Twenty Years ago Today: Tiananmen Square Massacre of peaceful protestors

I believe the correct number of casualties was several million, Stockholm. Or billion, I forget which. Oh well, what difference does it make, bad guys are bad guys.

The reason there has been so little posted here is that we Leftists all fervently support the Chinese government. I believe I speak for all babblers when I say that. Now, find me one incident where an Israeli soldier insulted a Palestinian terrorist, and we'll open 50 threads to denounce the evil Israelis.

Happy? I thought so.

The truth is, of course, that at the time, the left in the U.S. and throughout Western Europe(there wasn't a left that was free to be left in Eastern Europe at the time, since the Stalinist right was still in power there)supported the students and denounced the Chinese government(and did so while the administration of Bush the First essentially backed Deng's massacre) with the sole comic exceptions of Gus Hall's "Communist" Party and the Workers World cult.. 

There was never any reason for the Chinese government to use brute force on anyone that night.  The students had voluntarily left the square, the protests were over.  The government should have left it at that.  And there is still no excuse whatsoever for that government to insist, twenty years later, on refusing to allow public commemorations of the massacre or even to release the names of those killed in it.  The way for the Chinese government to make itself secure is to actually deal with the concerns of the people, not to force that people to keep silent in exchange for consumer goods(goods most Chinese are no longer able to afford now that the capitalist model introduced by Deng has collapsed).  Time for those Hundred Flowers to finally bloom.

And, before anyone jumps in, all of us on the left who condemn this massacre equally condemn every life capitalism ever took as well.   There was never any reason to question that assertion.

Ken Burch wrote:

all of us on the left who condemn this massacre equally condemn every life capitalism ever took as well.   There was never any reason to question that assertion.

Yes, perfect. Beautiful.

BS, I watched clips of the vigil last night in Hong Kong and there were thousands of young people there.

remind wrote:

BS, I watched clips of the vigil last night in Hong Kong and there were thousands of young people there.

Yeah, and was Hong Kong part of Red China in 1989?  Lighten up, remind. At least learn a little about the subject before jumping on people.

I heard a radio journalist yesterday say how, while he was talking to young Chinese people and trying to raise the subject of the massacre, all he received were blank looks.

That's effective propaganda.

This is one of the most interesting and thoughtful articles I have read which tries to analyze the statistics of casualties and the question of whether or not any actual killing took place within the square as opposed to in the approaches:

[url=http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6774077/Revisiting-Tiananmen-Square---A-Dist... Tiananmen Square - A Distorted Image from Both Sides of the Lens[/color][/url]

It's by Albert Chang, in the [i]Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs[/i].

Ghislaine you did not discriminate you  said "China" period.

Moreover, more and more mainland Chinese are moving to Hong Kong, to seek jobs etc, it may have rights that those on the mainland do not yet have, but information flow to other areas is happening and will continue.

[url=http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/johnbon/2009/06/video-bike-and-die-comme... posts footage by John Bonnar of the Toronto ceremony here[/url]

I wish there was more of this sort of coalition-building on the left - a ceremony that opened with acknowledgement that it was taking place on the land of the Mississaugas, combined Chinese, Western and first nations art forms, and saw labour organizers join forces with groups in the Chinese-Canadian community in Toronto. And even invited bikes to be part of the event!

Ghislaine wrote:

What you are discussing can be googled and researched in S. Korea. The topic of this thread does not exist in China. Google it at google.cn. It was thrown down the memory hole. A lot of people my age in China don't even believe that the massacre even happened.

Quick! Name three other topics that have gone down the memory hole popular Western concepts?

What I find funny is the latent implication (and lets face it, this is a large part of what this is about) is that there is too much focus on Israel, in comparison to other countries. "Uh oh! The murky outline of anti-semetism lurks beneath the surface here, can you not see it!" What is most absurd about this line of arguement is that one is actually instrumetalizing China, so that one can talk about Israel, and one is not really talking about China at all.

But I can talk about numerous far more brutal massacres that never get comemorated on Rabble, some of them even more recent than Tianemen square event. For example the ethnic cleansing of Krajina in Croatia in 93 doesn't even rate a mention on this web site, when the day passes, nor the more recent massacres in East Timor, the repeated days of massacre of Chechyns in Grozny passes without even a whimper. All of these, even by the most kind accounts have higher body counts than the repression at Tianemen Square. What of Tibet and so on?

So why the double standard? Is there some lurking anti-Chinese sentiment at play here?

Well lets look at the history then. The fact is that "the west" has desperately been trying to control events in China for the last 100 years, and even the US involvement in World War Two begins in China with the Japanese invasion that begins in 1934, and turns into full blown war at the "Marco Polo Bride incident" of June 1937, and then the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Since then "we" have been backing one party or another in China in an effort to find political results that are positive to western interests. But the fact is that China is, and has always been, beyond our control. We may have been able to influence events, but never direct them, and even if our favourite Chinese ally, Chiang Kai Shek's KMT, were to have won out in the civil war, in all likelyhood the government would have been just as nationalist and anti-western as Mao's communists. Would Tibet have been on Chiang's radar scope after victory against the CPC? Of course, as was Manchuria and inner Mongolia, which he deftly plucked from the embrace of his erstwhile ally the Soviet Union, even as WWII was raging. There isn't anything even, that indicates that Chiang was any more liberal or less uncompromising against his opponents: he conducted brutal massacres of Communists and other opponents merely two years after he took over the KMT after the demise of Sun Yat Sen.

Talk about "memory holes", or is it selective MEMRI?

On the other hand even little Canada has been a player in the history of Israel, from day one, as the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, points out in his recent speech to the CJC:

Quote:

More than six decades ago, in 1947, my father was a Canadian diplomat on the UN Special Committee on Palestine-which recommended a partition plan accepted by Jews but rejected by the Arab world.

 Israel is both by cultural heritage and government policy directly a creation of European interests, and peopled mostly by European emigres. Most Israelis are bonded to us by blood, culture, history, and our own political design. It is, in a few words, our last great colonial project. Our colonial project in China failed, and since has always been beyond our control, we, as a people, have very little direct relationships to the Chinese, nor do we bare any political responsibility for its actions -- the case of Israel is entirely the opposite.

We created Israel. China created itself. Therefore our interest is not only natural, but entirely appropriate.

Ghislaine wrote:

Unionist wrote:

I thought Hong Kong was in Indonesia?

The wonderful thing about babble is that you can always predict that thread drift will happen, but you don't always know in what direction...

Hong Kong is pretty relevant to the thread topic...however now discussion seems to have moved onto Israel. I guess that makes sense, as there are no threads at all discussing Israel on babble.

No actually it moved onto media constructs and "memory holes". You seem suprised that many people in China have no awareness of the Tianemen square event of 20 years ago, yet if you asked Americans about complicity of the US government and ethnic cleansing of Krajina province in Croatia, they would ask you where Krajina was. Probably the Kent State shootings would draw a blank too.

Ask Canadians about Canadian complicity in the massacre in Gaza less than 6 months ago, and you would might even invoke outrage. In fact, such outrage is a regular occurence on Rabble when the issue of complicity is brought up.

It's not as if there is not a history of debate on this web site, and each thread starts out Tabula Rasa.

As for the rest, I am pointing out that since there is no special Canadian relationship to the events of Tianemen square, except perhaps tangentally because we have a large number of people of Chinese heritage living here, it is really not suprising at all that public interest is low, whereas, in regards to other issues, we can in fact see a direct link which draws our attention to it. In all probability, Chinese people also look at Israeli issues more or less in the same light as we see Tianemen square: They read about massacres of Palestinians, are shocked momentarliy, and then move on.

If you asked most Americans "how many soldiers were killed in the Vietnam war?" they would almost certainly say "50,000". I really hope that the absurdity of that figure as a response to that question is not lost on you.

[url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8635]Xiaoping Li wrote in 2008:[/url]

Quote:

There was no democracy on Tiananmen Square. Whoever controlled the loud speaker spoke on behalf of everyone. Factions of students fought to control the loud speaker. There were almost three to four attempted coups daily.

After the government made one after another concession to the students' demands, on May 27, 1989, a coalition of the student leaders and supporting workers and intellectuals agreed that the students would leave Tiananmen Square on May 30 so that they could, as student leader Wang Dang had long advocated, continue to pursue grassroots democracy on campuses.

But radical student leaders changed their minds and decided to stay on the Square. One of them was Commander-in-Chief Chai Ling. 

Chai Ling had confided to an American journalist: "what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people... I can't say all this to my fellow students. I can't tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to call on the people to rise up."

"Are you going to stay in the Square yourself?" asked the interviewer.

 

"No, I won't."

 

"Why?"

 

"... I want to live."

Ghislaine wrote:

Fidel wrote:

I agree with Ken. And we shouldnt forget 1980 and the thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in South Korea.

Well then start a thread on it. Geez - this is supposed to be a remembrance thread about a specific event - the one in the title. Maysie and Ze made comments about what sounds like a great (yet sad) event. Stockholm made a snarky comment and you veer into some other area.

What you are discussing can be googled and researched in S. Korea. The topic of this thread does not exist in China. Google it at google.cn. It was thrown down the memory hole. A lot of people my age in China don't even believe that the massacre even happened.

Well I'm sorry to have to inform you that there is censorship of the internet in freedom-loving South Korea. If you really want to discuss the requirements of democracy and freedom, we can oblige you.

And the US is basically a military dictatorship itself since [url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12539]Bush's warrantless wiretaps of any communications in the USSA[/url] were endorsed by the Oabama administration. Spying at will on the lives of others in Amurrika.

Fidel wrote:

[url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8635]Xiaoping Li wrote in 2008:[/url]

 

Quote:

 

But radical student leaders changed their minds and decided to stay on the Square. One of them was Commander-in-Chief Chai Ling. 

Chai Ling had confided to an American journalist: "what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people... I can't say all this to my fellow students. I can't tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to call on the people to rise up."

"Are you going to stay in the Square yourself?" asked the interviewer.

 

"No, I won't."

 

"Why?"

 

"... I want to live."

Other than the "not wanting to die himself" part, this guy sounds like the Padraig Pearse ot the Square.

I found a whole bunch of things there. Like this for example:

Ghislaine wrote:

Sorry, results are very different if you try it in China. It is called the "Great Firewall of China" and google and Microsoft are complicit.

Ah, ok, some friend in China told you that?

So, were China's students protesting for or against something in June of 1989? We know what they were protesting against at Kwangju 1980. I think our western news media deliberately ad-lib and ignore the facts surrounding Tiananmen, which is somewhat Orwellian on their part.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

I heard a radio journalist yesterday say how, while he was talking to young Chinese people and trying to raise the subject of the massacre, all he received were blank looks.

Do you honestly think the people of China are so stupid?

Most people in China think of many things about us they are too polite to say to westerners, and think of many things among themselves they are too discreet to say to westerners.

They know a great deal more about China and its history, ancient and modern, than most westerners would be able to understand without a lifetime of study.

And they mostly don't care what we think about the "Central Kingdom." If we think people in our own centre-of-the-universe (Toronto) don't care about the opinions of "out-of-town" folks, multiply that by 554 (there are 554 Chinese for every Torontonian). I'm not saying that in any critical way whatever. What we think of China IS pretty irrelevant by any objective standard.

So why should they ask for trouble by attempting to venture an opinion in their third language (their two first languages being their local language plus Mandarin) on a very complex topic to a foreign news reporter who will certainly quote them out of context?

I'd look blank too.

A baleful legacy of 4 June 1989 is the habitual use of violence by local governments faced with difficult issues.

Quote:

there have been many subsequent "Tiananmens", large and small. Just as the party's culture of intolerance implanted itself into some of its student opponents in 1989, so official violence has to a degree generated a similar response from elements of the public. Yang Jia, who killed six Shanghai policemen, and Deng Yujiao, who killed a local-government official, received support and praise online. The inclination to meet violence with violence is growing. Tiananmen casts a long shadow.

Wilf Day wrote:

A baleful legacy of 4 June 1989 is the habitual use of violence by local governments faced with difficult issues.

Quote:

there have been many subsequent "Tiananmens", large and small. Just as the party's culture of intolerance implanted itself into some of its student opponents in 1989, so official violence has to a degree generated a similar response from elements of the public. Yang Jia, who killed six Shanghai policemen, and Deng Yujiao, who killed a local-government official, received support and praise online. The inclination to meet violence with violence is growing. Tiananmen casts a long shadow.

Interesting article. However, no government exists entirely seperate from "it's people", "the people" or however you want to put it.  Many reforming "intellectuals" promote the pretension that there can be this clearly defined devide, where one entity (the government) exists entirely seperate from the other (the people) without some kind of consent of latter that goes beyond simple coercion, police sureveliance and state violence, used by the former.

At some point the state must be seen to act in the interests of "the people", or it will become intollerable not only to the people, but even to those people that the state relies on to enforce the social order, the police, and the rest of the state security aparatus, such as the army. As we saw in the Soviet Union, failure of authority, due to the apparent illigitimacy of the state, even in the eyes of the police and army, made it impossible for the state to repress the revolt that led to the fall of the Communist party.

I have seen nothing yet that indicates to me that the present social order in China is near to a state of collapse, despite the wishful thinking of western inspired "democrats". By couching his analysis, in the terms of "the state" v "the people" the writer poses the issues as if China is on the verge of a repressed general revolt that is bubbling near the surface.

From what I can see, I don't think China has passed into that phase where critical mass of dissent is so great that it can not govern, because there is a consensus among "the people" that "the state" is illigitimate, and "people" and "state" are seperated from each other and in clear opposition.

It may come to that but there has been enough progress in numerous areas, particularly in the introduction of a capitalist model that has inspired the growth of a wealthy business class, and increased availability of consumer goods, as well as greater international prestige and power, and indeed limited "freedoms" that the oligarchy has bought itself more time, and may continue to do so, as long as it remains relatively useful as a tool for satisfying the needs of the people.