Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

China wouldn't become as what it is today if they didn't do it. There could not be economic growth during political instability. Life of a billion+ people is now better and in hindsight i guess it was worth it.

This is a point many forget when talking about China. People bring up Tiananmen Square and the one child policy to talk about how evil China is. And don't get me wrong, to a certain extent both actions were wrong. But the U.S. had its own bloody civil war where the country killed hundreds of thousands of it's former citizens, not to mention the ways in which land was stolen from indigenous people. These violent actions the U.S. took are one of the reasons the country (and even the world) are so wealthy today.

bullshit. or maybe the Chinese communist would have been overthrown, and they would have had a better government.

all the progress China's made today is because the communist government took their foot off of the necks of the common citizens, and let the citizens work tears and sweats.

Stop using what-ifs to justify monstrocities.

One can offer stability within a democratic framework.

To say that the wholesale slaughter of protesters was necessary to deliver market reform is simply absurd.

Easy for you to say. Last time China had a radical change of governments there were a few speed bumps.

It's not nearly as cut and dried as you'd make it. How many Chinese deaths would be justified for such a transition, in your opinion?

They did have many governments and coups in the last 150 years, and they didn’t lead to incrementally better situations, but instead turmoil and foreign exploitation. I’m not Chinese and I can’t speak for their decisions, but it sounds like you don’t know the historical context and assume that Western liberalism always leads to positive ends - which, given our catastrophic interventions around the world, doesn’t seem to be the case.

EDIT: to be clear, nobody is saying what they did is moral. But what I am saying is that the results of such an uprising was not guaranteed to be peaceful, orderly, nor lead to better outcomes; and furthermore you can make the argument that the success of modern Chinese governance has been one of the greatest triumphs of poverty alleviation and human development in all of human history. So to claim with such conviction that that branch of history would be the better option smacks of ignorance to me.

Clearly it wasn’t a moral or just choice, but when China has seen rebellions that lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people in the last century, you can at least see why the incumbent government may have had pause.

It's not very interesting to compare what the US was doing 160 years ago as justifications for why China still acts the way it does.

A civil war is very different than a massacre of innocent protesters.

It's always easy for us in the democratic West to say that oppressed people should rise up and claim their democratic rights. Yet, we never think of the cost in human lives this sort of thing always has, and how it often fails anyway.

Cases in point: the "Arab Spring" (culminating in the Syrian Easter, if I may be so bold); regime change in Libya; regime change in Afghanistan; regime chnge in Iraq; and so on.

This wonderfully altruistic feeling we have, that we want others to enjoy democracy like we do, is always exploited to invade countries "in need of democratic reform". So often, indeed, that I at least wonder if that's the whole point to cultivate this feeling in the hearts and minds of our people.

You think Russia did a better job after getting rid of their communist party around the same time?