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Seriously?

You don’t find the million people (the Uighurs) in concentration camps “outlandish”?

How about the thousands of students rolled into smithereens by tanks in Tianamen Square? Too “cartoonish” for you?

smh

discuss

I don't really want to enter this discussion, since it usually quickly devolves to less than stellar levels. However, on the topic of the 1989 protests, I feel like Westerners often have a very superficial understanding of what happened back then, and in turn cannot understand chinese civil society and government today.

There's one documentary on the topic that I can wholeheartedly recommend, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.[1] It is quite long, but goes into incredible detail and also interviews a lot of organizers and politicians first hand.

The Tiananmen Square massacre was a turning point in chinese politics, ending a decade of increased freedom and open calls for reform. In civil society, people kept their heads down and went to work. In politics, almost all the reformers and politicians sympathetic to the students were isolated, demoted or even imprisoned. Still the last 30 years have been the best China has had in hundreds of years, and it is always much harder to argue with success. A lot of chinese people know what happened back then, and a lot of those accept it as something shitty that happened, but ultimately the country and people were still able to progress. Chinese people, by and large are not against their own government, even if they don't always agree with everything that happens.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gtt2JxmQtg

lucian1900|5 years ago

If you blindly believe Western media, sure. There is no actual proof of either narrative.

Try at least hearing the other side.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-...

https://youtu.be/BjgSOYRZqIo

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

yorwba|5 years ago

The problem with hearing the other side is of course that most people are more concerned with reaching the correct value judgment (imprisoning innocent Uyghurs is bad, killing innocent protesters is bad) than with reaching it based on accurate information.

If you tell someone who believes that thousands of people died directly on Tiananmen Square and were crushed to pieces by tanks, correcting them by pointing out that actually

> ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT ACTUALLY WITNESS ANY LARGE SCALE SHOOTINGS ON THE SQUARE PROPER, GALLO SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.

that's not going to affect their value judgment (the numbers are smaller, people weren't killed on the square itself but elsewhere, who cares, it's still bad) and most likely they'll soon forget those details and keep telling their original story, because, well, it's just a much more visceral image.

kristopolous|5 years ago

Every global power becomes one by exercising power, globally.

Claiming the existence of problems justifies these types of policies is an argument of convenience where the policy is fixed and someone is just fishing for reasons.

We ignore it when it's Saudi Arabia or the child slave driven mines of Central Africa and bring it up when there's a possibility of encroachment.

The world is terrible, we should do better. But carving out Chinese manufacturers of smartphones isn't how you'll get there.

wil421|5 years ago

You can’t look at history through modern lenses. Just because Germany, the US, or Europe did something bad 80-150 years doesn’t make it right today!