According to a Wikileakes cable released to the British telegram news organization (source here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...hed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html) After reading this some more, a Chilean diplomat at the time gave accounts of the scene and said there where no mass shootings in the crowd, instead the majority of troops who fought the students where armed with only the most basic of anti-riot gear like wooden clubs. One of the protest leaders "liu Xiaobo" (who just recently was awarded the Nobel peace price) had ordered the protest to stop and leave the square, directly going against western view of as a bunch of nice protesters getting killed by evil Chinese army. However it does still say there was a "massacre" at Beijing against the students, tough the estimated dates where placed way to high in order to undermine the Chinese regime. Tough i must admit this one less thing i can use against Deng Xiaoping, you know he did bring capitalism back into China, ended the Barefoot doctors program, ruined Mao legacy and there where many people playing the true chinese internaitonal at the protest.
Tiananmen Square is not a faked incident. A Chilean diplomat saying otherwise should really not change your opinion in the slightest. Historical revisionism seems to be quite popular among Nazis, communists, and the Chinese, but it's all hogwash.
Could be trying to save face. Nevertheless, I question this. I do not believe that the Western media did not exaggerate the Tiananmen Square incident and add bias to their reporting. BUT, it is beyond doubt in my mind that people did die. On both sides. While I do not share the extreme skepticism that Kali holds on everything that the Chinese government says, I do believe that this is a case in which the Chinese representative is either outright lying or he simply has not achieved the level in the Chinese government that they clear up his propoganda-clouded view of the world's history. While Wikileaks has produced... interesting claims in the past that have come to fruition, in this case, I believe that they have been mislead.
The only people who know what happened are the people who were actually there, let's ask them, Oh wait...
Tiananmen Square was very much indeed a massacre. It's hard push something under the rug as large as that event when a lot of the world's media at the time watched how the events unfolded before being gagged. Just like what Karakoran said, the Chinese have done a messy job of saying "no, no, nothing to see here [whistling]" when it's so painfully obvious that tons of blood was shed. So, I highly doubt this former Chilean official.
They try to cover the shit out of it in China. Of course the rest of the world is aware some shit went down.
That is a massacre. That being said, it was rather blown out of proportion. I remember seeing western journalists say that "China is going to have a civil war" and all that when the protests were going down. It wasn't just students, either. There were workers, housewives, retired old men partaking. Even some soldiers ended up joining the protests and were generally reluctant to open up on their own people. The Party were shitting themselves about it and did what they could to disperse the crowd. By beating and killing them. I do enjoy seeing the censorship on the part of the Chinese. I wish we had the same type of regime here. Maybe less people would be buying fucking Hollister t-shirts.
I'm content with dealing with Hollister if it means police aren't slaughtering thousands of OWS protesters.
Maybe. As long as the government never felt threatened and they made profit from it, I can see them allowing Hollister. Chinese government control of power has some downs and some ups. For example, companies like Monsanto are not allowed in China. At least, last I checked.
I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the media says there's going to be a Civil War the more people that'll go protest because they see it as their chance. If the media underly covered Egypt or Libya I doubt they would've had revolutions so quickly.
