this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Eh the massacring happened on side streets, local Peking residents were trying to keep the army from moving into the square not really knowing that other Peking residents had already briefed the army on who the protesters actually were, and what they wanted, and how they behaved. Once the army was on the square and set an ultimatum it was cleared with no or few casualties, the reports are a bit fuzzy.
That doesn't excuse the CCP in one bit, of course, or rather it doesn't excuse the hardline faction who couldn't stomach that others in the party were actually talking to the protesters as that would set a precedent that you can just turn up on the square and get an audience with the party, or maybe more precisely could boost the influence of one party faction over the whole.
The whole situation really can't be divorced from Hu Yaobang and his role in the party: The protests were essentially a wake for him and his ideas. Which the hardliners thoroughly buried afterwards and the situation in China hasn't improved to the point where Chinese would even be comfortable to criticise that decision -- you'd get invited for tea, if you can catch on to the euphemism.
If it had been up to the hardliners yes the army would've massacred the whole square, if that hadn't been their intention they wouldn't have mischaracterised the nature of the protest towards the army. Without ordinary Peking citizens stepping in, and getting butchered for it, that massacre would have happened.
And yes the Uygur situation is a genocide that's without question or asterisk.
The massacre is not and has never been limited to the square. It was the event.
Don’t say any of that on lemmy.ml haha
See there's the stuff that happened, there's the version that tankies want to believe (complete denial), which is actually different from the official CCP stance ("necessary and proportionate police action to ensure stability", with the implication "enough questions, comrade, nothing more to see"), which is different from western public... myth, I have to say. Back when the stuff went down western journalists didn't know what was happening, there were confusing reports, there were reports of violence, and then there was the tank man -- taken the day after (IIRC, but definitely later and no he didn't get run over). The collective imagination somehow constructed an image of the Chinese army rolling over students. Which is... metaphorically true, but not literally. And then the CCP is using that western imagination to spin their own tale of how the evil west is slandering them.
There have been plenty of years to get to the bottom of it, and I’m pretty sure the bottom of it has been found.