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Talk:1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre/Archive 2

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< Talk:1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Roadrunner (talk | contribs) at 17:39, 20 November 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The reason I believe The Tiananmen Papers are a production of the Chinese government is the revisionist estimate of casualties. That is what gives it away. However, I also believe it contains substantial valuable information. I don't belive it is reliable on certain critical points, as for example the claim that no protesters were killed within the Square itself. I think with more research the article Tiananmen Massacre should be resurrected and give a detailed account of the battle, so to speak, and fully explore casualities and how and where they occured. User:Fredbauder

The claim that no one was killed in the square itself appears to be generally accepted. Hundreds of people were killed around the square, but when the troops surrounded the square itself, the protesters within the square made the decision to evacuate the square in good order rather than to create a blood bath. This is all well documented by eyewitness accounts of people within the square, and I don't know of anyone that seriously disputes this.

I changed the title of the article because there was also a very significant protest in Tiananmen in 1975. User:Roadrunner

In Red China Blues the author and many other jounalists were in a hotel overlooking the square and observed events within the square. Lengthy bursts of automatic weapons fire were observed. With regard to support of the government, there is a turn to Chinese Nationalism, but almost no support for Marxism, or Communism. This has been my observation from observing Chinese postings on the internet. I suspect the Tiananmen massacre pretty much finished off popular support. Fredbauder 00:57 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Removed statement that Chinese government claimed that there were no causalities. The claim of the Chinese government is that there were no causalities in the square itself. As far as I know, no Chinese government official has ever denied that there were causalities outside the square.

As far as support for the Chinese government. There is no real support for Communism within the the government itself. The situation with Marxism is very complicated. Basically Chinese Marxism has been redefined so that it bears no resemblance to what most people in the West think of as Marxism. --Roadrunner

Intent of my previous edit wasn't to justify government's claims, merely to merge together this page and another page. I'm fine with your edits, but then again I really don't have any opinion on this whole issue. --TMC

Removed statement about little support for the Communist Party or its ideology. There is a huge range of opinion about the Communist Party in China today, but the statement that there is little support for it is not accurate. It's not universally loved, but at the same time it's not universially hated either. Ironically (and this is a wild simplification), businessmen tend to like the party while workers tend to dislike it. --Roadrunner


This also needs fixing

There was some minor disagreement within the ruling group, but all agreed that the lengthy demonstrations were a threat to the stablility of the country and especially to their continued rule. Abandonment of one party rule was seen by the leadership as a recipe for chaos. The demonstrators were seen as tools of advocates of "bourgeois liberalism" who were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The disagreement in the Politburo was not minor. Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili were actively supportive of the demonstrators and did not believe that abandonment of one party rule was a recipe for chaos. They lost the power struggle and the paragraph is an accurate assessment of the opinions of the people who won it, but this needs to be rewritten to reflect the huge rift that existed within the party.

-- Roadrunner

Also the information I have for the number of causalities within the square are from the PBS documentary film The Gate of Heavenly Peace which includes a number of interviews from people within the square itself. Basically, there was an argument over whether they should stay and die or leave the square and they decided to all leave.

-- Roadrunner

Changed the statement a bit. The PSC was actually very strongly divided between Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili who were supportive of the students, Yao Yilin and Li Peng who were anti-student, and Qiao Shi who didn't seem to have an opinion.

-- Roadrunner

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