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Tiananmen Square: What happened in the protests of 1989?
- studentrob 7y agoI wonder to what degree the population is aware of the level of censorship that happens on the internet today.
- 07d046 7y agoOn that note, apparently Instagram in Laos is blocking "liking" posts related to Tiananmen Square. > I’m in Laos, a close ally of China, & whenever I “Like” a post on @instagram related to Tiananmen Square it comes up with a message saying “Action Blocked”. When I switch on my VPN it allow me to “Like” the images. I wonder if China provides internet infrastructure to Laos. https://twitter.com/adamjdean/status/1135809731879088128 https://twitter.com/adamjdean/status/1135809731879088128
- asveikau 7y agoThis is a big deal if true. I can't imagine they did that without https or other encryption. It would have to be FB doing this.
- studentrob 7y agoI've often wondered how many controls Facebook gives to SE Asia in exchange for being allowed to operate there. Do they get moderator powers or alert systems? In Vietnam about 5 years ago, you could only use Facebook on your phone. It's hard for me to imagine the dictatorships of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam welcoming Facebook and allowing the population to freely criticize the government.
- mac01021 7y agoIt's interesting that you can view the content, but just not like it.
- asveikau 7y agoI wonder if it's being logged who tries to like and fails, and if so, who has access to that info.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoSeems in line with what is known so far, e.g. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-allows-government-criticism-silences-collective-expression https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
- mac01021 7y agoThat does seem consistent. But why adopt that strategy? Why not pull out the dissent by its roots?
- rellui 7y agoThey're giving them a delusion of freedom so that most won't realize they're censored or passively accept it. If the government goes all out then it might cause a revolt. Soft tactics are always scarier than hard tactics.
- studentrob 7y agoLaos is quite locked down, beyond the internet. You technically can't form a group (e.g. a book club) there without the government's consent, and it is very hard for NGOs to operate. I would not be surprised at any level of internet censorship there, except that Vientiane is within cell distance of Thailand, so maybe that forces them open a little.
- Nasrudith 7y agoAlmost certainly aware of something certainly given the sheer clumbsiness like shutting down the stock market when the top numbers come up on numbers which are also coded references to Tinamen Square. You would probably be interested in this article of related weird bypasses and defiance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse
- Mtinie 7y agoAware there is censorship at all? From conversations with Chinese citizens living abroad whom I work with, they say the knowledge censorship is occurring is common, but as to understanding what types of information is being censored they only know in general terms. Anecdotally, in China, the younger generations can’t get answers from the older generations who lived through these times because it’s verboten to speak of them. It leads to an (academically interesting) censorship feedback loop. From my perspective it’s hard to know what you don’t know if the Powers-That-Be want to keep it a secret. For example, here in the U.S. I assume we’re reasonably censorship-free, but by no means am I confident we have access to everything (excluding governmental information requiring clearances). I do recognize our various media outlets play a major role in determining what the narrative is and which stories/reports/messages are raised to the level of societal recognition. I know people who consider this to be an indirect form of censorship.
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago> Anecdotally, in China, the younger generations can’t get answers from the older generations who lived through these times because it’s verboten to speak of them. Chinese speak very freely about all topics in private and with people they know.
- xenyal 7y agoAlso, there are forums in which the Chinese do freely discuss these topics, obviously with to some degree of discretion. But yes, they generally stick to speaking about sensitive topics to verbal conversation since there's significantly less 'keyboard warriors' over there - especially ones with any strong political lean.
- studentrob 7y ago> there's significantly less 'keyboard warriors' over there HN is not blocked in China. Interesting. What is the sentiment when access to a popular website is removed? Does everyone just VPN, or forget about it?
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- est 7y agocensorship was rebranded as "battle against misinformation" these days.
- Avalaxy 7y agoYea, not really. There is a difference between preventing people from spreading facts and preventing people from spreading blatant lies.
- philwelch 7y agoWhat’s the difference, really? One truth is that power corrupts. The power to “prevent people from spreading blatant lies” is the power to be the arbiter of truth; it’s naive to think that power will never be abused.
- 50656E6973 7y agoWhen overlords and their followers believe themselves and to be benevolent moral authorities (as most do), any criticism is seen as malicious misinformation. It also helps that the overlords are in a position to control the flow of information, and thus define what is fact and what is fiction, according to their version of reality.
- refurb 7y agoNot sure there is. You need someone to make the call between truth and lies. That person then has all the power.
- est 7y agothe key is "preventing". Once the mechanism is there, the power will be likely get abused. Also, who decides what's lie? Is providing partial truth a lie? It's all about perspective.
- chapium 7y agoto tell a lie to hide a truth
- throwayEngineer 7y agoLook here. Mods shadow ban/hide comments. Censorship is very bad on the internet.
- turk73 7y agoSad that so many AMERICAN media outlets are censoring stories about Tianamen Square. Whose side are they on?
- mlang23 7y agoInteresting staccato writing style. I wonder if the target audience of this article is actually non-english speaking people...
- oconnor663 7y agoOr maybe machine translation?
- forgotmypwd123 7y agoOn the BBC? From what language, and why?
- hencq 7y agoFrom English to Chinese.
- el_cujo 7y agoI clicked on a couple of other articles from the side bar and they all seemed to have the same "skip line after ever sentence" style, but yeah this article does seem especially simplistic and would probably be easy to run through some translation software compared to some articles.
- ChrisSD 7y agoIt's the BBC News web style to have relatively simple sentences, and each paragraph be made up of one sentence. The sentences do often become more complex further down an article. Partly this was done so as to be readable on the old Ceefax and other mediums. But also so that it would be understandable by a wide audience.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago>> I wonder if the target audience of this article is actually non-english speaking people... > this article does seem especially simplistic and would probably be easy to run through some translation software compared to some articles. Though, in this case, that's probably not necessary for the main non-English audience for this article. The BBC has a Chinese-language website (https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp). Unfortunately they discontinued their Mandarin shortwave service (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12864041 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12864041), which is still probably the best technology to bypass censorship.
- amiga_500 7y agoThis article has almost no information and must have taken less than 30 minutes to write.
- educationdata 7y agoOne of the best songs for the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4PJVLTrjt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4PJVLTrjt0 I remember there was a youtube video with better quality, but I cannot find it any more.
- bijant 7y agoI have enormous respect for the tank crew. In the preceding days and hours many of their comrades had been violently attacked by militarized protesters. Molotov Cocktails had been used to kill and maim other tank crews. The restraint those PLA officers showed in the face of (cia sponsored) adversity will go down as one of the greatest examples of military discipline in history.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- atemerev 7y agoAlmost 60 minutes before the first bot arrival. The Party is slacking off!
- dang 7y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and please stop using HN for nationalistic flamewar? Or any flamewar. We ban accounts that do this. I don't want to ban you, because you've posted good comments too. But users here need to follow the site guidelines and be using HN as intended. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jacquesm 7y agoTanks against civilians? Tanks are bullet proof and if you keep the hatch shut you should be pretty safe from your average molotov cocktail thrower, otherwise tanks would not be worth anything at all on the battlefield. As long as the opponent isn't armed with RPG's it's an uneven battle. As for the CIA sponsoring, sources please?
- bijant 7y ago"if you keep the hatch shut you should be pretty safe from your average molotov cocktail thrower" [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird [2]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142...
- peisistratos 7y agoActually some accounts have a lot of people protesting feeling the opposite - that the "capitalist roaders" had gone too far in laying off state enterprise workers. In other words supporters of what are described as "hardliners" supporting state industry. Obviously the few initial Hu Yaobang commemorators felt differently, but mass movements grow from wider interests. And obviously there was no mass movement as the protest failed. I have to laugh at recent news reports of students being hassled in China. The students are trying to organize revolutionary unions and want a return to communism and Maoism. It is obvious the same Western newspapers tut-tuting the Maoist students being hassled would be fulminating if they took power and started moving back to the Maoist principles that they are espousing.
- pjc50 7y agoTiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting. There we a huge number of people involved on both the PLA and protestor sides. There are some reports which claim thousands of people killed and gruesomely disposed of; those people must have had relatives. We (outsiders and history in general) have very little idea what happened, and a single photo which escaped the censorship. If the gunpoint forgetting is maintained for the lifetimes of the surviving participants, we may never know what happened. Of course, even in incidents which are hugely documented, there is scope for denialists and propagandists to sneak in misinformation. Edit: well, looks like there's lots more. I've been misled myself by how prevalent the Tank Man photo is compared to all the other footage!
- cjslep 7y ago> We (outsiders and history in general) have very little idea what happened, and a single photo which escaped the censorship. ...what? We have more than a single photo of the Tiananmen Square incident! While in the article, have some archival BBC footage: https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A
- nogridbag 7y agoHere's another (NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI Discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bw8x9b/a_look_at_the_tiananmen_square_massacre_from_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bw8x9b/a_look_at_th...
- cr1895 7y ago>a single photo which escaped the censorship. It seems there's quite significant documentation, even documentaries with video of the event. Perhaps more is coming to light because it's the 30 year anniversary. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/tiananmen-square-protest-photos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/tiananmen-squa...
- wodenokoto 7y agoA single photo? What are you talking about. There are plenty of video footage from the square where you can see the military shoot from cars into crowds of civilians[1]. We don’t have “very little idea what happened”. Contemporary BBC news report: https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A
- yumraj 7y agoPerhaps the World should adopt this day as Tainenmen Square day, or World Democracy Day, as a formal counter against the great forgetting.
- dvh 7y agoAnd there should be 10% discounts in cheap electronics store and sales in toy stores. /s
- rwmj 7y agoThe facts in this UK diplomatic cable are disputed, but it has some terrifying details: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_Massacre https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_...
- m-i-l 7y agoOne of the things I hadn't fully appreciated, until reading the link, was how divided even the perpetrators were. Firstly, there are indications that not all the armies worked together, e.g. "Beijing [Military Region] commander had refused to supply outside armies with food, water or barracks", and the suggestion that different armies may have had allegiance to different factions in the State Council, e.g. "we cannot substantiate reports that six military regions (not Beijing) support Li Peng". And secondly, if the information is correct, it seems the atrocities were committed by the 27 Army who were just one of at least 8 other armies present. Furthermore there are even multiple references to troops from other armies being victims of the 27 Army, e.g. "27 Army APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers] opened fire on the crowd (both civilians and soldiers) ... APCs ran over troops and civilians", "27 Army ordered to spare noone and shot wounded SMR [Shenyang Military Region] soldiers". And even within the 27 Army itself "27 Army officer shot dead by own troops apparently because he faltered". Sounds quite chaotic.
- scarmig 7y agoThe protesters were also beset by factionalism. One issue the government had was that it didn't have a reliable partner in negotiations: different student groups had a diverse range of goals, from anti-corruption measures, to more socialism, to more capitalism, to freedom of speech, to democracy, to better housing standards, to lower tuition. And there was a constant tension between moderate and hardline student groups. Imagine if Occupy Wall Street was 100,000 strong and had occupied Times Square, and the city of New York was trying to negotiate with them to meet their demands.
- fasthandle 7y agoTerrifying indeed. No comment other than for others to please read this.
- c789a123 7y agoThe free world gave the criminal CCP regime a free pass after the 1989 massacre. The same criminal regime get stronger in the last 30 years and put on a capitalist shell on its bloody skin. But it never stopped its criminal practices but has been doing it more relentlessly just with more concealment. For about 20 years it made large scale human organ sells from people they kidnapped or arrested. It put up huge concentration camps in Xinjing to get rid of some minor race people in the number of millions. That is just a small sample of its crimes still actively happening. I am glad US starts to realize the CCP regime is not a country following normal human ethics.
- dang 7y agoWould you please stop using HN for nationalistic or political battle? You've been doing that repeatedly, and we ban such accounts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- objectivetruth 7y agoI appreciate the reason for the rule, but in this case, I'm curious who this person was "battling?" Seems like it was a top-level post that didn't argue with the original headline or article, but provided additional context. And I found it helpful since I'd forgotten about the whole "execute prisoners for their organs" thing that was (is) going on in China and that seems relevant. The article is about a massacre, lots of other threads debated the existence and scale of atrocities in the massacre, and this specific thread just seemed to mention similar atrocities? Specifically, if they had removed the "evil" and "bloody" metaphor, and phrased it like "Considering the supply chain and trade interactions between the US and China, it's worth considering the significant differences in human rights. For instance, the black market organ schemes of the 1990s and the Uighur concentration camps where millions of ethnic minorities are currently interned." <-- That seems like the exact same content which is completely relevant to conversations here? (I'm an American with no Chinese connections or vested interest in the conversation, but I'm just curious how it specifically crossed a line, especially given the recent HN conversations about political discussions. I know it's a fine line but for this particular topic, it sparked my interest. Thanks in advance for your consideration.)
- juanuys 7y agoA good bit of TV recently about "tank man": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimerica_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimerica_(miniseries)
- Shivetya 7y agoThe part that irks me is that we still allow companies which preach human rights in Western countries to not only turn a deaf ear to the abuses of China's past and present but to continue manufacturing there without quarrel. Each time their CEO's get up to preach about human rights they need to be challenged on their activities in China. China to them is a profit center and nothing more.
- ubercow13 7y agoAnd you, posting on your phone or PC made partly in China, are also turning a deaf ear and then preaching on HN. That's exactly 'letting' them get away with it right?
- HackPotter 7y agoThis isn't really a good-faith argument. It isn't tenable to live and work in modern society without the use of a phone or PC, and it certainly isn't possible to connect with people to effect societal change at any significant level without using the internet (and by extension a device capable of connecting to the internet). The very fact that the parent comment was pointing out the issues with western corporations outsourcing their pollution-producing practices means that the commenter isn't "turning a deaf ear" to the issue; they're very much aware and talking about it. What you're saying comes across as disingenuous and hostile, when as far as you know the individual you're responding to could be working diligently to fight against industrial pollution and climate change.
- ubercow13 7y agoMy post was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek because I think the GP post is equally absurd. In what way is a current CEO supposed to alter their business practice to make amends for the "abuses of China's past" (presumably including Tiananmen)?
- PavlovsCat 7y ago> make amends for the "abuses of China's past" They said "not only turn a deaf ear to", you turn it into "make amends for". The absurdity in your reading is there because you put it there.
- julienfr112 7y agoCould github turn it's background color black for a day ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lawsan645 7y agoPlease check out the feed of Peter Turnley on IG or FB. He was a photojournalist who was in Beijing in May-Jun of 1989.
- utopcell 7y agoI am curious to see how all these low orbit satellite internet projects will play out for countries like China and North Korea.
- miki123211 7y agoIt always strikes me as weird that 4 june 1989 is both the day when the chinese were protesting for freedom and the day when the poles had their first free election. I'm a pole myself, and when I've heard about Tiananmen Square for the first time (age 14 or so) I was wondering if one event was somehow related to the other, as the movements had some things in common.
- philwelch 7y ago1989 was the year that communist regimes across the world fell under pressure from their own people. China was the exception.
- scarmig 7y agoInterestingly, many of the student leaders are listed as highly wanted fugitives by the PRC to this day. At least one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu%27erkaixi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu%27erkaixi ) has tried to turn himself in for trial, multiple times, in places as diverse as Macau, HK, and various embassies throughout the world, but he's been refused each time and deported to definitely-part-of-China Taiwan.
- refurb 7y agoWow. That’s really telling. I assume the Chinese gov’t thinks that any effort to prosecute him would just bring more attention to a mostly forgotten episode. Reminds me of the stories a coworker told me about growing up in Romania under Ceaușescu. A neighbor would disappear and a new family would be living in their house the next day. Nobody ever said anything. Just acted like they had always lived there.
- person_of_color 7y agoHow can we reconcile a country that does this and also brings hundreds of millions out of poverty? The same way Britain colonized India, but they made it whole too.
- nithinm 7y agoBritain colonised India, looted it dry, abused its people. So 'making it whole' by torturing a country is not 'remarkable' act.