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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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That's what I said in the edit. That said, the CPC really isn't helping the situation. They have shown themselves to be highly untrustworthy when it comes to any level of transparency.
Citation: Other stories as-covered by western media. The CPC has censorship laws, but when they actually publish official statistics on something, those are pretty accurate. Their estimate on Tiananmen fatalities is much more like the statistics published by most journalists than the 10k number or even that hack's revised 2k - 3k count, and their accounting of events is much more like the ones that have held up over time among western journalists (the square was cleared without killings, there weren't machine guns on rooftops, most protestors left peacefully, there was no mulching of corpses, etc.)
There were many estimates from western press at the time that were in the realm of reason, those claiming it was a few hundred dead. There's no excuse for the 10k guy unless you want to argue he suffers from hallucinations.
You're essentially relying on cultural osmosis from the same culture that uncritically parrots the 10k figure and other such nonsense that you see spouted on Reddit. If you keep digging, eventually you will find that just about every story holding up that Ba Sing Se vibe is a fabrication.
There's a pretty good excuse. He was told a piece of information by a source
I brought that specific one up because I found it first, but walked it back when I found out it was unreliable. But more broadly, I'm looking at hundreds of citizens being killed by their own government. In the US, the closest to that was race riots against Black people that ended a hundred years ago. We're not censoring discussion of them and there are efforts to reconcile with the nation's past, even if some dullards don't want their precious feelings hurt.
Oh, "a source" gave him information that was completely incongruous with any observation made by people on the ground? It sure seems like using "a source" to launder absolute bullshit would be effective if it can merely be brushed off after the fact, so it's a good thing western rags don't do that constantly.
That's the lovely thing about anglosphere propaganda, you don't need to censor the truth (well, mostly) so long as you make your version of a story a thousand times more accessible than the other versions of that story.
Remember the death total there includes soldiers, and we are talking about militants who killed unarmed soldiers clashing with the PLA, with students being deliberately driven into the crossfire by student leaders.
If we mean "against their own citizens" then, uh, sure, I acknowledge that the types of conflict the US is involved in is very different from what China does. China fights off color revolutionaries domestically while the US kills millions abroad, an unknowable number of migrants, and is in a constant process of lynching black people and occasionally protestors to those lynchings.
Are you kidding? There've been ongoing efforts for the country's history to censor discussions even just of chattel slavery in schools, to say nothing about how talking about the summary executions otherwise referred to as "officer-involved shootings" are basically considered satanic CRT material and any attempt to call the no-note-"suicide"-by-hanging of BLM organizers a lynching when the cops say otherwise makes you a conspiracy theorist.
Can you imagine if this happened just once in China? An ethnic minority pretty much ritually murdered in the form of historic violence against that ethnicity, written off as "suicide" and brushed under the rug with no further contest, despite of protests from the victims' parents that the thesis makes no sense.
The current head of state, the leader of the so-called left wing party, is an unrepentant segregationist who justified his actions with a "states' rights" argument as recently as, like, 2019 (and he just hasn't been challenged on it since). Do you think the dashiki stunt helped us towards reconciliation? There is no effort to "reconcile" with shit. There's an allowance for more black drone pilots, but reparations or even just basic restitution for the destruction and theft wrought on black communities is a pipe dream.
China teaches about the June 4th incident in its schools, it's a matter of public knowledge, and claims to the contrary are made by ignorant redditors who read 1984 and just kind of imagine what China's domestic policy is based on vibes.