Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
if anything you’ll benefit from me not going on for too long because I’m excited by ideas I’m discussing
Actually, I don’t really mind long winded tangents as long as they are interesting, funny or preferably both!
Either you mean to say that “Someone on the internet saying ‘Just trust me bro’” is not a good source
Pretty much this. “bro” science, lessons from the “school of hard knocks”, insane 4 hr yt videos with absolutely no source references and Twitter threads with wild statements corroborated by screenshots from some obscure source… I could go on but it seems you understand what I mean.
Even the journo who said 10k recanted!
Yes, 10k is inaccurate. At the same time though, you have the mayor of Beijing claiming 200, the Ministry of Public Security claiming 563, while hospital records show about 500 as a minimum baseline, so I guess as far as official sources go we can’t really trust them either. 2 600 seems like the best estimate based on what I have found, which is still a huge number if you ask me when compared to other protests of similar size in western countries, consider e.g. the frequently quite violent protests in Paris and how the police there doesn’t murder a few thousands just because the government doesn’t agree with the protests (apologies for the digression).
(you) agree that the HRIC isn’t a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right?
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
While the image is full of pathos, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
It’s also worth noting that the various armies called in acted quite differently from one another, since some were more or less local to the city and others were pulled from far away places, with no local attachments and with varying levels of sympathetic commanders - so it’s quite possible that some groups of soldiers would have acted compassionately while others would have been more keen to shoot first and ask questions later. This is also supported by the fighting and killing between the different armies, and could (in part) explain the differences between the eye witness reports.
I hope Youtube is acceptable when it’s for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast
It’s fine, I am not watching 3 hours of unsubstantiated claims but 6 minutes is alright.
It’s plain that some “protestors” (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated.
I don’t think it’s that plain. As mentioned, you have several elements all killing each other at various points:
Violent elements among protestors
Elements of the PLA sympathetic to protestors
Elements of the PLA with a “strong political” sense, loyal to the regime
Within that, you have soldiers being suddenly surrounded and encouraged by protestors to rise up against their perceived tyrants, you have civilians witnessing the murder of their friends and you have soldiers fearing for their lives - soldiers I might add that might have had no freaking idea what is happening because up until that point they were happily living their lives as illiterate farmers and now suddenly there’s chaos and their commander is telling them to defend themselves and now everyone without a uniform starts looking like a threat.
So you see, I don’t think I can attribute a lot of confidence to reports claiming that the protestors started lynching soldiers which in turn made them open fire. I think it’a an order of magnitude more likely that things got out of hand after the first phase of the dispersal, people were then hurt and things escalated from there up until the point where you have civilians stringing up burnt corpses in the street, soldiers summarily executing protestors and tanks running over people.
Regardless, a command was centrally issued and the consequence was a slaughter. Responsibility for the murders falls on the government of the PRC in my opinion, mens rea and actus reus.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
Here’s a place where perhaps I can be helpful, since I feel like I won’t be much use elsewhere. Pay close attention to the way that the anticommunists here talk about their opposition and imagine being the subject of that talk by a substantial portion of this userbase and basically the entire mainstream of other websites like Reddit (of which it borders on being a carbon copy). It’s easy to see Marxists referred to as “red fascists,” “genocide deniers,” sometimes flat-out “Nazis,” along with being accused of being a “shill,” a “bot,” a “troll,” a foreign agent (you can see people complaining about “how many Russians” are on this site, but they don’t actually have reason to believe many Russians are here). All of that sits behind the sneering accusation of “tankie.”
Now, it’s kind of whatever to me when it’s online – and this sort of “anti-tankie” framework almost always is – but some people take that sort of thing as a serious insult because equating someone to Nazis is a pretty serious insult. All this while the people making the accusation bandy about things like the 10k figure we discussed, which is just ridiculous but you are treated as a holocaust denier for trying to interrogate its dogma. Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
So, I don’t encourage people to get needlessly combative, but I can slip into it myself and I struggle to fault others who do so as well (though I encourage them to take things dispassionately!). I hope that that explains a little bit of it, because personal insult just saturates the environment in some places.
Regarding the rest of this, let me know if the organization of information is too hectic and I’ll rewrite it.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
I do not doubt that these are real people who are dead, let me repeat that again. That said, these 5 are singled out because they supposedly died in the square.
I’ve presented you with witness testimony from multiple sources saying that people were not, in fact, killed in the square and the crowd was dispersed pretty uneventfully (though I think to actually reach the square in the first place people were beat back with batons to make way). Most of the people were already gone before the dispersal because most of the protestors listened to the warnings and the deadline.
Quoting the photo article:
“Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw,” said Lilley in his cable, “the students left the square through the southeast corner. Essentially everyone, including Gallo, left. The few that attempted to remain behind were beaten and driven to join the end of the departing procession.”
The square was mostly cleared peacefully and those who refused were beaten with batons to drive them out. They weren’t just wantonly shot.
There’s no reason that the student leader who said he stayed until 6:30 AM wouldn’t have seen this victim, since the victim was shot “early in the morning on June 4th” and the leader witnessed the square being cleared, just as many others did. Perhaps if you have other information that complicates the case, that will be worth considering, but it seems like the simplest answer is that he was somewhere else at the time he was shot. Perhaps he was at the flag, then cleared the square, got caught up in the ensuing fighting elsewhere, and was shot then, with his body only properly discovered and identified by people who knew him after the shooting occurred. The story you linked to doesn’t give any indication that he was, for example, with friends who saw him get killed.
Perhaps his friends were with him, but then it raises the question of why they were not also shot and how they were able to arrange transportation to get him to the hospital where he succumbed, which the article might prefer to gloss over.
Which reminds me:
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
This is exactly what I mean about how you don’t need to censor a story, just make your version much more accessible, because we keep getting these reactions along the lines of “well, I don’t endorse the source here, it’s just the first one I saw”. Just something to think about.
If those books provide any more details that could be pertinent to the evaluation of this guy’s case, I invite you to share them with me, but I hope you can understand that I’m not going to go and buy a book so I can evaluate you claims unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance involved.
You can take more time to look over the information I gave you, since there were a few things made clear that I think you missed. Chief among them is that this isn’t a Boston Massacre situation, despite the obvious parallels. Unlike the redcoats, the PLA who were outside of vehicles and present and supervising the protest were unarmed. I never even insinuated that the protestors threw an incendiary at a soldier and then the others started blasting – they couldn’t even if they wanted to! That segment had no guns! Though it seems that the soldiers who were in military vehicles were armed, and the victims were inside military vehicles.
What I am saying is that the severity of the crackdown and the ensuing violence were in part brought on by the harsh escalation of these militants hiding among the more mundane protestors committing murder against an unarmed soldier and then hanging up his corpse like a declaration of war! Well, they killed a couple, but one or two were just hung against a wreck while another was actually suspended in the air (I believe under a bridge). This was all well before the night of the crackdown, though I don’t know exactly when.
I’ve been using a framework loosely based on how crimes are sometimes argued, by establishing witnesses and timelines and looking for inconsistencies or other possible explanations. What could possibly have happened to produce this situation otherwise, with a soldier’s corpse strung up in broad daylight with people able to just stand around and gawk at it? It only makes sense as being before the crackdown, when civilians could just stand around and gawk in broad daylight (rather than, at the gentlest, be pushed away by troops securing the area, possibly shot if they resisted) and the body is still strung up rather than taken down (as it would be after the crackdown ended and people could return to the area). There’s no way that these pictures were taken during the fighting, no one is behaving like there is gunfire going off nearby.
Drawing again from the article with the photo, since we actually don’t need to speculate just with the photo:
The Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tienanmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many others were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.
Unless the soldiers were sleeping on-site or taking 70-hour shifts, that means the murders probably took place the night of June 2 - 3 or thereabout, since they surely would have had another chance to report back otherwise. The article likewise says that the corpses were seemingly from vehicles getting petrol bombed, extracted from the vehicle, and strung up on the night of the 2nd to 3rd.
It’s worth noting that there’s a huge difference in how you approach a situation between “There’s an unruly group of protestors we need to remove” vs “There’s a pretty amicable group of protestors that also has militant splinters that have killed other soldiers via incendiaries – possibly provided by the US – and strung the corpse up. Oh, and they stole some guns too”. Suddenly, people carrying such weapons – which you are now looking for among every bag and bottle – are established to not only be quite capable of killing you but seemingly out for blood, considering the display they made of the corpse.
Thank you, I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
I think I will need to think a bit further on the subject, so I will definitely have a look at it again with fresh eyes, but I thank you for challenging my assumptions and providing me with sources I had not previously seen. Even though I can’t say that I have changed my mind, at least you have made me reconsider it.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
Ah, well, no worry in any case.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that’s something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss – the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square – the CPC told the truth.
Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven’t seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I’m not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it’s very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn’t see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.
Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of “Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press,” which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn’t seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we’re not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was – if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it’s quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that’s a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.
In terms of victims who have been identified, let’s look again at Wikipedia:
The Tiananmen Mothers, a victims’ advocacy group co-founded by Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose children were killed by the government during the crackdown, have identified 202 victims as of August 2011. In the face of government interference, the group has worked painstakingly to locate victims’ families and collect information about the victims. Their tally had grown from 155 in 1999 to 202 in 2011. The list includes four individuals who committed suicide on or after 4 June for reasons related to their involvement in the demonstrations.[citation needed][g]
Former protester Wu Renhua of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an overseas group agitating for democratic reform in China, said that he was only able to identify and verify 15 military deaths. Wu asserts that if deaths from events unrelated to demonstrators were removed from the count, only seven deaths among military personnel might be counted as from being “killed in action” by rioters.
As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being “killed in action” by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn’t be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn’t being killed “in action,” though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.
More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that’s taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I’m not saying they should have every name – Tank Man hasn’t been identified either, though he also wasn’t killed – but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.
Anyway, I still don’t have much to say about the tallying business because it’s honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that’s fair enough on your part).
*which, let me be clear, isn’t some “outside agitators” thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.
Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
Actually, I don’t really mind long winded tangents as long as they are interesting, funny or preferably both!
Pretty much this. “bro” science, lessons from the “school of hard knocks”, insane 4 hr yt videos with absolutely no source references and Twitter threads with wild statements corroborated by screenshots from some obscure source… I could go on but it seems you understand what I mean.
Yes, 10k is inaccurate. At the same time though, you have the mayor of Beijing claiming 200, the Ministry of Public Security claiming 563, while hospital records show about 500 as a minimum baseline, so I guess as far as official sources go we can’t really trust them either. 2 600 seems like the best estimate based on what I have found, which is still a huge number if you ask me when compared to other protests of similar size in western countries, consider e.g. the frequently quite violent protests in Paris and how the police there doesn’t murder a few thousands just because the government doesn’t agree with the protests (apologies for the digression).
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
It’s also worth noting that the various armies called in acted quite differently from one another, since some were more or less local to the city and others were pulled from far away places, with no local attachments and with varying levels of sympathetic commanders - so it’s quite possible that some groups of soldiers would have acted compassionately while others would have been more keen to shoot first and ask questions later. This is also supported by the fighting and killing between the different armies, and could (in part) explain the differences between the eye witness reports.
It’s fine, I am not watching 3 hours of unsubstantiated claims but 6 minutes is alright.
I don’t think it’s that plain. As mentioned, you have several elements all killing each other at various points:
Within that, you have soldiers being suddenly surrounded and encouraged by protestors to rise up against their perceived tyrants, you have civilians witnessing the murder of their friends and you have soldiers fearing for their lives - soldiers I might add that might have had no freaking idea what is happening because up until that point they were happily living their lives as illiterate farmers and now suddenly there’s chaos and their commander is telling them to defend themselves and now everyone without a uniform starts looking like a threat.
So you see, I don’t think I can attribute a lot of confidence to reports claiming that the protestors started lynching soldiers which in turn made them open fire. I think it’a an order of magnitude more likely that things got out of hand after the first phase of the dispersal, people were then hurt and things escalated from there up until the point where you have civilians stringing up burnt corpses in the street, soldiers summarily executing protestors and tanks running over people.
Regardless, a command was centrally issued and the consequence was a slaughter. Responsibility for the murders falls on the government of the PRC in my opinion, mens rea and actus reus.
Here’s a place where perhaps I can be helpful, since I feel like I won’t be much use elsewhere. Pay close attention to the way that the anticommunists here talk about their opposition and imagine being the subject of that talk by a substantial portion of this userbase and basically the entire mainstream of other websites like Reddit (of which it borders on being a carbon copy). It’s easy to see Marxists referred to as “red fascists,” “genocide deniers,” sometimes flat-out “Nazis,” along with being accused of being a “shill,” a “bot,” a “troll,” a foreign agent (you can see people complaining about “how many Russians” are on this site, but they don’t actually have reason to believe many Russians are here). All of that sits behind the sneering accusation of “tankie.”
Now, it’s kind of whatever to me when it’s online – and this sort of “anti-tankie” framework almost always is – but some people take that sort of thing as a serious insult because equating someone to Nazis is a pretty serious insult. All this while the people making the accusation bandy about things like the 10k figure we discussed, which is just ridiculous but you are treated as a holocaust denier for trying to interrogate its dogma. Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
So, I don’t encourage people to get needlessly combative, but I can slip into it myself and I struggle to fault others who do so as well (though I encourage them to take things dispassionately!). I hope that that explains a little bit of it, because personal insult just saturates the environment in some places.
Regarding the rest of this, let me know if the organization of information is too hectic and I’ll rewrite it.
I do not doubt that these are real people who are dead, let me repeat that again. That said, these 5 are singled out because they supposedly died in the square.
I’ve presented you with witness testimony from multiple sources saying that people were not, in fact, killed in the square and the crowd was dispersed pretty uneventfully (though I think to actually reach the square in the first place people were beat back with batons to make way). Most of the people were already gone before the dispersal because most of the protestors listened to the warnings and the deadline.
Quoting the photo article:
The square was mostly cleared peacefully and those who refused were beaten with batons to drive them out. They weren’t just wantonly shot.
There’s no reason that the student leader who said he stayed until 6:30 AM wouldn’t have seen this victim, since the victim was shot “early in the morning on June 4th” and the leader witnessed the square being cleared, just as many others did. Perhaps if you have other information that complicates the case, that will be worth considering, but it seems like the simplest answer is that he was somewhere else at the time he was shot. Perhaps he was at the flag, then cleared the square, got caught up in the ensuing fighting elsewhere, and was shot then, with his body only properly discovered and identified by people who knew him after the shooting occurred. The story you linked to doesn’t give any indication that he was, for example, with friends who saw him get killed.
Perhaps his friends were with him, but then it raises the question of why they were not also shot and how they were able to arrange transportation to get him to the hospital where he succumbed, which the article might prefer to gloss over.
Which reminds me:
This is exactly what I mean about how you don’t need to censor a story, just make your version much more accessible, because we keep getting these reactions along the lines of “well, I don’t endorse the source here, it’s just the first one I saw”. Just something to think about.
If those books provide any more details that could be pertinent to the evaluation of this guy’s case, I invite you to share them with me, but I hope you can understand that I’m not going to go and buy a book so I can evaluate you claims unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance involved.
You can take more time to look over the information I gave you, since there were a few things made clear that I think you missed. Chief among them is that this isn’t a Boston Massacre situation, despite the obvious parallels. Unlike the redcoats, the PLA who were outside of vehicles and present and supervising the protest were unarmed. I never even insinuated that the protestors threw an incendiary at a soldier and then the others started blasting – they couldn’t even if they wanted to! That segment had no guns! Though it seems that the soldiers who were in military vehicles were armed, and the victims were inside military vehicles.
What I am saying is that the severity of the crackdown and the ensuing violence were in part brought on by the harsh escalation of these militants hiding among the more mundane protestors committing murder against an unarmed soldier and then hanging up his corpse like a declaration of war! Well, they killed a couple, but one or two were just hung against a wreck while another was actually suspended in the air (I believe under a bridge). This was all well before the night of the crackdown, though I don’t know exactly when.
I’ve been using a framework loosely based on how crimes are sometimes argued, by establishing witnesses and timelines and looking for inconsistencies or other possible explanations. What could possibly have happened to produce this situation otherwise, with a soldier’s corpse strung up in broad daylight with people able to just stand around and gawk at it? It only makes sense as being before the crackdown, when civilians could just stand around and gawk in broad daylight (rather than, at the gentlest, be pushed away by troops securing the area, possibly shot if they resisted) and the body is still strung up rather than taken down (as it would be after the crackdown ended and people could return to the area). There’s no way that these pictures were taken during the fighting, no one is behaving like there is gunfire going off nearby.
Drawing again from the article with the photo, since we actually don’t need to speculate just with the photo:
Unless the soldiers were sleeping on-site or taking 70-hour shifts, that means the murders probably took place the night of June 2 - 3 or thereabout, since they surely would have had another chance to report back otherwise. The article likewise says that the corpses were seemingly from vehicles getting petrol bombed, extracted from the vehicle, and strung up on the night of the 2nd to 3rd.
It’s worth noting that there’s a huge difference in how you approach a situation between “There’s an unruly group of protestors we need to remove” vs “There’s a pretty amicable group of protestors that also has militant splinters that have killed other soldiers via incendiaries – possibly provided by the US – and strung the corpse up. Oh, and they stole some guns too”. Suddenly, people carrying such weapons – which you are now looking for among every bag and bottle – are established to not only be quite capable of killing you but seemingly out for blood, considering the display they made of the corpse.
The article with the photos is worth reading.
Thank you, I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
I think I will need to think a bit further on the subject, so I will definitely have a look at it again with fresh eyes, but I thank you for challenging my assumptions and providing me with sources I had not previously seen. Even though I can’t say that I have changed my mind, at least you have made me reconsider it.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
Ah, well, no worry in any case.
As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that’s something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss – the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square – the CPC told the truth.
Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven’t seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I’m not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it’s very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn’t see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.
Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of “Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press,” which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn’t seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we’re not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was – if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it’s quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that’s a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.
In terms of victims who have been identified, let’s look again at Wikipedia:
As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being “killed in action” by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn’t be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn’t being killed “in action,” though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.
More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that’s taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I’m not saying they should have every name – Tank Man hasn’t been identified either, though he also wasn’t killed – but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.
Anyway, I still don’t have much to say about the tallying business because it’s honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that’s fair enough on your part).
*which, let me be clear, isn’t some “outside agitators” thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.
Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!