the_dunk_tank

I don't think anyone who's done a decent amount of reading or investigation on the subject will deny that there was violence mostly in the side streets around the square but also some smaller amount in it. But plenty of people rightfully dispute that it was some kind of one sided massacre between a militarised state and peaceful protestors.

There absolutely were peaceful protestors, most of whom left the square and surrounding area long before the worst of the violence, and there were also armed, violent anti-government mobs who burned people to death with molotovs, best people to death, and fired on soldiers either with weapons that were taken from dead soldiers or provided from elsewhere. A few people on both sides who never actually fired on the opposing group were almost certainly killed due to being amongst those who did.

But there's also a collosal amount of bullshit with little to no evidence paraded about and over the decades the kinds of numbers of dead and the stories of the violence have nakedly been exaggerated and inflated for propaganda purposes to absurd degrees compared to the evidence and actual reporting at the time.

For example, the mantra now from a lot of Western media as well as some beholden human rights groups like Amnesty is that 1000s of peaceful protestors were killed in the square with indiscriminate machine gun fire and the deliberate crushing of people by tanks into paste, as the original person in the post alleges. Yet essentially none of the reporting from the time indicates those specifics, often refuting it, nor does a lot of the legal and investigative follow up even from some of the organisations of students and exiled protestors.

As an example, here is some of the reporting by the couple that won a Pulitzer prize for their reporting of the protests, before during and after it came to a head.

• It describes the mostly peaceful removal and retreat of the majority of protestors.
• It describes fighting from both the military and hardliners, including the firebombing and destruction of at least 18 military vehicles and many many more soldiers including those beaten to death. It also describes hardliners beating people, including an American, who tried to step in before they killed soldiers. (This sort of thing will appear again in another example shortly). These actions weren't all defensive acts of desperation by peaceful protestors. They advanced on police and military lines. They used buses full of armed people to attack the military. They encircled military trucks and attacked those on board.
• After the violence they were able to confirm around 100-150 deaths. The student movement claimed 'maybe' 500 at the time to the journalists, but didnt offer evidence and obviously have reason to inflate the numbers to them. (I'll come back to those numbers in a bit so keep them in mind).
• Meanwhile, the Chinese government reported over 1000 of their own were seriously injured or killed.

John Simpson, veteran BBC reporter and general darling of thr British establishment, was also there and obviously far from a friend of China. In fact, he even wrote a series of fictionalized novels in which China is a main villain and even openly used his own experience of being questioned and beaten while tied to a chair in Lebanon as the basis of a far more extreme (fictional) scene of his alter ego being tortured by the Chinese state. Yet his reporting from the time is closer, and perhaps even more damning to thr student hardliners, than that which I shared above. In fact, he was even pulled into the violence of the students when he felt the need to intervene and wasn't shy about what he thought of them in later interviews:

The foreign correspondent claims he once ‘waded in’ during the Tiananmen Square protests in Peking and ‘whacked’ a mob of angry students to stop them killing Chinese soldiers.

He said one such event happened while he was reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989. He saw protesters dragging soldiers from an armoured personnel carrier and beating them savagely.

He told the Radio Times: ‘The crowd was a very rough lot, not nice students, and they wanted blood.

They smashed the head of one of the soldiers in, and then they started to smash another one in and I thought, ‘I can’t stand by and just let this happen,’ and so I waded in. I used to be a rugby player and a boxer and I’m quite big and so on… and so I whacked them to one side.’

Even many of the foreign pressure groups representing exiled students or friends and family of people who died often don't support the kind of accusations that are now commonplace or accepted wisdom in the West. Obviously plenty are just sensationalist propagandists who'll say anything, but the ones who actually do some real legal work for example don't agree. Take this example from the Human Rights In China group legal action in 1999, reported in the Guardian.

After ten years of investigation and copious funding they listed 155 protestors killed in the violence in their legal petition. Nothing close to the numbers student groups claimed to journalists on the ground at time and nothing compared to the now often claimed 1000s od deaths.

Likewise, the one example of something even approaching the 'tanks running over people until they're red paste' is an account of a tank breaking through a barricade and hitting six people, five of which apparently died. The sixth is giving the testimony and apparently had his legs crushed (later amputated). Not to get too gruesome, as it's horrible regardless, but the five people killed were identified and the person recounting the story still had their (admittedly destroyed) legs. There's no accusations that this was a tactic on behalf of thr military or that it happened multiple times or that they drove over people repeatedly to somehow conceal the evidence.

Even in this more measured case, it should probably be noted that these are mostly eye witness testimonies from activists in exile and that HRIC is based in and funded predominantly by the US, including, of course, the infamous CIA funded National Endowment for Democracy.

So yeah, I realise this is long, but it's important to offer even just a few examples of the way these already not exactly neutral accounts have spiraled far beyond any even claimed reality at the time. So I think it's important when presented with a pretty gruesome but non-descript photo of vague gore on the pavement for example, to consider what we actually know about what it depicts and the context in which it was taken. Does it actually depict tanks running over peaceful protestors until they were somehow mostly liquid to be washed down the drain? Or is it just presented with that story, or a much more grounded, realistic one that's later been explored and exaggerated over the years without actually demonstrating it?

Regardless, I'd encourage people to read more of the on the ground reporting from the time in general. There are also plenty of in depth works that are more sympathetic to the Chinese state that others could link you and were shared in the big Tiananmen struggle post a while back, but for obvious reasons (and length) I just tried to focus on just some of the details and context from even extremely un-China-friendly sources here.