This has two interesting issues right in the first sentence.
Most I know are generally opposed to violence, with some exceptions allowed for . . .
The idea of violence being a categorical bad with “exceptions” where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment. Violence has severe downsides that mean that it should be minimized, but the degree to which it can be minimized without some greater downside (particularly violence from another party) coming about or continuing is something that varies situation to situation. Sometimes violence isn’t useful, so its introduction only has downsides. Sometimes it is one of several options that are all reasonably arguable. Sometimes it is clearly the only option to prevent a much greater violence.
with some exceptions allowed for any revolution or class struggle.
[Setting aside the word “any” there] What do you think these words, “revolution” and “class struggle,” mean?
Do you think a revolution – or whatever makes it worthwhile, since that surely is not revolution for its own sake – is something that is achieved eternally after fighting for a few years, or something that must be continuously protected from forces trying to sabotage you from all angles?
Do you think that “class struggle” is something where you hang a few capitalists, wash your hands of the blood, and then kick back and relax? Or is it a continuous process of trying to resolve the contradictions in society on a basis that follows the broad democratic consensus of the working class? There are going to be workers who are bought off by capital, or radicalized by cults it supports, or any number of other things, and these workers will then seek to destroy your socialist state while Trotskyists in the North Atlantic cheer them on. Do you let this small group – typically representing foreign powers or the most monstrous of infections you have let fester in your own society – dictate the destruction of the socialist state even as the majority wishes for it to be preserved?
I am reminded of a quote from Michael Parenti in one of his lectures:
Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of the society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo. These have distorting effects upon a society…
When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago, filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing, and it wasn’t about themselves, even though they had to do it to themselves. It was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police. They discovered that they needed a security police because all around them, coming in from two borders and within their own society, were acts of sabotage, espionage, attack, mercenary invasion and the like, and they understood that if the revolution was going to survive, it would have to build up instruments of state power, instruments of coercion even, and these instruments, by the way, can make mistakes, and these instruments can not only make mistakes. They can commit some serious crimes, although in Nicaragua the impressive record is how few crimes there were, given the utterly dire conditions they were under.
(It’s worth noting that “secret police,” as far as I can tell, is what you call the “intelligence agency” of a country hostile to the US)
This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students – who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate – but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.
Unfortunately for the CPC, there was also a group of students (a tiny subset of the larger movement) being lead by people who were either religious zealots (Christians, in this case) or bought off and were consciously making the group stand its ground in hopes that they would be caught in the crossfire, which happened in some cases. We know this in part because one of those leaders very helpfully told us as much in an interview. She did escape and had a fruitful career in the US working with various Republican think tanks and the like. I assume that the recruitment vector was her being Christian, but I don’t know.
Anyway, that’s just a very basic overview because I thought I shouldn’t leave your actual claims uncontested, but I mostly wrote this comment for the first couple of paragraphs.
The idea of violence being a categorical bad with “exceptions” where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment.
I am pointing out what I have perceived as the general consensus among socialists that I interact with, not trying to make any assessment, immaterial or otherwise in the above comment.
In so far as exactly when violence is justified, I believe that it is highly contextual, and ought to be justifiable so as not to allow abuse of power.
This last point is also where I believe we disagree, because were it factually correct that the various violence-monopolies that you refer to always meted out justifiable violence in perfectly proportional portions in order to protect the proletariat or some other noble cause, I would perhaps consider it a fair point. However I don’t think having an “intelligence agency” with little to no oversight with a license to kill and abuse their own citizens results in the best end result for the citizenry, and frequently it seems that the most vulnerable citizens receive the hardest end of the stick.
This isn’t to say that I can’t agree with it in principle, only that whatever the Tiananmen square massacre was, it was a far cry from a being the proportional and justifiable response to an outside threat.
This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students – who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate – but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.
If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable. Just ask any flat-earther or holocaust-denier. While it’s most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:
I fell as I ran, together with the students, for our lives. The troops always came up, chased and beat us; dispersed and hit with baton viciously the students who came before them, falling, crawling and running in panic. We didn’t dare to stay, being dealt blows while running. As I fell again, the troops came up and hit me twice. Luckily I was not injured, but it still hurt. They hit with all their might, with no sympathy. Many students are pushed down, hit to the point that their heads bled and the blood spilt onto me.
~ Hui, W. (2019). Ten Questions about June-4th
Furthermore, in the book Hui also mentions 5 protestors that were shot dead within the first phase of the Tiananmen square dispersal, all supported by evidence from verified sources. While 5 people dead is not a massacre (that happened later), it does show that the PLA were not simply some “unarmed soldiers supervising the protests”.
It’s difficult to understand the chaos and pandemonium of that event, where several elements of the army ended up fighting each other as well as protestors. u/SickHobbit on r/askhistorians sums up quite thoroughly here in this excellent response: Why were the 27th Army Group killing other Army Groups/Police at Tiananmen Square?
If you are interested in some actual academic sources on the topic, I would recommend these:
Béja, Jean-Philippe. The impact of China’s 1989 Tiananmen massacre. 2010.
Brook, Timothy. Quelling the people: The military suppression of the Beijing democracy movement. 1998.
Lim, Louisa. The people’s republic of amnesia: Tiananmen revisited. 2014
This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.
If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable.
When you stay in the realm of aphorism, it is much easier to support this thesis. When trying to apply this in the concrete it falls apart here. I am talking about photos and videos, typically from western journalists, of the events leading up to June 4th. They didn’t come from a parallel world, nor were they synthesized from thin air because someone wanted to believe in them.
While it’s most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:
You are failing to follow the simple timeline I explained before, which makes your attempt at refutation worthless even if we supposed you were correct. Your quote is from the dispersal, when I referred to unarmed soldiers supervising the protest, I was there talking about the period prior to the dispersal, and the lynching was immediate prior to it. Obviously during the dispersal itself, people were struck if they were not already outside of the square, but I don’t think anyone was shot since it’s plainly the case that no one died. Let’s make this as easy as possible:
Here you can see linked a number of western sources which a) show that the 10,000 dead estimate is hysterical and recanted by the person that said it (despite some people in this very fucking thread asserting it!) and b) that no one died in the square itself. Hundreds did obviously die in the ensuing violence around the square, but anyone claiming that, for example, five people in the square itself were immediately shot should be regarded as unreliable.
I’m curious how you believe the lynching took place during or after the dispersal. Being technical, I think the two soldiers in question here were killed by other means and then strung up after (along with being stripped and immolated), but if the military was already on the offensive at that point, how would this be accomplished? It seems like an absurd ritual to engage in while rifles and tanks are coming for you, and we do have photographs of these corpses and their onlookers. I’ve avoided linking them because they are graphic photos and that also makes them a nuisance to find, but I can dig them up if this is a real sticking point for you.
In order to have an actual conversation, I believe having a common understanding of the facts is a premise, agreed?
Firstly, the number of people who died has a 200-10 000 range.
Timothy Brook (referenced above) makes a good argument for 2 600, which matches the number the Chinese Red Cross gave multiple journalists at the time and so that is what I am most inclined to believe. The baseline is in any case higher than 200, because Beijing hospital records show 500 dead, which does not include any killings carried out on the street since they presumably did not die at the hospitals. It is also probably lower than 10 000, as you mentioned.
Secondly, the case of the 5 murdered people in the square itself. Wu Renhua, author/historian and Choi Shufen (who is the one quoted above by Hui) name these:
Huang Xinhua (I could not find a link, possibly spelled)
* Wu R. 天安門血腥清場內幕 and 六四事件中的戒嚴部隊, both available on amazon
You are failing to follow the simple timeline
This is not intentional, any simple timeline is hard to follow since the events happened over an extended period of time, and there were presumably many interactions between goverment forces and protestors leading up to the events that happened on June 3-4. So far what I have read on the subject suggests that violence directed towards PLA may have been e.g. pelting by stones or similar in the week before June 4, however I have not seen good sources claiming civilians were actually killing and lynching soldiers at any time prior to when the massacre actually began. If you do have such sources, I am open to changing my mind, although I do not think Twitter threads or Youtube videos should be seen as good sources, and are not likely to change my mind.
This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.
Comments like this are uncouth and unproductive. I don’t appreciate being talked down to, and I will do my best to return the favour if you can do the same for me.
Comments like this are uncouth and unproductive. I don’t appreciate being talked down to, and I will do my best to return the favour if you can do the same for me.
I should have been more specific that a “conversation” to me is a little different from the formal exercise of a “debate” or what have you, and that formal exercise, especially when it’s littered with tacit assumptions that are much easier to drop in than to unpack and refute, such as:
However I don’t think having an “intelligence agency” with little to no oversight with a license to kill and abuse their own citizens results in the best end result for the citizenry
It’s just not very engaging to me, you know? But that’s fine, if anything you’ll benefit from me not going on for too long because I’m excited by ideas I’m discussing, we can just have a simple exercise in looking at evidence and I’ll be more mindful of my tone. I apologize for letting myself come off so rudely.
That having been said:
If you do have such sources, I am open to changing my mind, although I do not think Twitter threads or Youtube videos should be seen as good sources, and are not likely to change my mind.
I don’t plan on using those sources, but I would like to point out that you either are expressing yourself poorly or have a mistaken idea here.
Either you mean to say that “Someone on the internet saying ‘Just trust me bro’” is not a good source
Or you are concerned with platforms being “academic” in a way that is tied up in silly formalism.
[I was going to include for option one that “Having the task of argument be exported to a video essay is kind of obnoxious,” but on the other hand having it exported to a book is arguably much more obnoxious, so I think the main issue is sourcing]
Obviously I agree with the first version, but then it’s good to talk about sourcing more plainly. In the second case, well, I think you drastically underestimate the pablum that gets published in academic journals. You can find people saying any old thing so long as it’s a thesis that is friendly to the publisher or the publisher’s audience. I did a research paper on Michael Parenti not too long ago and let me tell you, the “literature” attacking him in peer-reviewed journals is dog shit, plain and simple. Just the most insipid and unsubstantiated arguments you’ve ever seen. There was one that could have been a good critique if the author had a limited enough scope for the length of what they were writing to not leave their thesis completely hanging, but that review was a shining city on a hill compared to the others.
But if you want something a little more relevant, I’ll mention that people do indeed lie in books, and there are multiple cottage industries dedicated to producing stories with no concern for if they are lies or not so long as they support a certain range of theses [example]. If we were talking about the DPRK (let’s not), it would not be a good idea to crack open Yeonmi Park’s memoir and quote from it as believable witness testimony.
Anyway, back to the main subject:
In order to have an actual conversation, I believe having a common understanding of the facts is a premise, agreed?
Agreed
Firstly, the number of people who died has a 200-10 000 range.
Even the journo who said 10k recanted! His high-end estimate was like 3.5k or something, which is still way higher than others but way less than what he said before.
Well, whatever, that part isn’t important at the moment.
I keep finding tangents, but you generally also agree that the HRIC isn’t a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right? Since whatever might be said of the authors you mention, the website doesn’t list so much as a witness of the killings on any of the four profiles. Mind you, several students did die (I think the lowest estimate is 30-something, along with ~200 other fatalities) and I am not contesting that these were real people who were killed by the PLA in that area at around that time (though June 3rd is listed for one and that seems early), merely that these accounts are not compelling for the argument that people died in the square. The US by this point is infamous for laundering its foreign policy goals through NGOs like the NED.
We also have this article citing both a Reuters reporter and a Chinese dissident who support that there was no death in the square. It should be noted that, if I am reading both accounts correctly, the reporter would have been in very close proximity to where one of the students you listed was said to have died (“beneath the national flag”). While the image is full of pathos, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
In any case, it’s no wonder that monsters like Chai Ling, the student leader who infamously gave the interview before the fact about trying to drive her flock into gunfire, would later give sensational reports of slaughter when they themselves weren’t even present at the time said slaughter supposedly happened. I hope Youtube is acceptable when it’s for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast. I hadn’t personally seen the clips after the first interview with Chai Ling until looking it up just now. I’ve gotta say, though I obviously am politically against him, Hou Dejian seems admirable.
Regarding the lynching [and let me correct myself again that it might have been an immolated corpse that was strung up by its neck, i.e. the hanging was not the cause of death, though burning an unarmed person to death sure qualifies by the informal definition of "lynching], I guess step one is to dig up those photos . . . You would not believe how annoying it is, but it makes sense that the photos would be constantly taken down.
[Massive CW for extreme violence and some nudity] Found it, scroll down to just shy of halfway and you will see the graphic images. I think even from the pictures alone, the timeline is self-evident, since civilians would not be left in such close proximity to corpses (or torched tanks) after the violence concluded. It’s plain that some “protestors” (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated. It was probably a slightly larger number who were involved in messing with the vehicles, since that appeals to a basic hooliganism (see the people still standing on top of one).
I’m less interested in tallying the specific death toll than the more definable and finite issues like “Were soldiers killed beforehand?” and “Did anyone die in the square itself?” Of course, those aren’t the only questions and we can do the tallying thing if you insist, but I wanted to start by focusing on the more clear-cut topics.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
if anything you’ll benefit from me not going on for too long because I’m excited by ideas I’m discussing
Actually, I don’t really mind long winded tangents as long as they are interesting, funny or preferably both!
Either you mean to say that “Someone on the internet saying ‘Just trust me bro’” is not a good source
Pretty much this. “bro” science, lessons from the “school of hard knocks”, insane 4 hr yt videos with absolutely no source references and Twitter threads with wild statements corroborated by screenshots from some obscure source… I could go on but it seems you understand what I mean.
Even the journo who said 10k recanted!
Yes, 10k is inaccurate. At the same time though, you have the mayor of Beijing claiming 200, the Ministry of Public Security claiming 563, while hospital records show about 500 as a minimum baseline, so I guess as far as official sources go we can’t really trust them either. 2 600 seems like the best estimate based on what I have found, which is still a huge number if you ask me when compared to other protests of similar size in western countries, consider e.g. the frequently quite violent protests in Paris and how the police there doesn’t murder a few thousands just because the government doesn’t agree with the protests (apologies for the digression).
(you) agree that the HRIC isn’t a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right?
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
While the image is full of pathos, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
It’s also worth noting that the various armies called in acted quite differently from one another, since some were more or less local to the city and others were pulled from far away places, with no local attachments and with varying levels of sympathetic commanders - so it’s quite possible that some groups of soldiers would have acted compassionately while others would have been more keen to shoot first and ask questions later. This is also supported by the fighting and killing between the different armies, and could (in part) explain the differences between the eye witness reports.
I hope Youtube is acceptable when it’s for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast
It’s fine, I am not watching 3 hours of unsubstantiated claims but 6 minutes is alright.
It’s plain that some “protestors” (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated.
I don’t think it’s that plain. As mentioned, you have several elements all killing each other at various points:
Violent elements among protestors
Elements of the PLA sympathetic to protestors
Elements of the PLA with a “strong political” sense, loyal to the regime
Within that, you have soldiers being suddenly surrounded and encouraged by protestors to rise up against their perceived tyrants, you have civilians witnessing the murder of their friends and you have soldiers fearing for their lives - soldiers I might add that might have had no freaking idea what is happening because up until that point they were happily living their lives as illiterate farmers and now suddenly there’s chaos and their commander is telling them to defend themselves and now everyone without a uniform starts looking like a threat.
So you see, I don’t think I can attribute a lot of confidence to reports claiming that the protestors started lynching soldiers which in turn made them open fire. I think it’a an order of magnitude more likely that things got out of hand after the first phase of the dispersal, people were then hurt and things escalated from there up until the point where you have civilians stringing up burnt corpses in the street, soldiers summarily executing protestors and tanks running over people.
Regardless, a command was centrally issued and the consequence was a slaughter. Responsibility for the murders falls on the government of the PRC in my opinion, mens rea and actus reus.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
Here’s a place where perhaps I can be helpful, since I feel like I won’t be much use elsewhere. Pay close attention to the way that the anticommunists here talk about their opposition and imagine being the subject of that talk by a substantial portion of this userbase and basically the entire mainstream of other websites like Reddit (of which it borders on being a carbon copy). It’s easy to see Marxists referred to as “red fascists,” “genocide deniers,” sometimes flat-out “Nazis,” along with being accused of being a “shill,” a “bot,” a “troll,” a foreign agent (you can see people complaining about “how many Russians” are on this site, but they don’t actually have reason to believe many Russians are here). All of that sits behind the sneering accusation of “tankie.”
Now, it’s kind of whatever to me when it’s online – and this sort of “anti-tankie” framework almost always is – but some people take that sort of thing as a serious insult because equating someone to Nazis is a pretty serious insult. All this while the people making the accusation bandy about things like the 10k figure we discussed, which is just ridiculous but you are treated as a holocaust denier for trying to interrogate its dogma. Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
So, I don’t encourage people to get needlessly combative, but I can slip into it myself and I struggle to fault others who do so as well (though I encourage them to take things dispassionately!). I hope that that explains a little bit of it, because personal insult just saturates the environment in some places.
Regarding the rest of this, let me know if the organization of information is too hectic and I’ll rewrite it.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
I do not doubt that these are real people who are dead, let me repeat that again. That said, these 5 are singled out because they supposedly died in the square.
I’ve presented you with witness testimony from multiple sources saying that people were not, in fact, killed in the square and the crowd was dispersed pretty uneventfully (though I think to actually reach the square in the first place people were beat back with batons to make way). Most of the people were already gone before the dispersal because most of the protestors listened to the warnings and the deadline.
Quoting the photo article:
“Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw,” said Lilley in his cable, “the students left the square through the southeast corner. Essentially everyone, including Gallo, left. The few that attempted to remain behind were beaten and driven to join the end of the departing procession.”
The square was mostly cleared peacefully and those who refused were beaten with batons to drive them out. They weren’t just wantonly shot.
There’s no reason that the student leader who said he stayed until 6:30 AM wouldn’t have seen this victim, since the victim was shot “early in the morning on June 4th” and the leader witnessed the square being cleared, just as many others did. Perhaps if you have other information that complicates the case, that will be worth considering, but it seems like the simplest answer is that he was somewhere else at the time he was shot. Perhaps he was at the flag, then cleared the square, got caught up in the ensuing fighting elsewhere, and was shot then, with his body only properly discovered and identified by people who knew him after the shooting occurred. The story you linked to doesn’t give any indication that he was, for example, with friends who saw him get killed.
Perhaps his friends were with him, but then it raises the question of why they were not also shot and how they were able to arrange transportation to get him to the hospital where he succumbed, which the article might prefer to gloss over.
Which reminds me:
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
This is exactly what I mean about how you don’t need to censor a story, just make your version much more accessible, because we keep getting these reactions along the lines of “well, I don’t endorse the source here, it’s just the first one I saw”. Just something to think about.
If those books provide any more details that could be pertinent to the evaluation of this guy’s case, I invite you to share them with me, but I hope you can understand that I’m not going to go and buy a book so I can evaluate you claims unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance involved.
You can take more time to look over the information I gave you, since there were a few things made clear that I think you missed. Chief among them is that this isn’t a Boston Massacre situation, despite the obvious parallels. Unlike the redcoats, the PLA who were outside of vehicles and present and supervising the protest were unarmed. I never even insinuated that the protestors threw an incendiary at a soldier and then the others started blasting – they couldn’t even if they wanted to! That segment had no guns! Though it seems that the soldiers who were in military vehicles were armed, and the victims were inside military vehicles.
What I am saying is that the severity of the crackdown and the ensuing violence were in part brought on by the harsh escalation of these militants hiding among the more mundane protestors committing murder against an unarmed soldier and then hanging up his corpse like a declaration of war! Well, they killed a couple, but one or two were just hung against a wreck while another was actually suspended in the air (I believe under a bridge). This was all well before the night of the crackdown, though I don’t know exactly when.
I’ve been using a framework loosely based on how crimes are sometimes argued, by establishing witnesses and timelines and looking for inconsistencies or other possible explanations. What could possibly have happened to produce this situation otherwise, with a soldier’s corpse strung up in broad daylight with people able to just stand around and gawk at it? It only makes sense as being before the crackdown, when civilians could just stand around and gawk in broad daylight (rather than, at the gentlest, be pushed away by troops securing the area, possibly shot if they resisted) and the body is still strung up rather than taken down (as it would be after the crackdown ended and people could return to the area). There’s no way that these pictures were taken during the fighting, no one is behaving like there is gunfire going off nearby.
Drawing again from the article with the photo, since we actually don’t need to speculate just with the photo:
The Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tienanmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many others were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.
Unless the soldiers were sleeping on-site or taking 70-hour shifts, that means the murders probably took place the night of June 2 - 3 or thereabout, since they surely would have had another chance to report back otherwise. The article likewise says that the corpses were seemingly from vehicles getting petrol bombed, extracted from the vehicle, and strung up on the night of the 2nd to 3rd.
It’s worth noting that there’s a huge difference in how you approach a situation between “There’s an unruly group of protestors we need to remove” vs “There’s a pretty amicable group of protestors that also has militant splinters that have killed other soldiers via incendiaries – possibly provided by the US – and strung the corpse up. Oh, and they stole some guns too”. Suddenly, people carrying such weapons – which you are now looking for among every bag and bottle – are established to not only be quite capable of killing you but seemingly out for blood, considering the display they made of the corpse.
Thank you, I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
I think I will need to think a bit further on the subject, so I will definitely have a look at it again with fresh eyes, but I thank you for challenging my assumptions and providing me with sources I had not previously seen. Even though I can’t say that I have changed my mind, at least you have made me reconsider it.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
Ah, well, no worry in any case.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that’s something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss – the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square – the CPC told the truth.
Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven’t seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I’m not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it’s very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn’t see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.
Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of “Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press,” which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn’t seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we’re not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was – if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it’s quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that’s a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.
In terms of victims who have been identified, let’s look again at Wikipedia:
The Tiananmen Mothers, a victims’ advocacy group co-founded by Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose children were killed by the government during the crackdown, have identified 202 victims as of August 2011. In the face of government interference, the group has worked painstakingly to locate victims’ families and collect information about the victims. Their tally had grown from 155 in 1999 to 202 in 2011. The list includes four individuals who committed suicide on or after 4 June for reasons related to their involvement in the demonstrations.[citation needed][g]
Former protester Wu Renhua of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an overseas group agitating for democratic reform in China, said that he was only able to identify and verify 15 military deaths. Wu asserts that if deaths from events unrelated to demonstrators were removed from the count, only seven deaths among military personnel might be counted as from being “killed in action” by rioters.
As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being “killed in action” by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn’t be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn’t being killed “in action,” though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.
More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that’s taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I’m not saying they should have every name – Tank Man hasn’t been identified either, though he also wasn’t killed – but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.
Anyway, I still don’t have much to say about the tallying business because it’s honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that’s fair enough on your part).
*which, let me be clear, isn’t some “outside agitators” thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.
Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!
This has two interesting issues right in the first sentence.
The idea of violence being a categorical bad with “exceptions” where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment. Violence has severe downsides that mean that it should be minimized, but the degree to which it can be minimized without some greater downside (particularly violence from another party) coming about or continuing is something that varies situation to situation. Sometimes violence isn’t useful, so its introduction only has downsides. Sometimes it is one of several options that are all reasonably arguable. Sometimes it is clearly the only option to prevent a much greater violence.
[Setting aside the word “any” there] What do you think these words, “revolution” and “class struggle,” mean?
Do you think a revolution – or whatever makes it worthwhile, since that surely is not revolution for its own sake – is something that is achieved eternally after fighting for a few years, or something that must be continuously protected from forces trying to sabotage you from all angles?
Do you think that “class struggle” is something where you hang a few capitalists, wash your hands of the blood, and then kick back and relax? Or is it a continuous process of trying to resolve the contradictions in society on a basis that follows the broad democratic consensus of the working class? There are going to be workers who are bought off by capital, or radicalized by cults it supports, or any number of other things, and these workers will then seek to destroy your socialist state while Trotskyists in the North Atlantic cheer them on. Do you let this small group – typically representing foreign powers or the most monstrous of infections you have let fester in your own society – dictate the destruction of the socialist state even as the majority wishes for it to be preserved?
I am reminded of a quote from Michael Parenti in one of his lectures:
(It’s worth noting that “secret police,” as far as I can tell, is what you call the “intelligence agency” of a country hostile to the US)
This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students – who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate – but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.
Unfortunately for the CPC, there was also a group of students (a tiny subset of the larger movement) being lead by people who were either religious zealots (Christians, in this case) or bought off and were consciously making the group stand its ground in hopes that they would be caught in the crossfire, which happened in some cases. We know this in part because one of those leaders very helpfully told us as much in an interview. She did escape and had a fruitful career in the US working with various Republican think tanks and the like. I assume that the recruitment vector was her being Christian, but I don’t know.
Anyway, that’s just a very basic overview because I thought I shouldn’t leave your actual claims uncontested, but I mostly wrote this comment for the first couple of paragraphs.
I am pointing out what I have perceived as the general consensus among socialists that I interact with, not trying to make any assessment, immaterial or otherwise in the above comment.
In so far as exactly when violence is justified, I believe that it is highly contextual, and ought to be justifiable so as not to allow abuse of power.
This last point is also where I believe we disagree, because were it factually correct that the various violence-monopolies that you refer to always meted out justifiable violence in perfectly proportional portions in order to protect the proletariat or some other noble cause, I would perhaps consider it a fair point. However I don’t think having an “intelligence agency” with little to no oversight with a license to kill and abuse their own citizens results in the best end result for the citizenry, and frequently it seems that the most vulnerable citizens receive the hardest end of the stick.
This isn’t to say that I can’t agree with it in principle, only that whatever the Tiananmen square massacre was, it was a far cry from a being the proportional and justifiable response to an outside threat.
If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable. Just ask any flat-earther or holocaust-denier. While it’s most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:
~ Hui, W. (2019). Ten Questions about June-4th
Furthermore, in the book Hui also mentions 5 protestors that were shot dead within the first phase of the Tiananmen square dispersal, all supported by evidence from verified sources. While 5 people dead is not a massacre (that happened later), it does show that the PLA were not simply some “unarmed soldiers supervising the protests”.
It’s difficult to understand the chaos and pandemonium of that event, where several elements of the army ended up fighting each other as well as protestors. u/SickHobbit on r/askhistorians sums up quite thoroughly here in this excellent response: Why were the 27th Army Group killing other Army Groups/Police at Tiananmen Square?
If you are interested in some actual academic sources on the topic, I would recommend these:
This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.
When you stay in the realm of aphorism, it is much easier to support this thesis. When trying to apply this in the concrete it falls apart here. I am talking about photos and videos, typically from western journalists, of the events leading up to June 4th. They didn’t come from a parallel world, nor were they synthesized from thin air because someone wanted to believe in them.
You are failing to follow the simple timeline I explained before, which makes your attempt at refutation worthless even if we supposed you were correct. Your quote is from the dispersal, when I referred to unarmed soldiers supervising the protest, I was there talking about the period prior to the dispersal, and the lynching was immediate prior to it. Obviously during the dispersal itself, people were struck if they were not already outside of the square, but I don’t think anyone was shot since it’s plainly the case that no one died. Let’s make this as easy as possible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Other_estimates
Here you can see linked a number of western sources which a) show that the 10,000 dead estimate is hysterical and recanted by the person that said it (despite some people in this very fucking thread asserting it!) and b) that no one died in the square itself. Hundreds did obviously die in the ensuing violence around the square, but anyone claiming that, for example, five people in the square itself were immediately shot should be regarded as unreliable.
I’m curious how you believe the lynching took place during or after the dispersal. Being technical, I think the two soldiers in question here were killed by other means and then strung up after (along with being stripped and immolated), but if the military was already on the offensive at that point, how would this be accomplished? It seems like an absurd ritual to engage in while rifles and tanks are coming for you, and we do have photographs of these corpses and their onlookers. I’ve avoided linking them because they are graphic photos and that also makes them a nuisance to find, but I can dig them up if this is a real sticking point for you.
In order to have an actual conversation, I believe having a common understanding of the facts is a premise, agreed?
Firstly, the number of people who died has a 200-10 000 range.
Timothy Brook (referenced above) makes a good argument for 2 600, which matches the number the Chinese Red Cross gave multiple journalists at the time and so that is what I am most inclined to believe. The baseline is in any case higher than 200, because Beijing hospital records show 500 dead, which does not include any killings carried out on the street since they presumably did not die at the hospitals. It is also probably lower than 10 000, as you mentioned.
Secondly, the case of the 5 murdered people in the square itself. Wu Renhua, author/historian and Choi Shufen (who is the one quoted above by Hui) name these:
* Wu R. 天安門血腥清場內幕 and 六四事件中的戒嚴部隊, both available on amazon
This is not intentional, any simple timeline is hard to follow since the events happened over an extended period of time, and there were presumably many interactions between goverment forces and protestors leading up to the events that happened on June 3-4. So far what I have read on the subject suggests that violence directed towards PLA may have been e.g. pelting by stones or similar in the week before June 4, however I have not seen good sources claiming civilians were actually killing and lynching soldiers at any time prior to when the massacre actually began. If you do have such sources, I am open to changing my mind, although I do not think Twitter threads or Youtube videos should be seen as good sources, and are not likely to change my mind.
Comments like this are uncouth and unproductive. I don’t appreciate being talked down to, and I will do my best to return the favour if you can do the same for me.
I should have been more specific that a “conversation” to me is a little different from the formal exercise of a “debate” or what have you, and that formal exercise, especially when it’s littered with tacit assumptions that are much easier to drop in than to unpack and refute, such as:
It’s just not very engaging to me, you know? But that’s fine, if anything you’ll benefit from me not going on for too long because I’m excited by ideas I’m discussing, we can just have a simple exercise in looking at evidence and I’ll be more mindful of my tone. I apologize for letting myself come off so rudely.
That having been said:
I don’t plan on using those sources, but I would like to point out that you either are expressing yourself poorly or have a mistaken idea here.
Either you mean to say that “Someone on the internet saying ‘Just trust me bro’” is not a good source
Or you are concerned with platforms being “academic” in a way that is tied up in silly formalism.
[I was going to include for option one that “Having the task of argument be exported to a video essay is kind of obnoxious,” but on the other hand having it exported to a book is arguably much more obnoxious, so I think the main issue is sourcing]
Obviously I agree with the first version, but then it’s good to talk about sourcing more plainly. In the second case, well, I think you drastically underestimate the pablum that gets published in academic journals. You can find people saying any old thing so long as it’s a thesis that is friendly to the publisher or the publisher’s audience. I did a research paper on Michael Parenti not too long ago and let me tell you, the “literature” attacking him in peer-reviewed journals is dog shit, plain and simple. Just the most insipid and unsubstantiated arguments you’ve ever seen. There was one that could have been a good critique if the author had a limited enough scope for the length of what they were writing to not leave their thesis completely hanging, but that review was a shining city on a hill compared to the others.
But if you want something a little more relevant, I’ll mention that people do indeed lie in books, and there are multiple cottage industries dedicated to producing stories with no concern for if they are lies or not so long as they support a certain range of theses [example]. If we were talking about the DPRK (let’s not), it would not be a good idea to crack open Yeonmi Park’s memoir and quote from it as believable witness testimony.
Anyway, back to the main subject:
Agreed
Even the journo who said 10k recanted! His high-end estimate was like 3.5k or something, which is still way higher than others but way less than what he said before.
Well, whatever, that part isn’t important at the moment.
I keep finding tangents, but you generally also agree that the HRIC isn’t a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right? Since whatever might be said of the authors you mention, the website doesn’t list so much as a witness of the killings on any of the four profiles. Mind you, several students did die (I think the lowest estimate is 30-something, along with ~200 other fatalities) and I am not contesting that these were real people who were killed by the PLA in that area at around that time (though June 3rd is listed for one and that seems early), merely that these accounts are not compelling for the argument that people died in the square. The US by this point is infamous for laundering its foreign policy goals through NGOs like the NED.
By contrast, I will point you to leaked secret cables from the US Embassy in Beijing which state that there was no bloodshed in the square itself.
We also have this article citing both a Reuters reporter and a Chinese dissident who support that there was no death in the square. It should be noted that, if I am reading both accounts correctly, the reporter would have been in very close proximity to where one of the students you listed was said to have died (“beneath the national flag”). While the image is full of pathos, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
In any case, it’s no wonder that monsters like Chai Ling, the student leader who infamously gave the interview before the fact about trying to drive her flock into gunfire, would later give sensational reports of slaughter when they themselves weren’t even present at the time said slaughter supposedly happened. I hope Youtube is acceptable when it’s for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast. I hadn’t personally seen the clips after the first interview with Chai Ling until looking it up just now. I’ve gotta say, though I obviously am politically against him, Hou Dejian seems admirable.
Regarding the lynching [and let me correct myself again that it might have been an immolated corpse that was strung up by its neck, i.e. the hanging was not the cause of death, though burning an unarmed person to death sure qualifies by the informal definition of "lynching], I guess step one is to dig up those photos . . . You would not believe how annoying it is, but it makes sense that the photos would be constantly taken down.
While I’m looking, here’s another leaked testimony from a diplomat.
[Massive CW for extreme violence and some nudity] Found it, scroll down to just shy of halfway and you will see the graphic images. I think even from the pictures alone, the timeline is self-evident, since civilians would not be left in such close proximity to corpses (or torched tanks) after the violence concluded. It’s plain that some “protestors” (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated. It was probably a slightly larger number who were involved in messing with the vehicles, since that appeals to a basic hooliganism (see the people still standing on top of one).
I’m less interested in tallying the specific death toll than the more definable and finite issues like “Were soldiers killed beforehand?” and “Did anyone die in the square itself?” Of course, those aren’t the only questions and we can do the tallying thing if you insist, but I wanted to start by focusing on the more clear-cut topics.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
Actually, I don’t really mind long winded tangents as long as they are interesting, funny or preferably both!
Pretty much this. “bro” science, lessons from the “school of hard knocks”, insane 4 hr yt videos with absolutely no source references and Twitter threads with wild statements corroborated by screenshots from some obscure source… I could go on but it seems you understand what I mean.
Yes, 10k is inaccurate. At the same time though, you have the mayor of Beijing claiming 200, the Ministry of Public Security claiming 563, while hospital records show about 500 as a minimum baseline, so I guess as far as official sources go we can’t really trust them either. 2 600 seems like the best estimate based on what I have found, which is still a huge number if you ask me when compared to other protests of similar size in western countries, consider e.g. the frequently quite violent protests in Paris and how the police there doesn’t murder a few thousands just because the government doesn’t agree with the protests (apologies for the digression).
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
It’s also worth noting that the various armies called in acted quite differently from one another, since some were more or less local to the city and others were pulled from far away places, with no local attachments and with varying levels of sympathetic commanders - so it’s quite possible that some groups of soldiers would have acted compassionately while others would have been more keen to shoot first and ask questions later. This is also supported by the fighting and killing between the different armies, and could (in part) explain the differences between the eye witness reports.
It’s fine, I am not watching 3 hours of unsubstantiated claims but 6 minutes is alright.
I don’t think it’s that plain. As mentioned, you have several elements all killing each other at various points:
Within that, you have soldiers being suddenly surrounded and encouraged by protestors to rise up against their perceived tyrants, you have civilians witnessing the murder of their friends and you have soldiers fearing for their lives - soldiers I might add that might have had no freaking idea what is happening because up until that point they were happily living their lives as illiterate farmers and now suddenly there’s chaos and their commander is telling them to defend themselves and now everyone without a uniform starts looking like a threat.
So you see, I don’t think I can attribute a lot of confidence to reports claiming that the protestors started lynching soldiers which in turn made them open fire. I think it’a an order of magnitude more likely that things got out of hand after the first phase of the dispersal, people were then hurt and things escalated from there up until the point where you have civilians stringing up burnt corpses in the street, soldiers summarily executing protestors and tanks running over people.
Regardless, a command was centrally issued and the consequence was a slaughter. Responsibility for the murders falls on the government of the PRC in my opinion, mens rea and actus reus.
Here’s a place where perhaps I can be helpful, since I feel like I won’t be much use elsewhere. Pay close attention to the way that the anticommunists here talk about their opposition and imagine being the subject of that talk by a substantial portion of this userbase and basically the entire mainstream of other websites like Reddit (of which it borders on being a carbon copy). It’s easy to see Marxists referred to as “red fascists,” “genocide deniers,” sometimes flat-out “Nazis,” along with being accused of being a “shill,” a “bot,” a “troll,” a foreign agent (you can see people complaining about “how many Russians” are on this site, but they don’t actually have reason to believe many Russians are here). All of that sits behind the sneering accusation of “tankie.”
Now, it’s kind of whatever to me when it’s online – and this sort of “anti-tankie” framework almost always is – but some people take that sort of thing as a serious insult because equating someone to Nazis is a pretty serious insult. All this while the people making the accusation bandy about things like the 10k figure we discussed, which is just ridiculous but you are treated as a holocaust denier for trying to interrogate its dogma. Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
So, I don’t encourage people to get needlessly combative, but I can slip into it myself and I struggle to fault others who do so as well (though I encourage them to take things dispassionately!). I hope that that explains a little bit of it, because personal insult just saturates the environment in some places.
Regarding the rest of this, let me know if the organization of information is too hectic and I’ll rewrite it.
I do not doubt that these are real people who are dead, let me repeat that again. That said, these 5 are singled out because they supposedly died in the square.
I’ve presented you with witness testimony from multiple sources saying that people were not, in fact, killed in the square and the crowd was dispersed pretty uneventfully (though I think to actually reach the square in the first place people were beat back with batons to make way). Most of the people were already gone before the dispersal because most of the protestors listened to the warnings and the deadline.
Quoting the photo article:
The square was mostly cleared peacefully and those who refused were beaten with batons to drive them out. They weren’t just wantonly shot.
There’s no reason that the student leader who said he stayed until 6:30 AM wouldn’t have seen this victim, since the victim was shot “early in the morning on June 4th” and the leader witnessed the square being cleared, just as many others did. Perhaps if you have other information that complicates the case, that will be worth considering, but it seems like the simplest answer is that he was somewhere else at the time he was shot. Perhaps he was at the flag, then cleared the square, got caught up in the ensuing fighting elsewhere, and was shot then, with his body only properly discovered and identified by people who knew him after the shooting occurred. The story you linked to doesn’t give any indication that he was, for example, with friends who saw him get killed.
Perhaps his friends were with him, but then it raises the question of why they were not also shot and how they were able to arrange transportation to get him to the hospital where he succumbed, which the article might prefer to gloss over.
Which reminds me:
This is exactly what I mean about how you don’t need to censor a story, just make your version much more accessible, because we keep getting these reactions along the lines of “well, I don’t endorse the source here, it’s just the first one I saw”. Just something to think about.
If those books provide any more details that could be pertinent to the evaluation of this guy’s case, I invite you to share them with me, but I hope you can understand that I’m not going to go and buy a book so I can evaluate you claims unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance involved.
You can take more time to look over the information I gave you, since there were a few things made clear that I think you missed. Chief among them is that this isn’t a Boston Massacre situation, despite the obvious parallels. Unlike the redcoats, the PLA who were outside of vehicles and present and supervising the protest were unarmed. I never even insinuated that the protestors threw an incendiary at a soldier and then the others started blasting – they couldn’t even if they wanted to! That segment had no guns! Though it seems that the soldiers who were in military vehicles were armed, and the victims were inside military vehicles.
What I am saying is that the severity of the crackdown and the ensuing violence were in part brought on by the harsh escalation of these militants hiding among the more mundane protestors committing murder against an unarmed soldier and then hanging up his corpse like a declaration of war! Well, they killed a couple, but one or two were just hung against a wreck while another was actually suspended in the air (I believe under a bridge). This was all well before the night of the crackdown, though I don’t know exactly when.
I’ve been using a framework loosely based on how crimes are sometimes argued, by establishing witnesses and timelines and looking for inconsistencies or other possible explanations. What could possibly have happened to produce this situation otherwise, with a soldier’s corpse strung up in broad daylight with people able to just stand around and gawk at it? It only makes sense as being before the crackdown, when civilians could just stand around and gawk in broad daylight (rather than, at the gentlest, be pushed away by troops securing the area, possibly shot if they resisted) and the body is still strung up rather than taken down (as it would be after the crackdown ended and people could return to the area). There’s no way that these pictures were taken during the fighting, no one is behaving like there is gunfire going off nearby.
Drawing again from the article with the photo, since we actually don’t need to speculate just with the photo:
Unless the soldiers were sleeping on-site or taking 70-hour shifts, that means the murders probably took place the night of June 2 - 3 or thereabout, since they surely would have had another chance to report back otherwise. The article likewise says that the corpses were seemingly from vehicles getting petrol bombed, extracted from the vehicle, and strung up on the night of the 2nd to 3rd.
It’s worth noting that there’s a huge difference in how you approach a situation between “There’s an unruly group of protestors we need to remove” vs “There’s a pretty amicable group of protestors that also has militant splinters that have killed other soldiers via incendiaries – possibly provided by the US – and strung the corpse up. Oh, and they stole some guns too”. Suddenly, people carrying such weapons – which you are now looking for among every bag and bottle – are established to not only be quite capable of killing you but seemingly out for blood, considering the display they made of the corpse.
The article with the photos is worth reading.
Thank you, I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
I think I will need to think a bit further on the subject, so I will definitely have a look at it again with fresh eyes, but I thank you for challenging my assumptions and providing me with sources I had not previously seen. Even though I can’t say that I have changed my mind, at least you have made me reconsider it.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
Ah, well, no worry in any case.
As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that’s something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss – the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square – the CPC told the truth.
Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven’t seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I’m not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it’s very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn’t see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.
Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of “Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press,” which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn’t seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we’re not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was – if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it’s quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that’s a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.
In terms of victims who have been identified, let’s look again at Wikipedia:
As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being “killed in action” by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn’t be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn’t being killed “in action,” though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.
More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that’s taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I’m not saying they should have every name – Tank Man hasn’t been identified either, though he also wasn’t killed – but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.
Anyway, I still don’t have much to say about the tallying business because it’s honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that’s fair enough on your part).
*which, let me be clear, isn’t some “outside agitators” thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.
Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!