I don't really want to enter this discussion, since it usually quickly devolves to less than stellar levels. However, on the topic of the 1989 protests, I feel like Westerners often have a very superficial understanding of what happened back then, and in turn cannot understand chinese civil society and government today.
There's one documentary on the topic that I can wholeheartedly recommend, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.[1] It is quite long, but goes into incredible detail and also interviews a lot of organizers and politicians first hand.
The Tiananmen Square massacre was a turning point in chinese politics, ending a decade of increased freedom and open calls for reform. In civil society, people kept their heads down and went to work. In politics, almost all the reformers and politicians sympathetic to the students were isolated, demoted or even imprisoned. Still the last 30 years have been the best China has had in hundreds of years, and it is always much harder to argue with success. A lot of chinese people know what happened back then, and a lot of those accept it as something shitty that happened, but ultimately the country and people were still able to progress. Chinese people, by and large are not against their own government, even if they don't always agree with everything that happens.
The problem with hearing the other side is of course that most people are more concerned with reaching the correct value judgment (imprisoning innocent Uyghurs is bad, killing innocent protesters is bad) than with reaching it based on accurate information.
If you tell someone who believes that thousands of people died directly on Tiananmen Square and were crushed to pieces by tanks, correcting them by pointing out that actually
> ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT ACTUALLY WITNESS
ANY LARGE SCALE SHOOTINGS ON THE SQUARE PROPER, GALLO
SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID
NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE
KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.
that's not going to affect their value judgment (the numbers are smaller, people weren't killed on the square itself but elsewhere, who cares, it's still bad) and most likely they'll soon forget those details and keep telling their original story, because, well, it's just a much more visceral image.
It's also the the information about these events is so hidden. The govt admits no wrong and hides all evidence to the contrary. For that alone I prefer to err on the side of these events being pretty bad.
Also having known an eye witness to Tiananmen square, I'm confident it was bad. Really bad. If he were to get caught talking about it, things would be really bad for him too. So you won't find many witnesses willing to talk.
No one claims there were no deaths. US-backed counter revolutions often involve violence, regardless of the self-restraint of the state being attacked. What exactly should the army do after several of its unarmed soldiers were killed by the “protesters”?
Every global power becomes one by exercising power, globally.
Claiming the existence of problems justifies these types of policies is an argument of convenience where the policy is fixed and someone is just fishing for reasons.
We ignore it when it's Saudi Arabia or the child slave driven mines of Central Africa and bring it up when there's a possibility of encroachment.
The world is terrible, we should do better. But carving out Chinese manufacturers of smartphones isn't how you'll get there.
If those actors really thought what they did was bad they would be trying to revert the outcomes of their actions. Do you see the US moving non-native descendants out of vast swaths of American to set up native-american countries, or paying native survivors the fair land value of all the lands they were driven from? Talk is cheap, watch the hands.
Kent State was barely 50 years though, and sending Predator Drones after anyone suspected to even tangentially be related to terrorism is current policy.
If the US still had an ethnic minority that lived predominately in one area and has been active in terrorism and islamist extremism, I don't think they'd handle it gracefully. Abu Ghraib gives us an idea about what the US would do in a similar situation and it's not been that long.
There's one documentary on the topic that I can wholeheartedly recommend, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.[1] It is quite long, but goes into incredible detail and also interviews a lot of organizers and politicians first hand.
The Tiananmen Square massacre was a turning point in chinese politics, ending a decade of increased freedom and open calls for reform. In civil society, people kept their heads down and went to work. In politics, almost all the reformers and politicians sympathetic to the students were isolated, demoted or even imprisoned. Still the last 30 years have been the best China has had in hundreds of years, and it is always much harder to argue with success. A lot of chinese people know what happened back then, and a lot of those accept it as something shitty that happened, but ultimately the country and people were still able to progress. Chinese people, by and large are not against their own government, even if they don't always agree with everything that happens.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gtt2JxmQtg