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.
And we know the extent of US involvement in these coups and conflicts because the US declassified the info, becauase all info becomes declassified eventually.
When is the Dictatorship of China going to admit that this happened, when will they declassify the internal documents about this atrocity they were responsible for?
That’s the problem people have with the Chinese government. They can’t even acknowledge reality because they seek to eventually change the records of what really happened to pretend they did no wrong.
I agree that declassification is a great thing, but it is not so black and white. Not all info becomes declassified eventually, so much is covered up and destroyed.
For example, much is known about the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. Most of this information is known due to declassified documents. But these declassified documents also mention that there were over 100 My Lai-level massacres that occured, most of which we know nothing about. Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland was quoted saying we do a “My Lai each month”.
One of the largest, codenamed Speedy Express, reportedly killed 11,000 people, and was covered up at the highest levels.
I don’t care about your whataboutism meant to deflect
When is the Chinese government going to admit that they were responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre?
If you can’t answer that then fuck off tankie
My best guess is that the Chinese government will admit fault long into the future, when most of the accountability and backlash has already faded into history.
Which is no different than how the US has handled many of the atrocities I mentioned.
When will the US acknowledge and release info on the 100s of Yemeni and Pakistani civilian targets that were destroyed by drone strike? When will the US release the warcrimes reports from the War on Terror? Does the US even still have these warcrimes reports, or were they destroyed (as whistleblowers and Amnesty International have suggested they were)?
If you can’t answer questions like these without resorting to cries of “Whataboutism”, then fuck off hypocrite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
US declassification falls squarely into this domain. What gets released into the public record is enshrined as “The Truth” and what gets omitted is reserved to the domain of “Conspiracy Theory”. Thus a guy like Allen Dulles can sit on the committee that investigates the assassination of the President and author the copy that the CIA was in no way at fault or otherwise involved in the actions of a disgruntled former agent’s actions against the Chief Executive who personally fired Dulles three years earlier.
The Chinese Communist Party has its own version of Limited Hangout and goes to some length to assert that the riots in Tienanmen were the result of outside agitation, the civilian death toll was minimal, and the reforms that followed succeeded in restoring trust in the national government.
Westerners choose to ignore the official party line and rely on the equally unreliable narrations of participants who were fully opposed to the party, heavily invested in an insurgent opposition, and outspoken in their desire to abolish the CCP and have its leadership executed.
So you end up with a bunch of smug liberals denouncing Chinese state media as controlled, while regurgitating talking points that came straight out of the John Birch Society and the Falun Gong.
It’s propaganda all the way down. Nobody is giving you a complete and accurate picture of events. Any serious scholar must reconstruct events by bits and pieces, sifting through the enormous amounts of FUD. And when their work is completed… good luck finding it, because vanishingly few media moguls have an interest in promoting something that is insufficiently sensational.