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Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#231

Post by grzm »

DonHopkins wrote: post #230
oldandtired wrote: post #207

Let us not forget that all countries today face major problems politically. The world is being polarised in multiple ways and those countries that at one time had the appearance of moral superiority have fallen to the same levels as those they oppose. Totalitarianism comes in may forms. Countries such as China and Russia have specific characteristics that US, Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, etc, etc, etc are try…

Jingoism as in "Make America Great Again"?

Please stop feeding this conversation between the two of you. Neither of you is engaging in good faith, and carrying it across threads is even worse.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#232

Post by oldandtired »

grzm wrote: post #231
DonHopkins wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jingoism as in "Make America Great Again"?

Please stop feeding this conversation between the two of you. Neither of you is engaging in good faith, and carrying it across threads is even worse.

What cross thread conversation? My comment was about the general downhill movement of governments and that in effect what we see in China is being reflected everywhere.

I don't recall any specific conversation with DonHopkins.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#233

Post by erikpukinskis »

paulmd wrote: post #168
nate_meurer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the death penalty is a disgrace, but it's not comparable to things like Tianamen Square. Not even remotely. The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punis…

> The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process I'm sure China's system has some high-minded "nominal" goals too. Why should we give the US a pass for its practical outcomes while holding China to a higher standard? Remember, for all that talk about how horrible China is, the US imprisons many times more people per-capita. (I…

We are not giving the US a pass.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#234

Post by oldandtired »

grzm wrote: post #231
DonHopkins wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jingoism as in "Make America Great Again"?

Please stop feeding this conversation between the two of you. Neither of you is engaging in good faith, and carrying it across threads is even worse.

Thank you, I only realised what the other conversation was about as I hadn't been taking any notice of the responder's moniker. Point taken and again thank you.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#235

Post by edwinyzh »

yogenpro wrote: post #220
refurb wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a one-off thing, but I remember playing an online trivial game with some Chinese post-docs. They had no idea who Chung Kai-Shek was! It was almost as if pre-CCP history didn't exist.

He's name in Chinese was 蔣介石 (courtesy name 蔣中正). If they came from mainland China, they would definitely recognize both, since they're in the history book for everyone. The same goes for those 2 names' Pinyin (the Chinese romanization system used by PRC) Jiang Jieshi or Jiang Zhongzheng. Chung's story (along with the civil war between CCP and KMT) is well-known in China and depicted a lot in TV shows and movies. Chu…

Exactly!

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#236

Post by yesenadam »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #222
yesenadam wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so to take just one example, say 50 or so Tiananmens died in the latest US appalling invasion/massacre of Iraq. So that was 50x as horrible and unforgiveable, and should 'forever be held against the USA' in the same essentially horrified way? Something comparable happened every few years of the last century. I get the feeling most people reading this will hold more against me for saying this, than against the US…

> should 'forever be held against the USA' in the same essentially horrified way? Yes! Of course. Do you think those of us who think Tiananmen Square was an atrocity that should not have been forgotten are waving away slavery or the current American prison system as forgiveable? We’re not. America’s sins are many and we are squaring up to those too. I have a hard time believing all of you posting this are actual HN r…

> I have a hard time believing all of you posting this are actual HN readers and not paid political operatives.

I think there's a HN guideline about assuming good faith.

Not sure what to say to that. I don't know who 'all of you posting this' means. Me? and who? People write stuff you disagree with, so you find it hard to believe they actually think that?

Again, you just mention US internal matters. That wasn't what I was talking about. The US has done its repressing/slaughtering all over the world, at least the last 120 years, not mainly internally, so that's why I talk about that. Americans it seems, as in your comment, prefer ignoring the foreign policy slaughters/bullying/destruction. Well, imagine 9/11 x100 or x1000.

No idea what your last paragraph means. Sounds kind of biblical or something. There's no reason to believe the world has, done or will work like that.

(Edit) Oh, and I forgot to mention - that 'expensive quagmire' is 'acceptable opinion' seems to me obscene. As if the main problem with (among other things) mass slaughter and killing children with uranium bullets that remain and cause birth defects, is how much money it cost! And it seems a lot of Americans think 58,000 people died in Vietnam; that's the main figure for Vietnam War deaths I see in US media.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#237

Post by erikpukinskis »

yesenadam wrote: post #236
erikpukinskis wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should 'forever be held against the USA' in the same essentially horrified way? Yes! Of course. Do you think those of us who think Tiananmen Square was an atrocity that should not have been forgotten are waving away slavery or the current American prison system as forgiveable? We’re not. America’s sins are many and we are squaring up to those too. I have a hard time believing all of you posting this are actual HN r…

> I have a hard time believing all of you posting this are actual HN readers and not paid political operatives. I think there's a HN guideline about assuming good faith. Not sure what to say to that. I don't know who 'all of you posting this' means. Me? and who? People write stuff you disagree with, so you find it hard to believe they actually think that? Again, you just mention US internal matters. That wasn't what…

I am aware of the policy. I didn’t accuse you, I said your comment, and the volume of comments like it made it difficult for me to assume good faith. Which is true. I had to rewrite my comment to leave open the possibility you were being earnest.

I can list horrible things the US has done abroad... regime change in Central America, torture and destruction in Vietnam, thousands of drone killings up to the present day. The U.S. has done things at least as horrible as Tiananmen at home and abroad.

These things are openly discussed in this country every day. They are openly discussed on HN. I resent your accusation that I am ignoring them.

To expand my comment on history: due to the massive amount of data and metadata and metemetata being recorded, there is a class of open evil which will inevitably enter the public record. Maybe not this decade, maybe not next decade, but the information wants to be free. For a certain class of events which are both evil enough and open enough, they will be inevitably exposed.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#238

Post by DashRattlesnake »

yogenpro wrote: post #225
aleyan wrote: post #55

> The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Alan Donald. > Mr Donald's telegram is from 5 June, and he says his source was someone who "was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council". Here we have a telegram by a guy (British Ambassador) who heard from a guy (unknown) who heard from a guy (unknown State Council) fac…

In terms of the source, on a side note, I personally know people who were on the square that day, and later escaped to the US to seek asylum under Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 [1]. They have a lot of first-hand information and photographs, but wouldn't release them to media because they still have families live in China, and as a consequence of release those information, PRC may reject their entry in the fu…

Is there any effort to collect those photos/accounts for later release, say after the person's death?

I understand the reluctance for them release publicly right now, but it would be a shame if it was all effectively lost because of that.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#239

Post by osdiab »

cgmg wrote: post #199
osdiab wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not Chinese, but I did live there for a bit. If you haven’t already I suggest you take the time to get acquainted with Chinese culture, modern history, and modern Chinese lifestyle. In recent times there have been significant human tragedies there for sure, but given the historical context they feared to relive, and the incredible gains they’ve made in recent years, you can think of their actions as real large sc…

> you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.” I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government? > our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy What do you mean by this, and what alte…

For the ends justify the means part, each time China went through a major revolutionary attempt in the last 150 years or so it led to incredible amounts of human suffering (on the orders of millions to tens of millions of deaths each time) and blatant foreign exploitation of their country, and some of those revolutions were for dumber things than a call to democracy (I find the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to be particularly interesting, where a guy who thought he was a literal descendent of Jesus Christ caused a rebellion that lead to the deaths of possibly around 20 million people). I could see why they would want to take extreme measures to maintain stability, especially given how difficult it was to maintain China as a unified country that could stand up against western imperialist exploitation. Once again, not saying it’s moral nor that there wasn’t some amount of a selfish attempt to maintain control, but it’s not so black and white, especially in a society with such a strongly collectivist mentality like China; and arguably, unified control in fact was the primary deficit in Chinese government and primary cause of social instability in China since the days of the Qing Dynasty.

As for alternatives, I have no good alternatives, but what I can say is that while people from the USA decry authoritarian rule as being 100% evil, it’s hard to ignore how efficiently it has been working in the Chinese case. In a developing country being inefficient at developing has real human consequences, prolonging disease, hunger, malnutrition, undereducation, and lack of opportunity for incredibly large numbers of people. So I don’t believe that opting for a maximally representative but likely significantly less efficient form of government is necessarily a good choice for all countries, which seems to be the subtext of many people who draw a hard line on the Chinese government’s misdeeds, and proceed to label it as uniformly detestable, without considering the potential human cost of its alternatives. As for whether installing a democratic government at that point in China’s history would have been successful or even possible at that time would have been a huge uncertainty, even with what we know today.

Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

#240

Post by osdiab »

lostlogin wrote: post #226
osdiab wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unjust or immoral actions can ultimately have on balance positive ends. What you decide to do is a matter of your philosophy, but in most significant cases none of your choices are completely moral.

Choosing to turn 10,000 people into ‘pie’ would seem a fairly black and white case. Do you think it possible to justify? You don’t seem whole against it.

I’m not saying it’s moral. Obviously I would prefer my government to not do this sort of thing. But I am saying that the motivations are understandable with historical context and that the legitimacy of a government’s decisions go deeper than just a binary good or bad judgment; and that all governments face these sorts of decisions at some point. For instance, any time the USA intervenes militarily or economically elsewhere, it is an unavoidable calculation that some (potentially large) number of innocent people on those countries will suffer or die. To ignore the obvious example of all of America’s armed conflicts since WWII, embargoes on North Korea, for example, have likely lead to a huge amount of suffering and death in that country, but our governments have deemed it worth it to some extent. How do we make decisions in these cases?
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