18 ms·

Top search result for “Tiananmen Square” on China's top search engine Baidu

84 points by ddxxdd 7y ago

moate 7y ago
I think this is the best part: >>The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story. Here's the link for the article they're quoting: https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananm... Pull quote: A common response to this corrective analysis is: So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place? That is an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction. I guess they're just really hoping nobody actually reads the article, and instead just goes "oh, false narrative. case closed"
ConfusedDog 7y ago
I remember when I was a kid in China, school showed us a clip announcing the man stopping the tank as the 'robber' who was trying to rob a tank. I was like wtf you got to be kidding. I was like 12 and I felt that my intelligence was insulted... that's probably why I no longer live in China.
- yogenpro 7y ago
  My guess is that you misunderstood the original word they used "歹徒", which is more like "gangster, villan". And the clip you referred to, I think was the "tank man" video being aired by CCTV on 1989/6/5, with voice-over as: "稍有常识的人都会看出，如果我们的铁骑继续前进，这个螳臂当车的歹徒，难道能够阻挡得了吗？摄像机拍下的这个画面，同西方某些国家的宣传恰恰相反，正好说明了我们的军队，保持了最大限度的克制。" which roughly translates to: "Any sane person can see that, if our 'iron horse' keeps marching, this 'gangster' wouldn't stand any chance, just like 'a mantis trying to stop a chariot'. In contrary to some western media had claimed, this clip showed that our troops remained utmost desciplinary." So I would say the clip was used to reinforce CCP's official tone on the tragedy, which is something like "some gangsters colluded with foreign influences tried to overthrow Chinese government". I know sometimes CCP's propaganda sounds dumb, but definitely not that dumb as "tank man was trying to rob the tank".
  - ConfusedDog 7y ago
    Sounds familiar. My 12 year-old self probably did misunderstand 歹徒。 After hearing the first part of the sentence, I remember being pissed for them showing me this ridiculous footage with that righteous tone of voice - I couldn't even remember hearing the second part. I think I was fed up with this type of footages that just don't explain what actually going on. Same negative emotion arises when 新闻联播 started every night about who visit XYZ, did whatever great job, blah blah blah BS. I don't have that kind of emotional reaction to these types of footages anymore. Benefit of no longer being a teenager, I'm used to ignoring useless information. Fox news and some other mainstream media in the states are not doing much better TBH, but at least they are very competitive, and there are some useful information can be derived from their biased views.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mimixco 7y ago
This is the canary in the cage for those of who still live in something resembling a democracy. This kind of censorship, whether from governments or tech giants, is already starting to take hold in the US and Europe.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  It's not censorship, it's "alternative facts" - far more effective!
- nickthegreek 7y ago
  Where is this happening in US & Europe?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bhk 7y ago
    Yesterday I did a search for "drunk pelosi" videos on duckduckgo and it reported "Sorry, no results here!" (Replacing "pelosi" any other name yields a page full.) Today they have results -- properly vetted, I presume.
  - chx 7y ago
    In Hungary almost all media is now owned by (effectively) the government. https://rsf.org/en/hungary https://rsf.org/en/hungary The alternative facts are rather thick on the ground due to this.
  - kangnkodos 7y ago
    1) Build public support against hate speech. 2) Create laws to ban hate speech. This puts the government in charge of defining exactly what is and what is not hate speech. 3) The government tweaks the definition of hate speech slowly over the years. Eventually, hate speech includes anything which is against the official government line. 4) Profit. Err... Control of the country, which could be very profitable.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
adriantam 7y ago
Oh yes, no one killed on Tiananmen Square. Because they are killed around the square or one nearby roads. So like a murderer arguing that "I didn't kill that guy, it's the bullet from my gun did it".
jdgoesmarching 7y ago
I'm sure running that search or opening that page is not advisable in China. That's not a database you want your IP address to end up in.
randyrand 7y ago
Could someone post the text? backup link?
- Gaelan 7y ago
  Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat who specializes in Chinese affairs, wrote an article in Japan Times recently, saying the Western media forged the so-called Tiananmen myth. Excerpts: The recent WikiLeaks release of cables has helped finally kill the myth of an alleged massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. But how did that myth come to exist in the first place? Several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any massacre. So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre? A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square. The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story. Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed to have been present at the square when "troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds". Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted - one of the many black information operations. Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, "the strategic placement of lies and false rumors", while gray propaganda was "the production of slanted, but not fictitious, non-attributable information". According to Henry, it played a key role in helping justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965. The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing government had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption. Some then leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected. When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could. Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres in certain countries, still go out of their way to paint a false picture of "a brutal Chinese government willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands". An April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham's book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising , - whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre - provides a clue. It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, as having said that creating a "sea of blood" might be the only way to shake the government. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops, then the anger of the government becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that. Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.
gvhst 7y ago
PSA: The article is from 2011. This isn't a new publication for the 30th anniversary as I initially thought.
tempguy9999 7y ago
No-one got killed. Everyone got bubble bath and cake. Years ago the Chinese had a reputation for subtlety. Anyone remember that? Article has less nuance than a Michael Bay Transformers film.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  The cake is a lie.
ihon 7y ago
When i was younger i believed the tank crushed the man who was blocking the tank. Many years later i saw the complete video. The man walked away, persuaded by bystanders. Did a google search and found this: Tank Man full footage: https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1134582926325104641 https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1134582926325104641
- hajile 7y ago
  My understanding is that the men who dragged him away were plainclothes police officers. To my knowledge, nobody has ever shown any evidence he was seen alive after the incident.
- zawerf 7y ago
  That twitter thread had a link to a video where you can see the actual shootings (NSFW, blood gore): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI
sneakernets 7y ago
When propagandists discovered you can turn enough of the populace against the press (specifically the free press) as a whole, you don't even need to censor anymore. China could start unblocking all evidence of the massacre happening, but counter it with the brainworms of "fake news", "whataboutism", and "FUD" - then it doesn't matter how loud the truth screams, more and more of the populace willingly calls it a lie regardless. It sure saves money on having to find each bit of truth and stamp it out. It's brilliant.
- cat199 7y ago
  or, alternately, buy out the entire media and claim that the global level of implicit spin injected into everything is 'objectivity'... this is a 2 edged sword which cuts both ways
AFascistWorld 7y ago
>From Overseas Press "Overseas press" that are regularly quoted on Chinese media: Europe Times, World Daily, Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong Wen Wei Po (present in Chinese libraries), American Multimedia Television USA (Chinese name "All America Television"), and a lot more are either controlled or influenced by the party.
archgoon 7y ago
The submission seems to have been removed from the front page; is it being flagged?
non_sequitur 7y ago
Interesting how quickly this fell off the front page (saw it earlier, then came back to find the link and it was already off the first 3 pages). Is that due to a large number of up/downvotes in the same time?
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Interesting, innit. Is there any downloadable info on HN voting patterns over time, per article or per comment? It would make an interesting project to have such an aggregate over time. When I see certain types of comments I check the poster's previous posts. Not so uncommon to get a long trail of obvious bias, often in the form of crude criticism of the US. Some members on slashdot, they could hardly be more obvious.
  - AFascistWorld 7y ago
    From my understanding, HN doesn't like politically sensitive threads regarding China.
    - fouric 7y ago
      "HN" meaning users or mods?

84 points by ddxxdd 7y ago

I think this is the best part: >>The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story. Here's the link for the article they're quoting: https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananm... Pull quote: A common response to this corrective analysis is: So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place? That is an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction. I guess they're just really hoping nobody actually reads the article, and instead just goes "oh, false narrative. case closed"

ConfusedDog 7y ago

I remember when I was a kid in China, school showed us a clip announcing the man stopping the tank as the 'robber' who was trying to rob a tank. I was like wtf you got to be kidding. I was like 12 and I felt that my intelligence was insulted... that's probably why I no longer live in China.

yogenpro 7y ago
My guess is that you misunderstood the original word they used "歹徒", which is more like "gangster, villan". And the clip you referred to, I think was the "tank man" video being aired by CCTV on 1989/6/5, with voice-over as: "稍有常识的人都会看出，如果我们的铁骑继续前进，这个螳臂当车的歹徒，难道能够阻挡得了吗？摄像机拍下的这个画面，同西方某些国家的宣传恰恰相反，正好说明了我们的军队，保持了最大限度的克制。" which roughly translates to: "Any sane person can see that, if our 'iron horse' keeps marching, this 'gangster' wouldn't stand any chance, just like 'a mantis trying to stop a chariot'. In contrary to some western media had claimed, this clip showed that our troops remained utmost desciplinary." So I would say the clip was used to reinforce CCP's official tone on the tragedy, which is something like "some gangsters colluded with foreign influences tried to overthrow Chinese government". I know sometimes CCP's propaganda sounds dumb, but definitely not that dumb as "tank man was trying to rob the tank".
- ConfusedDog 7y ago
  Sounds familiar. My 12 year-old self probably did misunderstand 歹徒。 After hearing the first part of the sentence, I remember being pissed for them showing me this ridiculous footage with that righteous tone of voice - I couldn't even remember hearing the second part. I think I was fed up with this type of footages that just don't explain what actually going on. Same negative emotion arises when 新闻联播 started every night about who visit XYZ, did whatever great job, blah blah blah BS. I don't have that kind of emotional reaction to these types of footages anymore. Benefit of no longer being a teenager, I'm used to ignoring useless information. Fox news and some other mainstream media in the states are not doing much better TBH, but at least they are very competitive, and there are some useful information can be derived from their biased views.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mimixco 7y ago

This is the canary in the cage for those of who still live in something resembling a democracy. This kind of censorship, whether from governments or tech giants, is already starting to take hold in the US and Europe.

gridlockd 7y ago
It's not censorship, it's "alternative facts" - far more effective!
nickthegreek 7y ago
Where is this happening in US & Europe?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bhk 7y ago
  Yesterday I did a search for "drunk pelosi" videos on duckduckgo and it reported "Sorry, no results here!" (Replacing "pelosi" any other name yields a page full.) Today they have results -- properly vetted, I presume.
- chx 7y ago
  In Hungary almost all media is now owned by (effectively) the government. https://rsf.org/en/hungary https://rsf.org/en/hungary The alternative facts are rather thick on the ground due to this.
- kangnkodos 7y ago
  1) Build public support against hate speech. 2) Create laws to ban hate speech. This puts the government in charge of defining exactly what is and what is not hate speech. 3) The government tweaks the definition of hate speech slowly over the years. Eventually, hate speech includes anything which is against the official government line. 4) Profit. Err... Control of the country, which could be very profitable.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

adriantam 7y ago

Oh yes, no one killed on Tiananmen Square. Because they are killed around the square or one nearby roads. So like a murderer arguing that "I didn't kill that guy, it's the bullet from my gun did it".

jdgoesmarching 7y ago

I'm sure running that search or opening that page is not advisable in China. That's not a database you want your IP address to end up in.

randyrand 7y ago

Could someone post the text? backup link?

Gaelan 7y ago
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat who specializes in Chinese affairs, wrote an article in Japan Times recently, saying the Western media forged the so-called Tiananmen myth. Excerpts: The recent WikiLeaks release of cables has helped finally kill the myth of an alleged massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. But how did that myth come to exist in the first place? Several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any massacre. So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre? A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square. The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story. Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed to have been present at the square when "troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds". Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted - one of the many black information operations. Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, "the strategic placement of lies and false rumors", while gray propaganda was "the production of slanted, but not fictitious, non-attributable information". According to Henry, it played a key role in helping justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965. The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing government had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption. Some then leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected. When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could. Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres in certain countries, still go out of their way to paint a false picture of "a brutal Chinese government willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands". An April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham's book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising , - whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre - provides a clue. It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, as having said that creating a "sea of blood" might be the only way to shake the government. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops, then the anger of the government becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that. Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.

gvhst 7y ago

PSA: The article is from 2011. This isn't a new publication for the 30th anniversary as I initially thought.

tempguy9999 7y ago

No-one got killed. Everyone got bubble bath and cake. Years ago the Chinese had a reputation for subtlety. Anyone remember that? Article has less nuance than a Michael Bay Transformers film.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
The cake is a lie.

ihon 7y ago

When i was younger i believed the tank crushed the man who was blocking the tank. Many years later i saw the complete video. The man walked away, persuaded by bystanders. Did a google search and found this: Tank Man full footage: https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1134582926325104641 https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1134582926325104641

hajile 7y ago
My understanding is that the men who dragged him away were plainclothes police officers. To my knowledge, nobody has ever shown any evidence he was seen alive after the incident.
zawerf 7y ago
That twitter thread had a link to a video where you can see the actual shootings (NSFW, blood gore): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI

sneakernets 7y ago

When propagandists discovered you can turn enough of the populace against the press (specifically the free press) as a whole, you don't even need to censor anymore. China could start unblocking all evidence of the massacre happening, but counter it with the brainworms of "fake news", "whataboutism", and "FUD" - then it doesn't matter how loud the truth screams, more and more of the populace willingly calls it a lie regardless. It sure saves money on having to find each bit of truth and stamp it out. It's brilliant.

cat199 7y ago
or, alternately, buy out the entire media and claim that the global level of implicit spin injected into everything is 'objectivity'... this is a 2 edged sword which cuts both ways

AFascistWorld 7y ago

>From Overseas Press "Overseas press" that are regularly quoted on Chinese media: Europe Times, World Daily, Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong Wen Wei Po (present in Chinese libraries), American Multimedia Television USA (Chinese name "All America Television"), and a lot more are either controlled or influenced by the party.

archgoon 7y ago

The submission seems to have been removed from the front page; is it being flagged?

non_sequitur 7y ago

Interesting how quickly this fell off the front page (saw it earlier, then came back to find the link and it was already off the first 3 pages). Is that due to a large number of up/downvotes in the same time?

tempguy9999 7y ago
Interesting, innit. Is there any downloadable info on HN voting patterns over time, per article or per comment? It would make an interesting project to have such an aggregate over time. When I see certain types of comments I check the poster's previous posts. Not so uncommon to get a long trail of obvious bias, often in the form of crude criticism of the US. Some members on slashdot, they could hardly be more obvious.
- AFascistWorld 7y ago
  From my understanding, HN doesn't like politically sensitive threads regarding China.
  - fouric 7y ago
    "HN" meaning users or mods?