But everything else you are saying is just stupid. Oh the students didn’t have meaningful knowledge of democracy, and so on and so forth. Quite rubbish, and by no means based on, you know, that actual evidence you are so interested in.

You really prefer focusing on the lack of murder within the square, but you seem unwilling to focus either on the murder happening a couple of clicks away or on the purging and murder of the students after the fact.

Look, propagandists do stupid things, its the nature of the business. The lack of student murder within the square changes nothing and never will, and I never stated otherwise.

Anyway, I am done here. You can have the last word as it seems you need it. You are just trying to muddy the waters anyway, so, congrats on a job, if not well done, then done well enough for your purposes.

My whole contention, based on the evidence I’ve presented, is that this statement of yours was not true. The evidence supports that it is not.

Here is what I wrote:

“Every year they have a new meme to push out. A couple years ago they were claiming that no one was killed in the incident at all! Guess how that went. Yup, not a one person changed their understanding.”

Wow, I clearly treat the TAM murders as the only reason to blame the government, and gosh if the murders happened 2km away my whole point breaks down.

And guess what? Not one person changed their understanding of the murderous despotic regime in Beijing. Still.

Whether the students understood what we mean by democracy is important because it’s the motivation ascribed to them and we should be asking if it’s true. After all, we are debating something we were always told about those events that wasn’t actually true so it’s prudent to question the rest of that narrative. If by democracy they really meant “That the Communist Party carries on ruling a one-party state but just does so better and less corruptly” then we have to believe that Xi Jinping is currently pursuing their democratic aims. That’s not really realistic, but enough of the statements made by the students themselves on the day (multiple interview records exist from within the movement) that they didn’t understand democracy in any sense that would be accepted in a constitutional monarchy of representative republic.

You were not so consistent in claiming that the reality of events in the square don’t change the picture very much when you believed they supported your opinion. Then, they mattered enough for you to offer them as evidence that the PRC government was lying. They suddenly didn’t change things very much when it turned out they didn’t actually happen that way.

And then you accuse me of a lack of objectivity.

The issue of corruption and the possibility that many of the protesting students were from wealthy families should not be used to obscure the fact that many common students ended up in jail or dead, while the wealthier or better connected ones escaped to foreign lands. Also many schools were involved not just elite schools.

There is no need to mention the endemic corruption of the party and its effect on the opportunity to study in elite and not so elite universities, which of course still continues to this day. Shall the government be blamed for this chronic situation?

And it is quite interesting to contemplate a world where it was the children of the connected to be the ones demanding more freedom. But I think that is too simplistic picture, many common students were also involved.

The party definitely must be blamed for the purges of students that happened in the wake of the incident. You seem to prefer to only focus on the events of 1-2 days instead of the big picture. If they weren’t killed in the square, is it better that they were killed in a jail cell or an interrogation room?

If you are arguing that the government considered the square so symbolically important that they took pains to avoid bloodshed within it, that would be interesting and not unreasonable. However maybe the real logic is that not killing the students in public was symbolically important as a tool of propaganda.

The argument about ‘poorly train conscripts” is also relevant, as it gets to the issue of whether there were orders to shoot or whether shooting just happened, and that is true even when the conscripts are well trained. When you send the army into the city, shit can easily happen. So shall we only blame the residents who killed a soldier? Does that make the government less responsible?

Your democracy argument is just weak. Doesn’t meet your definition of ‘meaningful sense”, well ok. A large number of students assisted in making it, they named it. But to you one student who speaks in simple terms negates all that.

Again, the city was awash in corpses that night, at least several hundreds if not several thousands of people were killed. The party then carried out a purge of the students and professors and workers, throwing many more people into jail with little legal process. Many of those people were killed too.

If the square being clean is what you need, then fine. I have consistently said that it doesn’t change the overall picture very much.

The support I have found for that, and which I’ve presented earlier, includes: the PBS ‘Tank Man’ interview (YouTube link supplied) in which a number of dissidents and journalists state the same thing; Philip Cunningham’s ‘Tiananmen Moon’ in which the Westerner closest to the student leadership gives his first-hand account; and the researched mea culpa by one of those responsible for promoting the original reporting of a massacre.

You interpret my statements on the status of the student as an “attack” when it’s nothing of the sort. It’s another statement of fact which just happens to conflict with your preferred version of The Truth. Students at elite universities overwhelmingly did not come from ordinary worker families, they were from affluence which in the context of the day meant politically-connected. It was one of the grievances of the ordinary folk which prompted the 1986 and 1989 protests, after all.

The Goddess of Democracy statue would only put the issue at rest if there were clear evidence that everyone present understood what was actually meant by the term and were unanimous in being motivated by a desire for it. In reality, most people had a wide range of motives and few seriously intended to challenge the Communist Party. One student, when asked what democracy meant to him, responded, “The ability to choose my own work assignment.” So yes, there is sufficient room to question if any of those participating in the protests were seeking democracy in any meaningful sense.

I have stated consistently that no students were killed in Tiananmen Square as part of the student movement and nothing more. Whether or not students participated in the resistance to the PLA’s entry elsewhere in the city, they were not doing so as organised student bodies. Again, that’s a simple fact undisputed by anyone who was actually there.

Finally, my point on the deaths of soldiers was to illustrate why badly-trained conscripts (who were, after all, only human themselves) would have so readily resorted to lethal force against civilians. The US Embassy in Beijing reported home an eyewitness account that the first sight meeting troops entering the square was the “the beating death of a PLA soldier who was in the first APC to enter Tiananmen Square, in full view of the other waiting PLA troops, appeared to have sparked the shooting that followed.” http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/docs/doc15.pdf Page No.8 ‘The Tiananmen Square spark?’

Far from destroying the article, you’ve conceded the truth of it that no massacre took place in Tiananmen Square that night. It’s also interesting to note how the importance of whether or not people were killed there diminished in importance to you when you conceded that they didn’t. If it was important enough as evidence of what the PRC government was like when you thought it damned them, why not as important when it didn’t? I think I already know the answer…

Again, let’s hope the government will release all the information it has on the incident so everything can be known, to the extent possible. Did they arrest tankman? They must have gone after him, I would think. Did they torture and murder him as well? He could theoretically still be in prison today. One day we may well know.

It is seemingly not wumao behavior to talk about the government being accountable for its actions, but at the same time you have indicated lots of things that show a lack of objectivity. You to some extent attacked the students as being from rich families, that was quite unfair, and its unclear what that would change anyway. You also indicated that you are unsure whether anyone at that time was pressing for democracy, while in reality a huge statue called the Goddess of Democracy probably puts that issue to rest…but for you its still a debatable point. You tried to move from “no students were killed in the square” to “no students were killed at all”, which is definitely incorrect.

Further you point out that some of the killed were soldiers, and again I just don’t know what point you think you are making. Is the government no longer responsible because several soldiers were killed in the fighting? Are you saying that the soldiers were killed first and this explains the later killing of students and locals? You raise little points that don’t seem particularly useful.

I am not butthurt at all, I have enjoyed this little discussion and learned more about the incident. Seeing as how I started by poking fun at the very article you brought up, it was great to destroy it once again, as I did years ago. Hope you have had as much fun as I have, and don’t forget to pick your battles.

Take it like a man, for crying out loud. I took you to task on a single factual inaccuracy, I didn’t do your mum doggy-fashion in front of your Cub Scout pack.

But if you are talking about accountability, which you presumbably wouldn’t as a wumao, let’s make a little list:

The students went back, and the next day people went around to all the schools and made sure all classes were held as scheduled, and told everyone that nothing happened the night before and no questions were to be asked. Anyone not heeding that would have been hauled off and never heard from again (i.e., murdered), without a doubt.

Then, the purges began, and many students fled, while *many* others were seized and thrown into prison and probably treated very horribly. Certainly quite a few died in custody, some of “suicide”, others remained for years and others were released. Some cases may have been formalized by a captive legal process, but many others did not get such treatment.

Then the follow-on suppression of the participants and mothers (angered by this injustice), and now *they* are watched and intimidated and forced to either stay or go somewhere according to the “logic” of their minders. Bao Tong has been held in this way, extra-judicially, for decades. He is in a de-facto prison while the others are still subject to whatever the party feels like throwing at them this month.

And now we have the suppression of follow-on follow-ons, the new generation, and on and on, apparently forever.

That is how its all going to work out, right?

Did I miss anything you would like to add to the list Brido? That list of accountability you wanted?

Incidentally, the pictures in your link include two incinerated corpses wearing the remains of PLA uniforms. I can’t help but think that would have coloured the opinions of the next batch of soldiers to happen along.

Just to counter your 5 mao disinformation campaign, here are several grizzly pictures documenting horrendus wounds and horrific deaths. http://imgur.com/a/q8ZIS

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8057762.stm

The author is not making any argument that he did not witness something and therefore it did not happen. He is making the argument that something was claimed to have happened and widely reported as having happened but that there is no factual evidence it actually did. That ‘something’ is the mass killing of students in Tiananmen Square by soldiers of the PLA on the morning of 4th June 1989. He is at pains to point out that killing did occur, just not there and not under those circumstances. Jay Mathews never claimed to have been present at the events, indeed that’s one of his premises that those who are not reporting first hand should be more careful about what they report. Jay Chin was not present at the events, either – at least according to your Reuters article – and got his information from a Singaporean businessman and doesn’t seem to have confirmed what that source saw first-hand.
Why was the slaughter the slaughter was mainly of local residents and workers? That’s next to impossible to tell without having been there and witnessed it, or having interviewed those soldiers who fired. As you’ve read the Tiananmen Papers, you’ll be familiar with the timescale Nathan and Perry present, including the fact that the column advancing down Chang’An Jie stalled at Muxidi Bridge for several hours before firing live rounds and then took several more hours to cover the 5km to the square. That suggests they were not simply blasting their way down the road or they would have been there faster.
This is important to me because I do not live under an authoritarian system where the government gets to make and remake history as suits its purpose. Things that happened are facts to be understood, not slogans to rally supporters and they should not be treated with that degree of contempt. The PRC government suppresses the Tiananmen incident because it would prefer it was forgotten, at least until the memory has faded and most likely for ever. It doesn’t want the facts known and that’s not a model I’m happy to follow.

1. I am all for a proper accounting of the events. The TAM papers is a good place to start. If the square itself really was not the site of any killing, then great, I don’t know how that really changes things, but whatever. The slaughter was in the streets not the square, according to your author who admits he wasn’t there. “There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre”. If that is your point then fine.

Again, the students were pushed out of the square that night, and then when the murder was over (be that of residents or students) the arrests began, and many fled rather than be arrested and possibly tortured and murdered. (Truth is important, right?)

2. The article says nothing that “no students were killed”, and can’t defend your statement in this regard. The TAM mothers exist because some students were killed, and certainly others were arrested and imprisoned for daring to challenge the party. Nothing in the paper supports that statement of yours, not even slightly.

3. I think the huge Goddess of Democracy is pretty strong support that there were democracy campaigners at TAM at that time.

4. You have no cause to claim that the student protestors were simply children of party members and “nouveau riche businessmen” (quite a lot of those in 1989, right). While I am sure given the persistent corruption of the party that indeed many *students* were children of party members, that is not to say the *protesters* had the same makeup. What a sick little way to criticize the students as elites. You do know the elites killed and imprisoned those people for asking for some rights and freedoms, don’t you? So apparently one group of elites are pampered while another are glorious leaders.

Its also funny that you would say a “privileged existence in universities”, wow those students in 1989 had it great, didn’t they. A whole cot to themselves, with only 7 roommates per room! What luxury! I wonder, by comparison, how Li Peng was living back then. Pretty spartan existence, right? No bank accounts in HK building up wealth, right, at least not yet haha. Although I just read that he did have enough wealth to spirit his granddaughter out of the country before the slaughter commenced.

5. You still don’t seem to understand that the author cannot make an argument that he wasn’t there but didn’t see anything so nothing *must* have happened. Yes some press have admitted errors, but still no one believes the government’s claim that only a few hundred died that day.

So, now that we know that the slaughter was mainly of local residents and workers, will you tell us why? Why is important to you, right? So, why did the party slaughter those people? And why did the government arrest many students afterwards? And why does the government harrass these people to this day, 25+ years after the fact? I would like to know your belief about this.