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

(www.bbc.co.uk)
362 points ComputerGuru | 3 comments | 23 Dec 17 12:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mutteraloo ◴[23 Dec 17 14:29 UTC] No.15994264[source]▶
Lest we forget, this is still the same government that mowed down 10,000 innocent lives, that still runs China today. They've gotten better at hiding behind marketing, propaganda, and strong arming other countries, but they're still ruled by a small, powerful group of elders that control every aspects of Chinese people's lives.

It's sad that we keep feeding this dangerous psychopath which threatens democracy and freedom worldwide. This psychopath will eventually cause harm to a few countries (Taiwan, South Korea) when said and done, maybe enable North Korea to strike a few nuclear missiles into Los Angeles or Tokyo, who knows.

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tw04 ◴[23 Dec 17 15:29 UTC] No.15994478[source]▶
I'm not going to stand here and say China doesn't have a TON of human rights issues. But on what planet can you say "this is the same government that mowed down 10,000 people"?

You might as well say the current government in the US is the "Same government that mowed down innocent college students at Kent State".

It's actually not the same government. Some parts of it are significantly better, some parts of it are significantly worse. Either way, it does the discussion a disservice to call it the same.

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lozenge ◴[23 Dec 17 15:39 UTC] No.15994520[source]▶
It is the same government. Those in power at the time chose who would succeed them, and so on to this day.
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tw04 ◴[23 Dec 17 15:53 UTC] No.15994607[source]▶
Good point, whereas in America the Republican and Democratic parties have since been dismantled and replaced...

Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.

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glenstein ◴[23 Dec 17 16:07 UTC] No.15994690[source]▶
In a meaningful sense, you can say the Republican party is largely the same today as it was during the Contract With America, and the Democratic Party is largely the party of New Deal programs. Sameness here refers to ideological continuity rather than literal individuals being the same.
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jbooth ◴[23 Dec 17 16:22 UTC] No.15994780[source]▶
That's not what the person was saying, though. They were saying something much more simplistic.

To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.

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glenstein ◴[23 Dec 17 16:31 UTC] No.15994822{3}[source]▶
I think you're right that all three parties have been subject to a certain degree of drift. However, applying that back to the original point (is the current regime the same one that did Tiananmen), to me that's an argument that, for the most part, this is the same regime. And if the original commenter wasn't arguing about a continuity in ideology or personnel, then I'm not sure what they were arguing.
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jbooth ◴[23 Dec 17 16:34 UTC] No.15994835{4}[source]▶
It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.
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glenstein ◴[23 Dec 17 16:42 UTC] No.15994885{5}[source]▶
I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b).

The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.

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1. jbooth ◴[23 Dec 17 17:01 UTC] No.15995002{6}[source]▶
It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery.

From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.

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2. glenstein ◴[23 Dec 17 17:37 UTC] No.15995193[source]▶
As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity.

The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.

Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.

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3. jbooth ◴[23 Dec 17 18:05 UTC] No.15995369[source]▶
The labor camp comment was in response to someone calling quote 'china' a quote 'psychopath' while being very obviously ignorant about what it's like inside the country. So I'm gonna have to disagree if you're saying they were straw-manning a thoughtful and balanced comment.

There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.