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

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.

  • CatDogL0ver@lemmy.worldEnglish
    263·
    3 days ago

    This is just my personal experience:

    ~I was talking to a few young Chinese. They were after born after the massacre happened.~

    “Why are Hong Kong people are so full of themselves and rebellious? They think they are better? (Derogatory comments…”, cheating among themselves, happily.

    I couldn’t help and interrupted, “Some young promising Hong Kong students were murdered, beaten and kidnapped under the mainland China. You can’t blame them for not being defensive.”

    Immediately they resorted to their memorised response, “Do you have any resources to back up what you said? The official death count was zero.”

    Of course there was no “official” news resources. China suppresses the news media.

    "It is the same as Tiananmen massacre. You won’t find any “official resources " but everyone knows people were killed.”

    Another one retorted, “The official number is zero. What official resources you have to backup your claim?”

    It was useless to talk anymore at that moment. I left. My encounter probably would be on their “report.”

    • KuroiKaze@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I find it pretty rare to meet Chinese people like that. Most of the ones I meet know that stuff happened isn’t that the government covered it up but they don’t think that the government covering things up is all that unusual or newsworthy.

  • Jhex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    3 days ago

    Maybe I’ll take Taiwan’s word on this one…

    Whatever the US says, you just know it’s posturing hypocritical bullshit

  • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    661·
    4 days ago

    “Never forget” is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of “never forget” lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the “never forget” was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.

  • unphazed@lemmy.worldEnglish
    255·
    4 days ago

    Meanwhile Oklahoma telling kids the 2020 election was rigged under state law.

        • Gorilladrums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          92·
          3 days ago

          Whataboutism is literally the appeal to hypocrisy fallacy. It’s a fallacy because the appeal is done in place of a proper argument that addresses the original issue. The very purpose of this fallacy is to distract from the original issue and to dismiss criticism without ever addressing it by bringing up something irrelevant to the topic at hand and accusing others of hypocrisy.

        • Gorilladrums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          Ah yes, the state is paying me to call out idiots on Lemmy for using fallicious argumentation and inconsistent logic. Which state is paying me? Who knows, but that’s the fun of making up random baseless accusations when you have nothing of value to provide.

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Oh is this the terrible bad country we shipped our entire industrial base to?

  • Deflated0ne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    94·
    3 days ago

    Love the propaganda around this. Its very dramatic and all. But here in the west its held up as some big thing. The rest of the video never gets played.

  • GoodOleAmerika@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    4 days ago

    Let’s not forget Faris Odeh

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faris_Odeh

    A picture of Odeh standing alone in front of a tank, with a stone in his hand and arm bent back to throw it, was taken by a photojournalist from the Associated Press on 29 October 2000. Ten days later, on 8 November, Odeh was again throwing stones at Karni when he was shot in the neck by an Israeli soldier.

        • Gorilladrums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          3 days ago

          And your assumption is wrong. If you read the article, you’ll see that his parents were alive and well at the time, and so were his 8 other siblings. Apparently this kid developed a habit of doing dangerous stunts like this, and father used to severely beat him many times as a way to deter him from doing more stunts in the future. Shockingly, physical abuse didn’t work, and he ended up being killed by doing another dangerous stunt in the future.

        • Gorilladrums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          23·
          3 days ago

          Actually if you read the article, you would see that this is in fact false, but that won’t stop you from spreading misinformation