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

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.

I’m not Chinese, but I did live there for a bit. If you haven’t already I suggest you take the time to get acquainted with Chinese culture, modern history, and modern Chinese lifestyle. In recent times there have been significant human tragedies there for sure, but given the historical context they feared to relive, and the incredible gains they’ve made in recent years, you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.”

Still lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused, and its a pity they rely on rewriting history and suppressing subversive thought to preserve the government’s legitimacy, but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted, blindly dogmatic and ignorant of the way the world works these days.

> you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.”

I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government?

> our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy

What do you mean by this, and what alternative do you propose?

For the ends justify the means part, each time China went through a major revolutionary attempt in the last 150 years or so it led to incredible amounts of human suffering (on the orders of millions to tens of millions of deaths each time) and blatant foreign exploitation of their country, and some of those revolutions were for dumber things than a call to democracy (I find the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to be particularly interesting, where a guy who thought he was a literal descendent of Jesus Christ caused a rebellion that lead to the deaths of possibly around 20 million people). I could see why they would want to take extreme measures to maintain stability, especially given how difficult it was to maintain China as a unified country that could stand up against western imperialist exploitation. Once again, not saying it’s moral nor that there wasn’t some amount of a selfish attempt to maintain control, but it’s not so black and white, especially in a society with such a strongly collectivist mentality like China; and arguably, unified control in fact was the primary deficit in Chinese government and primary cause of social instability in China since the days of the Qing Dynasty.

As for alternatives, I have no good alternatives, but what I can say is that while people from the USA decry authoritarian rule as being 100% evil, it’s hard to ignore how efficiently it has been working in the Chinese case. In a developing country being inefficient at developing has real human consequences, prolonging disease, hunger, malnutrition, undereducation, and lack of opportunity for incredibly large numbers of people. So I don’t believe that opting for a maximally representative but likely significantly less efficient form of government is necessarily a good choice for all countries, which seems to be the subtext of many people who draw a hard line on the Chinese government’s misdeeds, and proceed to label it as uniformly detestable, without considering the potential human cost of its alternatives. As for whether installing a democratic government at that point in China’s history would have been successful or even possible at that time would have been a huge uncertainty, even with what we know today.