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The general who refused to crush Tiananmen's protesters
- latincommie 11mo ago[flagged]
- rhubarbtree 11mo agoThe economist is a quality news magazine for the financial elite. As such, it is fairly accurate, and very biased towards the financial elite. It is liable to suggest deregulation as the solution to everything. It is less likely to fabricate stories about Chinese human rights abuses.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 11mo agoFrom your Wikileaks link: GALLO SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.
- marojejian 11mo agoarchive: https://archive.is/k388E#selection-1339.61-1339.70 https://archive.is/k388E#selection-1339.61-1339.70 video of the trial (6 hours): https://youtu.be/1RBV9i4jaPo?si=oesH721IFLnmzEcW https://youtu.be/1RBV9i4jaPo?si=oesH721IFLnmzEcW
- blargthorwars 11mo agoMay his name be remembered and on our lips for ever, and may his memory be a blessing for his family.
- DustinEchoes 11mo agoGutsy move by whoever got it out of the archive and into Wu’s hands.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoActs like this, along with rebellion against malicious use of authority when believed to be necessary (Hugh Thompson Jr., etc), are heroes of humanity imho.
- lysace 11mo agoWhitewashing CCP is a whole thing. This story is probably a part of it, somehow. In 30 years or so it will be completed.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo agoOut of curiosity, what were China’s current leadership up to during the Tiananmen Square massacre?
- testdelacc1 11mo agoThe article mentions where Xi Jinping was. > China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian during the unrest in 1989. But the PLA’s crushing of that unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse, clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from it all: the PLA must remain the party’s army and it must be kept under control. It all helps explain Mr Xi’s relentless “anti-corruption” drives among the high command. Xi was 36 years old in 1989, older than almost all of the current Politburo members. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had very minor roles at that time. Xi’s role was at least partly because he was a princeling - his father was a comrade of Mao Zedong from the old days.
- SilverElfin 11mo agoWas Xi himself a participant in the atrocities of the Cultural revolution? He would have been 23 when it ended.
- testdelacc1 11mo agoXi was a victim of the cultural revolution. His father was paraded as an enemy of the revolution, his mother was forced to denounce his father and his sister killed herself. Xi was sent to a rural village where he dug ditches and lived in a cave. Makes his complete commitment to the Party that much more interesting. I think Chinese leaders see the path they took - always venerating Mao (unlike the Soviets who denounced Stalin) and taking brutal action against any who would challenge the party’s power (in Tiananmen, unlike Soviet parties) as vindicating the approach of trusting the Communist Party. They firmly believe that only the Communist Party can control China and make it strong. Any reform like what the Russians did would leave them weak, like Russia is. Obviously we can’t read his mind, but I’d guess that he justifies the Cultural Revolution as the right thing because the Party cannot be questioned. If you question that it opens up a whole can of worms that leads to the weakening and destruction of the Party.
- mgrat 11mo agoThese are the sorts of people that deserve national holidays. Many of them come from problematic background, or had problematic politics, but when it mattered they showed up.
- wrs 11mo agoLet's include the Russians Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov, who both refused to start a nuclear war. There should be a permanent monument to all these folks in Greenland or something.
- mmooss 11mo agoTrue, but they also help create the problems that they help to solve.
- kshmir 11mo ago[flagged]
- lysace 11mo agoTo be perfectly clear, other generals had no such qualms. Many hundreds to thousands of student protesters were massacred by the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Army tanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Other_estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... Edit: To address latincommie's claims based on one of 250k "cables" (meant to be quick reports without much vetting) from that Assange/Manning leak: I think that a plausible explanation here is deception from PRC counter-intelligence. Chile was in a state of flux at the time, to say the least.
- latincommie 11mo ago[flagged]
- lysace 11mo ago"It's all just a western lie"?
- ks2048 11mo agoSalute to this guy, Xu Qinxian. Funny how (possibly worse) anti-democratic massacres done by US allies (and much more recently) don't get continuous coverage US/Western/Business/Tech press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabaa_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabaa_massacre
- latincommie 11mo agoNot only US allies but the US himself.
- SequoiaHope 11mo agoTo others: if you’re downvoting a link a massacre because it feels like the wrong kind of comment, I encourage you to at least read through about the event. I had not learned about this before. It’s perfectly interesting and I think the comment is worth considering in its intent. “On 14 August 2013, the Egyptian police and to a lesser extent the armed forces, under the command of then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, used lethal force to clear two camps of protesters in Cairo. Estimates of those killed vary from 600 to 2,600.”
- girvo 11mo agoNot that I’m one to do so, but comments like that usually get downvoted as it’s a quintessential example of whataboutism. Egypts government is abhorrent.
- Waterluvian 11mo agoI’m not sure this is whataboutism. To me at least, the distinguishing feature is using a whatabout as a form of deflection or absolution.
- jraines 11mo agoWell we’re talking about Egypt & rhetoric now, so …
- 11mo ago
- zrn900 11mo agoThe general did not 'refuse' to crush the protests because the government did not want to crush them - the protesters were Maoists, who thought that the government had become too capitalist and wanted the army to do a coup to return to Maoism. They were preventing the tanks from getting out of the square - not entering - for that reason, and that's what the Tankman was doing in the magically cut/edited video of the BBC. Magically, because they cut a ~2 minute footage to almost 10 seconds, to parts showing only the close plane, because if you show it zoomed out, it becomes evident that the tankman was preventing the tanks from exiting the square. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk And no, he did not die or anything - he just walked away with his bags full of food in the end - the food which he was carrying back to his comrades in the square, who were preventing the army from leaving.
- joshstrange 11mo agoDo you have any sources for that claim? You are correct that scene happened as the tanks were leaving but the rest of what you said isn’t back up by anything I’ve seen.
- zrn900 10mo agoThe rest requires a deep dive into the events: https://www.quora.com/Was-there-really-a-massacre-at-Tiananmen-Square-or-was-this-just-Western-propaganda/answer/Godfree-Roberts https://www.quora.com/Was-there-really-a-massacre-at-Tiananm... https://www.quora.com/Question-That-Contains-Assumptions-Did-Deng-Xiaoping-give-the-order-to-massacre-the-students-at-Tiananmen-Square/answer/Godfree-Roberts?share=717e13c7&srid=ihRO https://www.quora.com/Question-That-Contains-Assumptions-Did...
- justsomejew 11mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- latincommie 11mo agoThank you for this. It's sad how most comments here are just widespreading the DOD propaganda and can't see beyond obvious contradictions on our currently neoliberal capitalism.
- brazukadev 11mo agoI came to say that, this fetish is bizarre.
- RandyOrion 11mo agoSalute to anyone like Xu Qinxian who refused to give up their own moral principals when facing inhumane commands from psychopath leaders like Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and so on. Also, for anyone who obeyed inhumane commands like mindless shells, you'll eat what you grow. Note: Historical records reveal that the people behind the coordination of the Tiananmen Massacre (which this post is talking about) is Deng Xiaoping.
- duxup 11mo agoI believe some units also refused to do so.
- JohnnyLarue 11mo agoWestern media always gets Tiananmen wrong. Bro who help up the tanks, for example, was trying to convince them to stay and oppress the student movement. The tanks were leaving on the second day. It's just so very exhausting.
- axiolite 11mo ago> Bro who help up the tanks, for example, was trying to convince them to stay and oppress the student movement. Source? Wikipedia article says nobody has a clue who he is/was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man Chinese state TV treated him like a protester, and spun it as an example of what nice guys the Chinese Army is: CHINA TELEVISION ANNOUNCER: [subtitles] Anyone with common sense can see that if our tanks were determined to move on, this lone scoundrel could never have stopped them. This scene flies in the face of Western propaganda. It proves that our soldiers exercised the highest degree of restraint. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcript.html
- joshstrange 11mo agoYes, they were leaving, this was after they had cleared the square, but I can’t find anything that indicates “tank man” was trying to get them to stay. He wasn’t blocking the from entering (people do get this wrong) but was chastising them for what they had done. At least, that’s my understanding,
- stogot 11mo agoThe article is paywall, but has anyone attempted to transcribe the whole thing?
- miek 11mo agoThe video linked in the top post is via HRIC's (Human Rights in China) youtube chan. I used to see them at 2600's HOPE conferences in NYC in the early 2000s. I figure some of you may have seen them there as well. Neat to see that they're still going strong.