A day to Remember (10 Min) : https://vimeo.com/44078865 Liu Wei, a Chinese artist goes around the streets of Beijing on June 4th asking people ‘What Day is it today?’ hoping for an answer on the lines of ‘Today’s the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre’ but what he gets instead is a lot of ‘I don’t know’'s from the people whose faces clearly say otherwise.
I asked my graduate school classmates who were from China and got similar result. Very few of them said they heard of the event after they got to the U.S. and Googled it, but couldn't believe what they read since none of it appears in their life before they left China.
And it's a huge joke now in China (at least the fact that you're not supposed to mention it.)
Is it really? Would like to know more about what current generations think.
What I find most illuminating is how the current generation’s thoughts are so dramatically different than the Chinese-American’s whose parents left/escaped
In the states we have alot of Cantonese speaking people with a disdain for the party and the outcome, masquarading their opinion and obsolete language as relevant and other Americans treat it as canonical
My experience with mainlanders is complacency and contentment with the expected role of government, who have no idea why some people focus on an old uprising as if nothing else happened in 30 years
Not supposed to be a popular opinion but thats what Ive observed
What did they do with all the bodies? "Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make 'pie' and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains.“
The Tank Man (1989) : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tianasquare.j... `An unknown protestor bravely stands in front of a column of armored tanks as an act of defiance against the Chinese government following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.` `This photo is one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century and has since been widely used to represent the protests. It was a set of student-led popul…
What happened to the Tank Man, did he survive the protest?
Reading that made me feel physically sick, and then the line afterwards about the girls begging for their lives who were bayonetted. Just awful. I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
Yes, comparing the entire history of American war crimes against one domestic incident in China will give you a much bigger American death toll number.
A fairer comparison would include Mao's killing of 45 million of his citizens.
Reading that made me feel physically sick, and then the line afterwards about the girls begging for their lives who were bayonetted. Just awful. I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
Yes, comparing the entire history of American war crimes against one domestic incident in China will give you a much bigger American death toll number. A fairer comparison would include Mao's killing of 45 million of his citizens.
Reading that made me feel physically sick, and then the line afterwards about the girls begging for their lives who were bayonetted. Just awful. I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
Most of these were during wartime. Criminal and regrettable, of course. However, attacking your own citizens while protesting in your own cities somehow seems a bit different.
Reading that made me feel physically sick, and then the line afterwards about the girls begging for their lives who were bayonetted. Just awful. I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
The difference is that we're trying to do something about it. Kids learn about many of the bad things America did (slavery, extermination of the native Americans, Vietnam war atrocities, nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc.). They're taking down civil war monuments all over the country. The same will happen with Columbus soon--Los Angeles has already renamed Columbus Day in favor of the indigenous people he exterminated, and there are proposals to do the same/take down Columbus monuments in Baltimore, D.C., New York, etc.
The Tank Man (1989) : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tianasquare.j... `An unknown protestor bravely stands in front of a column of armored tanks as an act of defiance against the Chinese government following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.` `This photo is one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century and has since been widely used to represent the protests. It was a set of student-led popul…
What happened to the Tank Man, did he survive the protest?