Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
Narrator: “It did.”
Everyone should read this
https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs
Reading this whole thing never gets easier
Free West Taiwan! Someday, the White Sun will rise above Peking.
Give me democracy or give me death
Oh is this the terrible bad country we shipped our entire industrial base to?
Kent State says what?
No no no. This anniversary is about how communism is bad.
Tankies talking about Tiananmen Square without whataboutism:
Challenge Level = IMPOSSIBLE
The US won’t “forget” unless China pays the Dipshit-in-chief some payoff money. He’ll then EO that it never happened.
Maybe I’ll take Taiwan’s word on this one…
Whatever the US says, you just know it’s posturing hypocritical bullshit
Why is it being written as “date of 4 June”?
There’s a whole world outside of the US.
That didn’t answer my question. Is it the new lemmy thing to fuck with Americans for asking questions? I thought that was unique to Reddit but I guess not.
I guess us Americans will be stuck being stupid because non Americans refuse to answer questions to make a point that Americans are stupid.
You have the opportunity to learn something and instead you throw a tantrum
I literally asked the question. I don’t know non US date formatting. I know this story didn’t originate in China so it can’t be Chinese date formatting. We have the guardian in the Us as well but this formatting is not from the US. I am actively trying to learn something. A simple answer like “XYZ country formats their dates this way”. If you don’t know not answering would have been fine but the condescending response isn’t helpful.
i’ll bite… Almost all countries aside from America format their dates like this.
It amuses me the amount of effort you’ve put into this instead of just simply googling the answer
downvotes are from tankies
“Never forget” is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of “never forget” lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the “never forget” was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.
Germans should be critical of Israel then.
why?
Genocide
how are the 2 genocides similar to eachother?
You’re asking how two of the same thing are similar? Very strange. They share the same definition. They are similar in the ways that things with that label are similar.
Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
All of that is similar.
“Never again”:
- ❌ “We must never do what we did to the Jews in WW2 again”.
- ✅ “We can never allow what we did to the Jews in WW2 to happen again to anyone”.
The capitalism capital of the world probably shouldn’t be preaching about human rights.
Whataboutism.
Europe and China have already succeeded in poaching scientists that way, so not sure why it’d make you laugh.
why would you laugh at that??
“Efforts launched in regions including Europe, Canada, Australia and China range from enhanced funding opportunities to new programmes dedicated to wooing scientists, many backed by tens of millions of dollars. The trend has sparked a debate about whether luring US scientists abroad is the best way to support a global research community whose leading entity is under strain — and whether other nations can compete with historically high US levels of research funding.” - Nature Article. Source: The Article
Lol you’re the type of imbecile who would cry about Palestine and American imperialism, but then turn around and say shit like this. Marxists are a joke.
You’re not making much sense.
I’m saying you have no moral consistency. Think about it, what purpose does your comment serve besides defending this massacre? You’re simply mad that are people are recognizing it as such, and you want to shut down the criticism by screaming hypocrisy, but that in of itself is hypocritical because if China came out and recognized the trail of tears for example, you would be ecstatic with joy. You wouldn’t be crying about how China shouldn’t preach about human rights due to their extensive record of human rights abuses.
Tankie bot says what now? Get lost.
Every now and then I follow up and ask tankies what their actionable alternative is. They just never have one. Just making perfect the enemies of good. Tankies are deeply un-serious.
Best resource distribution (economic) model according to tankies: “Trust me bro”
I’d still rather have a more socialist society. Distribution based on markets means depriving those in need. Unfortunately tankies would rather leave vulnerable people to suffer the brutality of capitalism.
Shocking idea (this will blow your mind), but what if we dont fund a genocidal apartheid state? I mean not cut military aid by 30% or delay it three weeks, what if we just dont? What if we dont compromise with fascism?
If you abstain then you won’t have influence to stop funding genocide.
If you are serious please comment a real and actionable alternative.
The fact that voting inherently requires accepting fascism does not make fascism ok, it inherently makes liberal democracy fascist. As for a real and actionable alternative, building dual power through unions. Build communities from the bottom up to resist fascism and arm workers to prepare for eventual revolution.
The fact that voting inherently requires accepting fascism does not make fascism ok, it inherently makes liberal democracy fascist
I don’t see how that follows
Build communities from the bottom up to resist fascism and arm workers to prepare for eventual revolution.
I agree, but don’t you want to see some incremental progress for it in the mean time? We need political influence and tankies are just not good allies for it. Genocide is happening today. People are hungry and without medicine today. We can’t wait for a perfect revolution (those who wait are really just showing their privilege). Waiting for that also means leaving those you intended to help to die in the trenches. That in short is why I consider tankies un-serious.
I support the community building from the bottom up, but tankies are not doing that either. They are no shows on all fronts, and demoralizing our movements when we do try to do other things.
Agreed people are dying today, thats why we cant make these compromises. Compromising the lives of milliones of people based on what makes a bunch of privileged white liberals feel comfortable. Because right now only liberals are trying to equate the Palestinian Genocide with Palestinian resistance, thats what actural both sideism looks like.
Taiwan?
China?
Boy, you sure did get 'em. No pointing out bad behavior unless your history is unblemished, I guess.
US history is a little more than unblemished, though. Hell, not even history. They are literally arming a genocidal state as we speak.
Don’t forget that they are literally being lead by a political movement named after the history denying idea that they were “great” at some point and want to get back to that (never mind the other lie that the leaders of the movement don’t actually want to get back to any particular point in history despite the name)
So is China.
You could pick so many more things to criticize China for especially from its past, verifiable events, yet the west always picks Tiananmen Square, making sure to pick the image of the guy standing in front of the tank, but somehow always forgets to show the video of the guy climbing on top of the tank, asking soldiers to turn around to where the protesters are, and somehow forget mentioning that literally half the casualties were soldiers that were set ablaze. Even diplomatic cables at the time either leaked or declassified prove that.
The Tiananmen square massacre is a verified event. We literally have videos and pictures documenting the entire massacre. How much of an idiot do you have to be to believe low level Chinese propaganda about this being fake or a good thing?
So where are said videos of the massacre happening
I’ve seen images and footage put out by journalists. I’m just not bothered to re-locate them for the sake of a tankie.
Because they don’t exist. China is winning and you’re just a sore loser
In his dreams, along with destroying the three gorges dam and not seeing the irony in pretending to care about civilians.
Whataboutism
The most intriguing alt-history stuff I’ve read about it was that the protesters were “lefties” protesting the Dengist attempts at liberalization and confucianist reform, because in one of the videos the protesters were singing socialist anthems e.g. 1st international. It looked like the last gasp of the cultural revolution. But I’m not sure how to check any of this (certainly not from the Chinese archives and the rest of the world only has videos…and the cables you mention), it’s probably just another bullshit story to cover up what happened.
the guy was blocking the tanks from leaving tiananmen square too
I’m confused, I thought June 5th was the taboo ‘tank day’?
The massacre was on June 4th, and Tank Man was on the 5th. The involvement of the military lasted several days and the protests had been going on for a couple months.
Love the propaganda around this. Its very dramatic and all. But here in the west its held up as some big thing. The rest of the video never gets played.
in china they censor it on internet searches. thats why alot of thier netizens use proxies and anti-detect browsers.
You should(n’t) see the gruesome pictures. China is likely very happy that the tank man picture became famous when there were LOADS of other horrible images .
Especially this video where the ‘students’ hijacked a tank and fired it.
That video is really low res. Do you have any sources that prove that the moving object is a tank and that the people are students?
But honestly it doesn’t really matter because running over people because they are protesting a dictatorship is fucking gruesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre
Demonstrators attacked troops with poles, rocks, and molotov cocktails; Jeff Widener reported witnessing rioters setting fire to military vehicles and beating the soldiers inside them to death.[178] On one avenue in western Beijing, anti-government protestors torched a military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles.[179] They also hijacked an armored personnel carrier, taking it on a joy ride. These scenes were captured on camera and broadcast by Chinese state television.[180]
Good old peaceful demonstration strikes again. Luckily those students were not doing anything violent such as holding up a Palestine flag. Then the US media would tell us how violence against them is fully justified
So because the US media justifies the killing of Palestinians, China is justified in killing student protesters, is that what you want to say?
Also, you seem to be arguing that since some demonstrators are acting violent, shooting at, running over and oppressing student protesters are also justified? That sounds like the same logic Zionists use to justify killing Palestinians because some of them might be Hamas. You seem to agree with Zionists quite a lot.
Armed rioters burning cops alive are not “student protesters”.
The US media somehow manages to switch the two around for their propaganda purposes.
You apparently cannot tell the difference either.
And yet the student protesters are being run over despite your claim that only armed rioters are burning cops alive. The exact same reasoning Zionists use to justify killing Palestinians. Like I said, you think exactly like a Zionist, which is funny.
Has anyone claimed that the protests were entirely peaceful? Of course some turn violent when you roll in with your army and riot police gun blazing.
And thanks for confirming that it wasn’t a tank.
There really are no excuses for the killing of dozens if not hundreds of civilians and protestors.
And the protests were entirely peaceful to begin with but of course China couldn’t let that continue.
The censorship of the event also speaks a great deal about who’s fault it is.
The protesters on the square did not get shot. The Western media confirms nobody of the peaceful protesters on the square got killed.
Violent rioters who stoned and burnt police did get killed. On day4. There weer already multiple police killed on day3. Even Western media acknowledges all of what I am saying happened.
The censorship of the event also speaks a great deal about who’s fault it is.
The amazing amount of misinformation being spread here says a lot more about how insane the Western brainwashing machine is.
Which western media?
Nice use of selective quoting, the situation had already escalated at that point. From your source, one paragraph before yours:
The advance of the army was again halted by another blockade at Muxidi, about 5 km west of the square. After protesters repelled an attempt by an anti-riot brigade to storm the bridge, regular troops advanced on the crowd and turned their weapons on them. Soldiers alternated between shooting into the air and firing directly at protesters. Soldiers raked apartment buildings with gunfire, and some people inside or on their balconies were shot.
And, from the beginning of the section:
At 9:30 p.m, this army encountered a blockade set up by protesters at Gongzhufen in Haidian District, and made an attempt to break through. Troops armed with anti-riot gear clashed with the protesters and began firing rubber bullets and tear gas, while the protesters in return threw rocks and soda bottles at them. Other troops fired warning shots into the air, which was ineffective.
Who could’ve guessed that people turn violent when you start shooting them 😱
