sTuPiD gAmEs StUpId PrIzEs

reposted one such video recently

“Han Chinese are racial chauvinists” /r/politics libs, probably

Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times

From Another View of Tiananmen:

Concerns over prices weren’t solely due to absolute levels of privation, however. The complaints were heavily tinged with elitism. Students and urbanites were not happy to see peasants and farmers do so well relative to them. This “economic anxiety” had manifested itself a year earlier in Nanjing, where students affected by cuts to tuition subsidies took out their anger on African exchange students. “From December 1988 to January 1989, students in Nanjing, China waged violent protests against visiting African students.” The writing on the placards was very revealing:

Like most foreign students, the Africans enjoyed greater standards of living in China and some dated local women. Among the signs in the crowd at Hehai on Christmas Eve 1988 were placards demanding greater democracy alongside ones proclaiming, “death to the black devils”.

Agitprop repost from the massive china thread done two months or so ago:

• wikileaks published a private diplomatic cable stating that no one was killed in the square itself, although a smaller number of people did die in clashes elsewhere in Beijing, consistent with China’s own official account. (Here’s a Telegraph article on the cables).
• a spanish film crew was in the square all night and filmed people peacefully leaving the square in the early morning, singing the Internationale, here’s footage of a Hong Kong news report that includes the spanish film crew footage, which never appears in western reporting).
• one of the main organizers of the protest, Hou Dejian, states that no one died in the square and calls out other organizers for lying I Interview where Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national and one of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, says he was in the square all night and saw no one killed here is a twitter thread covering testimony by various organizers, including Hou Dejian).
• Numerous western media sources have stated that no massacre occurred in the square. (This article links to multiple western sources, including James Miles, attesting that no one died in the square.).
• various western massacre reports cite wildly different death figures, usually with little or no justification for the number.
• An attempt to collect all the names of the massacre victims ended early when they only found 155.
• CIA and NED goons were known to be present in Beijing and involved in the protests. (Here is an article from the Vancouver Sun in 1992, showing western intelligence involvement was known in the west decades ago).
• during most of the protest, protesters were calling for a return to stricter communism, not for liberal market reforms. These were Marxists. Their signs showed Marxist figures and slogans. (This article shows some images of the protesters displaying Marxist slogans and iconography and discusses it a bit — careful linking this site though, some of the articles are pretty dumb).
• tank man: the tanks in the video are leaving the square (you can see this in the uncropped footage) and it is broad daylight, whereas the main violence occurred at night.
• the first violence was against troops, not civilians. On June 2, 1989, two days before the June 4 incident when the main violence occurred, multiple unarmed Chinese troops were burned alive and their corpses hung from nooses in public. ((CW: gore) here is a thread of photos showing dead and wounded troops, some being rescued by civilians. Multiple men were burned to death, others were beaten. Some protesters stole guns from the army and can be seen brandishing them.).
• the violence against troops was uncharacteristic of the previous tone of interactions between troops and protesters in the preceding weeks. Troops and protesters had peacefully coexisted, singing songs and sharing food together. (Here’s an article that goes into it a bit)

FUCK OFF

It’s a powerful image for sure, but that power comes from a narrative that is only possible with the single frame, deprived of context, because it allows (and requires) the viewer to infer a lot of things that aren’t actually true.

The implication of the image is that the tanks are on their way to crush a student protest, and a single man bravely stands up to them and (momentarily) delays the violence. The viewer might be led to believe he was run over for this act.

However, the less-famous video shows the (by all appearances clean) tanks leaving the square, stopping and steering to try and avoid hitting the man. They even allow him to crawl on top and talk with the driver for a while.

It’s a classic lie by omission.