Look no further than Tiananmen square to see the true face of communist China. They executed thousands of protesters with the military that day. Today they make dissenters disappear into a work camp prison and organ harvesting complex. I love the Chinese people and hope the government can change but they do not have a good human rights record.
It's amazing the news about this riot has spread the way it has. It's common practice in China to limit the number of workers from each village in order to differ congregations of people and suppress acts like rioting. I have heard of protests when the factories are closed and no one is listening, but ultimately news about protests is usually limited. This must be a big one.
Before the crackdown, the Chinese government was willing to wait out the protests until people had their say and it was all over with. Except the protests went on, continuously, for months. If they had turned violent, they would have likely been able to overrun the central government entirely.
I'm not going to justify what the Chinese army did in Tiananmen Square, but what they did, they did as a last resort. If they had been a little more proactive and arrested the first few hundred people before it blew up, or impeded access into the square, or did anything to prevent that critical mass of people from assembling all in one place, it would be a different story.
On a relevant note, the Tiananmen Massacre monument at the University of Hong Kong was removed last night. They were careful to barricade everything to prevent any videos or images of the monument being destroyed.
Very spectacular but the normal Beijing people were kept well away from the parade. Like many things it does this display demonstrates the weakness of the regime rather than the strength. It needs such a display to attempt to show to its people (and in a smaller part to the world) that the Communist party is powerful and everlasting. That the Communist party brings great face to China through power and prosperity.
China is on the edge of the precipice. Especially with this recent economic turmoil. While they live in an authoritarian society, Chinese people are not sheep. There are far too many have nots and the memory of standing up and deposing the government is still in many peoples minds.
I think you'd be surprised to learn most Chinese know about the Tiananmen Square protests. It's within living memory and the government has made statements about it which can be found in archives etc.
Most Chinese don't want to talk about it because it's considered a source of national shame. (Westerners often interpret that as them being afraid to talk, but that's not actually true.) They also believe the events are used for foreign propaganda which is not entirely untrue.
This is really bad and definitely triggers memorys of the Tiananmen massacre. I'm very interested how the rest of the world is going to react to these developments considering the position of China only got stronger since the Tinanmen situation. I recognized that the reaction of e.g. Germany was considerably weaker to the HK protests than e.g. the Arab Spring protests, but I guess we just have to wait and see.
Really?
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