This is a large album of images from the protests in Beijing in 1989. It gives the historical context for the events leading up to the “tank man” photo, and what happened after.
Warning: blood, gore, visible injuries, death
I’ll never understand how the tankies can claim it never happened when there’s so many pictures like this available.
Even Lemmygrad says there were 300 deaths. I really can’t find anyone saying it straight up didn’t happen, not even the CPC itself. The closest is saying that the massacre happened outside the square, which seems more of a technicality that both “sides” rely on to pretend the other is making stuff up. Ie, Lemmygrad claiming others know nothing because there was no massacre on the square itself and it all happened outside, while others see that as outright denial.
Lemmygrad also believes it was CIA-backed and turned a pro-Maoist, anti-Dengist protest into an anti-Maoist, anti-Dengist, pro-Liberal Democracy/Capitalist protest, which I would say ultimately doesn’t change that protestors were murdered even if that was true.
I think it’s helpful to see what people are actually saying, you can better argue it to be an atrocity that way. For example, as above, even if it was steered in a different direction by western forces, it still had popular support and as such was still an unjust escalation of force into massacre.
The massacre is undeniable.
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Yes. They try and minimize it as much as they possibly can. I’ve seem them claim on here that nobody was killed and that nothing happened at Tiananmen square.
The bloodbath happened on side streets, the square itself was cleared by intimidation alone.
The one important name to know regarding the background and politics of all this is Hu Yaobang. Party hard-liners were happy being a faction of the party and struggling things out with other factions, students had the gall to very openly support the reformist faction, though, and marching onto the square in the wake of Hu Yaobang’s death would’ve set precedent that you can just march onto the square and demand basic decency. Tankies can’t have that, they gotta tank, and thus the hardliners took over leadership and reverted course away from the reformists for a decade or two.
It was decided that “The-Side-Streets-Around-Tiananmen-Square Massacre” was a little too wordy
I mean yes but no the salient point for the Chinese would be that the army did in fact not roll over all the students on the square, they “merely” intimidated them out of there after massacring themselves through barricades Peking locals had erected to protect the students. I say massacring not so much because those people didn’t right-out attack the army, but because the fighting was completely one-sided we’re talking pretty much fists and stones against machine guns and tanks.
There were plenty of people within the CCP who wanted to see much more blood, that there was so relatively little blood is thanks to Peking locals (this time less militant ones) bringing rice and fried noodles to the army camping out in front of the city while explaining to them that (unlike what they had heard from the party) those weren’t counter-revolutionary bourgeois foreign agents on the square, but simply reformists.
That’s why that point is rather important, the Chinese people might not be saying it out loud but “there was a massacre on the square” implies that the people did nothing to influence the situation. They very much did and avoided a much worse calamity.
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So because you haven’t personally seen it yourself it didn’t happen? Ok.
You say it like it’s the typical response though, essentially zero people believe nothing at all happened.
So because you have seen it but don’t have proof it still totally happened?
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Thanks for this. China keeps trying to wipe away this event by having any image deleted. It needs to be reposted and seen often.
There are diplomatic cables from Australia and Britain about the massacre that have been declassified. Shit was fucked and I don’t know if the cables are common knowledge. That article is a great read.
Those cables have been proven to be full of shit. Go to Wikipedia and read the accounts of the survivors that were pulled out by the CIA in Operation yellowbird https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird if you want to piece together what happened from primary sources.
Thanks for sharing. Every time I see a picture of the Tiananmen Square massacre I get shivers. That man is one of the most amazing icons of resistance against oppression. I like to think of myself as brave but I’m genuinely skeptical if I’d have the courage to stand in front of a tank that way.
Ya know I dont know if thats legit NSFL or if im just that desensitized to war photos. Maybe giving 12 year old me a book on the civil war that included post battle photos and sections from a contemporary medical book with photos from the mangled corpses wasnt the wisest move by my grandmother. But ya know what those photos do invoke within me absolute fucken rage.
This man is a fucking hero and deserves to be recognized as such.
I’ve seen lots of pictures of Hong Kong protests, and hear about rent protests in Beijing, but haven’t seen many photos like this in Beijing proper in the 21st century. Are they that good at scrubbing the web, or did I just miss them?
China’s internet is isolated from the rest of the world. We would be looking at a lot of content created from china if it wasn’t like that.
Damn malicious AI image generators trying to tarnish the good name of the CCP. Smh. (/s)
Yeah, those horrible AI image generators of the late 80s look like garbage - most photos don’t even have colour! /s
Isn’t this the classic photo?
I think the classic is the one where you see only 3 tanks.
So it is this, just cropped. Or really another pic with wider view?
I think it got cropped by western media to better focus on the hero and less on the army.
That’s odd, because that’s the photo I immediately think of when the massacre is brought up. I thought it was really well-known.
Most people think of this one
It’s pretty amazing how they let that guy just harass a tank for several minutes and even climb on it, then just kinda let him be led away by bystanders.
For some reason growing up I think everyone assumed he got ran over or killed?
For some reason growing up I think everyone assumed he got ran over or killed?
Because hundreds if not thousands of others were (others have already linked the graphic content).
Also, seeing him being led away in this footage is zero evidence that he survived his protest (unsurprisingly, there is no documentation of him or what the government did to him, but considering what they did to others like him, there is very little room to doubt that he didn’t make it).
I’ll play devil’s advocate - the photographs don’t seem to show evidence of thousands dying, or even hundreds necessarily. Dozens, absolutely. I doubt we’ll ever know the actual numbers, though. Clearly something awful happened.
Edit: I mean, they really don’t… and if they “only” ran over fifty civilians with tanks I think we can still consider that an unforgivable example of state violence. It’s not as if the Kent State shootings were okay because they only killed four people.
I’m just saying, I don’t feel the photographic record is a particularly robust source when it comes to supporting those higher claims. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way, just that the pictures are inadequate to prove that.
There are photos of dozens dead and tossed to the side like a garbage bag, both on the streets and in hospitals. Do you seriously think that’s the sort of thing which happens when only a few people died?
I don’t claim a strong position. I suppose if I had to say, I believe the estimates of between 2-800 dead, mostly in the streets surrounding Tiananmen Square, with a dozen or so police lynchings amongst that number. But it would be weird for me to be overly attached to that as an opinion, as the evidence is unclear. I think Beijing hospital records suggest about 400, so that seems like a safe lower estimate.
I think Beijing hospital records suggest about 400
That’d be the 400 they managed to find with their bodies in a good enough condition to identify. Have you seen the literal human paste?
Yes, it’s a reasonable minimum estimate. What is it that you’re disagreeing with? I’ve certainly seen all the pictures. But have a read about the declassified diplomatic cables, it’s interesting. Notably, the mountains of flesh being burned with flamethrowers probably didn’t happen. I have no stake in that, it’s the current position held by the US Government. What happened is still monstrous.
