and Chinese officials broke down their doors immediately afterward to confiscate the footage. Let's just say the journalists hid the film really well.

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