Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion

There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.

The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.

New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.

  • Corn@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    You support these atrocities and the regimes who committed them and so you perceive people calling out these acts as unjustified “hostility” rather warranted criticism.

    Given the total lack of knowledge surrounding any of the events in question or the people affected, it is blatantly obvious that the “criticism” begins and ends with “<insert communist country> bad!”

    The average ML has studied how/why such actions occurred and the response beyond the childish “dey did it coz authoritarianism!” that libs end their analysis at, because our interest isnt limited to its utility as hostile evidence.

    • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      When a country does a bad thing, then that thing is indeed bad. It’s fairly straight forward. Your persecution fetish isn’t going to change the reality. You’re not a victim, neither are the communist countries who committed these atrocities. Just because you’re soulless ghoul who supports these atrocities, that doesn’t means others do as well. This might be shocking to you, but most people don’t have ideological brainrot. They call out bad things when they see them. That’s called consistency.

      But that’s something you lack, because if you had consistency then you wouldn’t need to use fallacies. You would just defend your positions by their own merits, but you can’t do that so you become dishonest. Even now, instead of just taking the high road and saying “these events were atrocities and I condemn them” like a decent human being, you do the opposite by still defending them. You don’t seem to understand there is no justification for them. The fact that you are trying to justify them is direct evidence of your ignorance.

      • Corn@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        At no point did I try to justify any atrocity, I simply supplied context that pissed off liberals because it required more nuance to interpret than their thought-terminating clichés supplied. Which really was rude, feel free to ignore me and go back to “china ran 100,000 people over with tanks for peacefully asking for freedom like we have, because thats just what terrorists authoritarians do.”

        • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 day ago

          What fucking context lmao? You literally provided nothing. There’s no sources, no arguments, no explanations, no points, absolutely zero context was provided. The only things you did do was make false assumptions and use fallacious reasoning to justify using logical fallacies. That’s not context, that’s trying to justify poor critical thinking skills.

          • Corn@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            23 hours ago

            The context that the reason this is promoted multiple times a year as opposed to any particular atrocities committed by western media that this can be used to justify further hostile action against a foreign nation.

            If you still use the word “authoritarian”, You’re not ready to have a meaningful discussion on the event anymore than a zionist screeching about “terrorists” is capable of discussing Oct 6th.

            • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              20 hours ago

              The context that the reason this is promoted multiple times a year as opposed to any particular atrocities committed by western media that this can be used to justify further hostile action against a foreign nation.

              Here you are at again, this is NOT context. Context is when you add relevant information to a topic in a discussion. What you’re doing here is the tu quoue fallacy. Do you understand why the fallacy you’re using is just that? Do you even understand why fallacies are considered bad to begin with? We can’t have an honest discussion if you can’t comprehend this.

              If you still use the word “authoritarian”, You’re not ready to have a meaningful discussion on the event anymore than a zionist screeching about “terrorists” is capable of discussing Oct 6th.

              What other word would you use to describe it? You have a very big government that tries to control every aspect of society at the expense of the freedoms and rights of its citizens, it places a lot overbearing rules that are enforced very strictly, and those who break these rules receive punishments that disproportionately exceed the crime. In this case, the CCP is a tyrannical government that ordered soldiers to kill students for the crime of peacefully protesting. That’s the textbook definition of what authoritarianism is. How am I, or anyone, supposed to take you seriously, when you can’t even admit a basic fact like the CCP is authoritarian? Even they don’t deny it.

              • Corn@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                17 hours ago

                You have a very big government that tries to control every aspect of society at the expense of the freedoms and rights of its citizens

                The term is pointless because it is only used to describe foreign countries. What freedom does someone working for minimum wage, barely able to afford rent, and at the mercy of their employer to even be able to do that much experience? But also it’s impossible to separate any actual freedom in the west from the hyperexploitation of the global south; you are able to buy bananas or coffee with less than 10 minutes of labor because the dictators the US keeps in place in countries that produce them keep the price of labor and resources low.

                overbearing rules that are enforced very strictly, and those who break these rules receive punishments that disproportionately exceed the crime

                I’m from a country with 2% of its population in prison or homeless. To call any other country (except maybe Saudi Arabia, Iran, some gulf states, and Russia)'s rules disproportionate is laughable. Hell here in SK leading a socialist org is technically punishable by death, though the law isn’t enforced as written, in the lead up to the election I saw a demonstration with LGBT+ communist-like and anarchist flags that weren’t shut down. It’s like a fish accusing another fish of being wet.

                In this case, the CCP is a tyrannical government that ordered soldiers to kill students for the crime of peacefully protesting.

                Read the wikipedia article. You only accept such cartoonish logic of the evil communists needing to control everything and sending in troops to murder everyone who tries to ask for freedom because you have a cartoonish understanding of a real place with real people. You see the same short-circuiting of logic when you try to explain to a zionist why Oct 7th happened and they just go “They did it because they’re terrorists!” over and over. The CPC sent police and soldiers in unarmed, several got lynched (don’t look the pics up, they’re very graphic), they sent them back with weapons and a battle ensued, involving cops shooting indiscriminately in the area surrounding the square.

                See, the next step is where you go “well it’s still bad cpp ebil” instead of developing any nuance or researching the political impact within China or doing further research into the various student factions and how it got to lynchings and how the other factions reacted (there’s quite a few contemporary interviews by students whose positions lead them to have different biases), and then I realize I’ve wasted my time.