Absolutely nothing of note happened in China in June 1989, right?

Godric@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1478 points –
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Nothing happend at Reddit's Frontpage on June 12, 2023. The so called “protests” is a hoax invented by the Lemmy devs attempting to discredit our wonderful platform. The “purge of moderators” never happened, not one single moderator was purged. And those who did get purged are violent rioters internet vandals. Reddit is the greatest platform ever, and Lemmy is filled with racists and spammers and ads and evil developers trying censor posts and take away user freedom. Long live CEO Spaz! May his wisdom guide us towards a better future!

I can’t wait to hear about Spez’s new 5-year plan!

Based on that one sub he used to mod, he and Mao might have something else in common. At least a Spez 5-year plan only risks causing a content famine.

But who hasn’t killed their citizens in a simple misunderstanding? Or, if that doesn’t work, America Also Bad! \s

America Also Bad!

Seems like they usually leave out the "also" because apparently two things can't be bad at the same time. Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where only one thing is bad? I expect it'd be simpler, at least.

I mean, China fucking sucks and is a shit authoritarian statist government but let's not pretend America hasn't done similar things.

Ever heard the stories of how America won the right to unions?

  • Columbine Mine Massacre

  • Ludlow Massacre

  • Thibodaux Massacre

  • Battle of Blair Mountain

  • Herrin Massacre

Hundreds of people killed in total because they were protesting.

The difference in outcome is that back then the technology was more of a level playing field.

Those things? Also bad.

Incredible that two things can simultaneously be shit, but it’s true.

Congrats. That is exactly what I wrote.

Half this site can't accomplish holding two thoughts at once

Weird how I only ever hear one of those events used to dismiss an entire system of economic organization though

I guess you’re not listening then because “capitalism fucking sucks and is responsible for countless atrocities” is a pretty common tale these days.

Imagine thinking that people are opposed to post-scarcity economics, and not the whole "let's kill everyone who disagrees with us until we achieve such conditions"

I use those events in the US (and many more) to condem capitalism. I also use Tianamen (and others) to condem state capitalism.

Can always rely on there being at least one person ... "but the USA did XYZ." Doesn't change what happened in 1989.

No it doesn't. But the same people who whine and cry about people using whataboutism in favor of China do the EXACT same thing in favor of the US.

They are both shit. Everyone is tired of each side pretending that only one side is shit.

Except they’re nowhere nearly comparable. The US is pretty bad but China is an authoritarian state with internet censorship and state-controlled companies.

The “America also bad” argument feels like a mass murderer saying “well you stabbed a guy 10 years ago, you’re no different!”.

Do u know banana republics, thats a rad story. i think u should look up what usa have done to south american contries.

Go look up to see what China did during the great leap forward and cultural revolution. They killed about 30 million of their own people. I would like you to post a source proving that the United States murdered 30 million of its own people within the past 150 years, as well as persecuting tens of millions of people and sending millions of children from cities to be reeducated with forced labor on camps after being separated from their parents. Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were murdered for being... Intellectuals.

The only thing that comes close was slavery and the Japanese internment during world War II. However, slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, and during the Japanese internment families were generally kept together and they were not forcibly reeducated.

"Please tell me a time when.this country did terrible things b-b-but only in this certain half of the country's existence!! Otherwise it's cheating!!1!"

Conveniently chose a time right where you can ignore the Slavery and the Trail of Tears (% population wise that was just as bad). Not to mention the mass Native American "reeducation" and ripping them away from their families to get a "proper white education"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

Every government has done terrible things. The US, China, and Russia are among the worst. We can argue about what is "worse." But that is completely subjective. China literally just did much of what the US did, but on a larger scale 150 years later and with different technology.

Arguably Russia was the worst of them all, but literally all 3 are bad. America pulled itself out of that era and into corporate indetured servitude era of corporations committing genocides and coups in other countries. Personally I think that China is worse than the US and Russia dwarfs both of them, but just because one is maybe marginally worse doesn't mean the other wasn't/isn't bad.

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it doesn't, but for sure dispels the myth that the US isn't evil.

I mean that’s the point of the comment. Any conversation about China’s shortcomings necessarily turns into “but US also bad” as if that’s proving a point we don’t already know. This is Lemmy, not the CPAC convention. We’re probably all pretty on board with nuanced positions on the evils of imperial states

No one here holds that myth

This is so off topic I read it in grampa Simpson's voice.

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Well, the citizens they killed were literally firing on them and killed around 150 soldiers. Meanwhile the military for the most part did not have guns. Not saying it is justified even then to use military force on striking workers, but a hell of a lot more justified than western media claims. Oh yeah, and literally no college students died that day, as well as nobody within a mile of Tianenmen Square.

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Ah yes the one demonstration to push a government to the left and organize labor that tankies don’t like acknowledging

No, there was another one, interestingly at the exact same time, in Poland. They don't like that one either.

Could you be more specific? I hadn't heard about that before

The Solidarity movement, started in 1980 as a series of labor strikes, formed into a large trade union and then a political movement demanding workers' rights, actual worker control over means of production, and similar socialist policies. It finally forced and won a public election in 1989 (on the very same day of the Tiananmen square crackdown) which in turn led to the end of communist (and Russian) rule in Poland.

Quite ironic, when you think about it… - the working class defeating the communist party!

Tankies when the people being told heirarchy is bad and steals the value of your labor when people actually believe it and try to abolish it:

Also tankies claiming to be anti-imperialist when people want to leave your empire.

Having to live in an authoritarian shithole takes its toll on you after a while.

When oliver Anthony sings that he's an old world man struggling to live in a new world, all I think about is how strong the old world fought to unionize the work force. I didn't even know about it until this year. The 1900s labour movement was intense and interesing. Especially reading about it from the future which helps put a lot of current politics into perspective.

a political movement demanding workers' rights, actual worker control over means of production, and similar socialist policies.

They demanded this, won, and then ignored all of it and introduced neoliberal capitalism pretty much straight away?

Bro China is not real, it's just the back of Taiwan.

Actually Taiwan is China as in its the actual legitimate government of China not the occupiers in Beijing

I wouldn't call the ROG illegitimate since they won the civil war and they are recognised by pretty much every country in the world.

That doesn't mean I like them more though.

Edit: PRC not ROG lol.

HexBear and Lemmygrad fangirls heads exploded.

lmao that was my first thought, this comment section should be very interesting

Given that they defederated from Lemmy.world (at least Hexbear did, idk about lemmygrad), probably not

And thank fuck for that. Site is better off without them.

Lol, for all their enthusiastic talk about "let's go dunk on the libs", that sure happened quickly.

As of the writing of this comment, 3 tankies have seen this post

Edit: T+15h: 35 tankies (829 up). And 5 of those saw this comment.

Wait till you learn about the ideology of one of the lemmy devs...

I don't see any reason to care about that as long as they aren't forcing their opinions on anyone tbh.

This. Unless your use/purchase directly supports something you disagree with, people shouldn’t be worried so much. Companies and organizations are huge. They are all going to contain shitty people.

If you are on the internet, you have no choice but to indirectly supporting shitty people.

If you are worried about that do actual politics, not this ‘you eat ChikFilA you monster’ type shit.0

Yup. And they literally gave us the tools to take our toys and go home to make our own fun if we don't like the way they run Lemmy.ml.

Lemmy is open source so it doesn't matter. Devs come and go.

Oh I know all about that. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy clowning on tankies on lemmy.ml so hard.

Fun fact: the .ml TLD is officially designated as belonging to Mali; the lemmy devs chose it as an acronym for “Marxist-Leninist”. This caused problems very recently when Mali suddenly re-exerted control of their TLD, where previously they did not take an active hand in its management.

I’ll copy the top comment there, because it’s actually kind of important if you’re at all into web infra or self-hosting:

Using ccTLDs when you have no relationship with the country is just asking for trouble. Comes across as naive and unprofessional, although I've seen many serious infrastructure built upon .co and .io names.

i think the Marxist Leninist thing is disputed, It's just a rumour and we don't know if the devs chose it for that or they chose it because it was free on freenom

I heard it was cuz .ML was free to get a domain from.

I don’t see why I should care, as long as their not assholes, not breaking their own rules, and not abusing their powers as devs.

I wonder what actual Chinese people think, anyone originally from China able to weigh in?

According to my aunt, whose parents fled the Cultural Revolution when she was a teenager:

It's like if Chinese people kept trying to give you shit about the Kent State massacre and not Vietnam itself.

From my conversations with mainland Chinese, they often tout the line that the US was somehow involved, so it was partly an excusable defense of the homeland against dangerously co-opted students. That said, most acknowledge that it was pretty bad. But these are also well-educated Chinese working abroad, so I assume the majority of Chinese don’t know much.

One story I heard retold by an English teacher working in Nanjing that I used to know was about the experience of one of the people involved in the protests…or at least they were an academic in Beijing at the time of the massacre. They were really depressed 20 years later and felt that nobody around them, particularly their students, knew anything.

The people I have spoken to in China understand something happened, and most of them know that it was the suppression of a student protest movement. From there the knowledge diverges as to what kind of protest movement and how violent was the suppression and whether it was justified. My family will kind of halfheartedly repeat some version of the party line but acknowledge it was a fucked up situation, and they also understand that the censorship surrounding it is awkward and unnecessary.

Generally the Chinese I have spoken to are mostly aware of and opposed to the CCP's censorship, but they also don't really like to talk about it for obvious reasons.

Edit: Sorry for the wall of text. I typed too quickly and didn't even realize how long this is...


I wasn't born at the time so I have no first-hand account of the events. My parents heard about it briefly mentioned on the news and they also heard about it from relatives. The only thing they learn of was that there was a demonstration, then the news stopped talking about it. My parents and grand parents are pro- Communist Party, they didn't really care about the protests being suppressed, they wanted stability more. But remember, China has a culture of what westerners refer to as "Social Harmony", and don't like to "causs troubles". In 1912, when people were uprising against the Qing Monarchy, most parents would not have wanted their children being revolutionaries either. Same thing when Communists and Nationalists were fighting a civil war. The youth always want change, but no parent would ever want their child getting involved in stuff. They don't want to lose their childen. This is the same sentiment regarding Tiananmen. Change is risky, causes too much instability. China not being united is what allows foreigners to invade China. (Eg: Eight Nations Alliance invading China, Concessions in China (Chinese land that was occupied by foreign countries), Japanese invasions of China during the midst of Communist-Nationalist Civil war, etc.) Even though the students in Tiananmen called for reforms, not revolution, the Communist leaders feared riots or a violent uprising, so they decided to violently suppress it before it "got out of hand". Most people in China are probably just glad that it ended without fracturing China, they didn't care which side won, as long as the country is still stable.

I learned about the events in Tiananmen when I was around high school age, many years after immigrating to the US. I left China when I was in 2nd grade, so it's not surprising I didn't know about it, I mean most kids thag age don't get taught history. My older brother who learned about it on the internet first told me about it. At first, I just thought: meh, another one of the government's conflict with the people But that wasn't the important thing. What was odd to me was that they censored it in China. I mean, in my public school in the US, I was learning about slavery, how George Washington was a slave owner, most founders owned enslaved people. Natives were forcibly removed from their hones and put in so-called "reservations". And learning about the fact that even after the US Civil War, there's still racism against black people. I mean, the US had so much atrocities that I learned in a US public school. And I started learning that stuff around like 3-5th grade. Yet, my older brother who was like 7th grade in China didn't know about the Tiananmen stuff. So that was really odd to me. It was odd that the US was so open to teaching atrocities, but China didn't want to.

Then, I learn about how they put a firewall around the entirety of China's network. Now the government started to look very shady to me. I mean, at this point, I'm still very Patriotic for China. But I'm also starting to wonder: hmm, wtf is going on in the government?

Then one day my mother told me about how she has to take a risk to conceive me during the One Child Policy. She was supposed to be sterilized after my older brother was born, but she bribed a government official to fake the certificate of being sterilized. Then also bribe them again to hide that she was pregnant with her second child (the second child being me, obviously). So she went to a nearby city to be less likely to be found by her village elders. So then I was born in the city hospital. Now that I'm already born, they can't kill me anymore since somehow forcing a woman to abort her child was okay, but they didn't want to go as far was actually killing someone who was already born.

But my mom had to be sterilized. My parents had to pay a fine. Something like tens of thousands of Yuan(¥)/Renminbi. It took years to pay off. (And if you don't pay it off, they don't give you your documents, birth certificates, ID, etc. Basically becoming a legally non-existant person, despite actually existing). So that's my personal grudge against the CCP, I mean who wouldn't hate an organization that essentially tried to kill you? Idk why my parents still support the CCP to this day. Everytime they spew Pro-CCP propaganda, I'd just say: "So you support the One Child Policy? Should I not have been born?" That usually shuts then up.

I personally view what happened in Tianamen as a tragedy. I mean, they weren't even threatening to revolt, just wanted to talk some sense into the CCP leaders and start some reforms. The government didn't need to use tanks to suppress it. Such unnecessary violence.

Authoritarianism and the One Child Policy are both reasons why I oppose the Communist Party of China, although the One Child Policy is much more personal to me. They have since changed it to Two Child Policy, but still wtf is this shit. It's equivalent to US red states forcing women to give birth. Two sides of the same coin, both are governments dictating the lives of others.

I'm currently a US Citizen, I'm probably not going to visit China any time soon. (Not only because of China, but visiting China can also cause the US government putting you on a list of suspected CCP spies, and I don't want that to happen.) And right now idc what happens in China, it aint my country anymore.

(Although if China and the US is at war, that'd be terrifying. That shit would cause another Internment camps, this time for people with Chinese Ancestry. Being a US Citizen with Chinese Ancestry is as being stuck in the turbulent oceans between 2 unsafe shores. No safe harbor for people like me. I have to deal with China labling me a traitor, and also the US suspecting CCP spies. What a shitty situation that'd be.)

Can we morph the Tiananmen Square into a hyperbolic shape next?

For those not around when that happened, i remember it this way, after 20 years of booze, weed & hookers:

The student protest was extremely peaceful and organized. There were student delegations that would report up to student representatives, educatio delegation, housing delegation, for example. The representatives were negotiating with Party people. It was unclear at the time if the Party people were indicative of the top brass. But there was a worldwide feeling something good and right might be changing in China. If I recall correctly this went on for weeks, so the implications were setting in.

Then it all changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

What the video & still represent is not 1 man facing a line of tanks. It a culmination of a generation of students frustrated enough but clever enough to find a way to negotiate a change and when the Army came in they knew they failed. The world knew they failed. The question was how badly that failure was. There were a few days when nothing happened after this video. Then it happened all at once. And the rest as they say is History -- repression, violence, killing, abductions, lost family members, and rewriting history.

Like the Velvet Revolutions of the Middle East, it was a short time of hope for a better future, for the students & for their nation.

That feeling stays & that feeling is what China wants their populace to forget - and you forget by meming this historic picture without context.

P.S I don't know if the man was ever found out, but I hope he stays anonymous.

Are you at least paid to write this emotional propaganda fantasy? Chinese students didn't give a damn how you felt.

P.S I don’t know if the man was ever found out, but I hope he stays anonymous.

Lol he got taken away by 2 plain-clothed men, and he was never seen again. It is unclear who those 2 men are, but some have speculated they might be working for the Communist Party of China, and that they were detaining the man that stood in front of the tanks.

Also, "Tank Man" is actually on the morning of June 5th, after the protests have already been suppressed the night before.

Is the Tiananmen Sphere the rebuke to the flat-earthers who insist it is really the Tiananmen Plane?

We were all on vacation! In Poland!

Nothing happened on Tienanmen square, how naive are you all. The British ambassador inventer a tad too detailed horror stories, based on "trusted sources". In fact, the students protesting killed a PLA soldier but after a talk with the intervention force decided to clear square peacefully. The deaths happened elsewhere but we have almost no information about those. People protested against different things, some were for liberal freedom, some for more communism. We know what told us the Western "objective" press.

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So the west is still hunting communists to this day? Easier than fixing climate or providing healthcare I guess.

Care to explain what was communist in the event except the name of the party that enacted the massacre and maybe some of the people who died?

I wonder why an event that happened almost before I was born is so important to some people here. Why aren't we showcasing how monstrous Hitler was burning people for racism then? That's far more fitting to the situation of most western countries that are all leaning on fascism and racism. Some western countries like France are not far from crushing protestors with tanks btw.

But I guess the cold war world of 40 years ago is more comfortable. There was this nice black and white taint where capitalists were the good guys against evil communists. And we must now bring back all the sins of China and USSR to never forget what they did, so can be blind to what's happening now I guess.

People throwing "tankies" everywhere are worth no more than any Russian troll honestly.

You didn’t answer my question.

To answer yours, maybe it’s because Germany has literal museums dedicated to education about the horrors of its past while China tries to hide them and has that same party in power. That’s slightly different.

Also don’t fool yourself. The Cold War was capitalists against capitalists that called themselves communists. Real communism never existed for more than a week in any country in the world.

He. If you want to criticise China you should talk about ouïghours or Hong Kong. Tiananmen is irrelevant. It's as relevant as slavery in the US. Aren't you busy killing black people these days btw?

Definitely not as relevant since you can talk about slavery and it’s widely condemned (by the ruling party, at least).

I’m also not American, but nice try.

I don't care where you live. You're not Chinese yet you care about tiananmen apparently. But you don't care about slavery in the US apparently. Nor about fascism eventhough it's making a comeback in all western countries.

Which proves my point: tiananmen is not about China. It's a symbol of communist oppression. And a Godwin point to end any discussion about communism. And a liberal fuck you to all leftists and communists of lemmy. There's a reason I've never read "tankie" before I read lemmy.

I care about slavery and I care about fascism. Am I not allowed to care about those things and at the same time about the fact that the second-most populated country in the world is a literal dictatorship?

Again, there was nothing communist about Tiananmen, nor there is anything communist about the current CCP. It’s just fascism under a different name. Invent a time machine and bring back Marx to see this shit, he definitely wouldn’t be happy about it.

If Hitler or his party was still around and denying the Holocaust that that would be a comparable analogy. But it's not, so it isn't.

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Obvious troll is obvious.

The troll is the OP posting this picture if you ask me.

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