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.
The term is pointless because it is only used to describe foreign countries. What freedom does someone working for minimum wage, barely able to afford rent, and at the mercy of their employer to even be able to do that much experience? But also it’s impossible to separate any actual freedom in the west from the hyperexploitation of the global south; you are able to buy bananas or coffee with less than 10 minutes of labor because the dictators the US keeps in place in countries that produce them keep the price of labor and resources low.
I’m from a country with 2% of its population in prison or homeless. To call any other country (except maybe Saudi Arabia, Iran, some gulf states, and Russia)'s rules disproportionate is laughable. Hell here in SK leading a socialist org is technically punishable by death, though the law isn’t enforced as written, in the lead up to the election I saw a demonstration with LGBT+ communist-like and anarchist flags that weren’t shut down. It’s like a fish accusing another fish of being wet.
Read the wikipedia article. You only accept such cartoonish logic of the evil communists needing to control everything and sending in troops to murder everyone who tries to ask for freedom because you have a cartoonish understanding of a real place with real people. You see the same short-circuiting of logic when you try to explain to a zionist why Oct 7th happened and they just go “They did it because they’re terrorists!” over and over. The CPC sent police and soldiers in unarmed, several got lynched (don’t look the pics up, they’re very graphic), they sent them back with weapons and a battle ensued, involving cops shooting indiscriminately in the area surrounding the square.
See, the next step is where you go “well it’s still bad cpp ebil” instead of developing any nuance or researching the political impact within China or doing further research into the various student factions and how it got to lynchings and how the other factions reacted (there’s quite a few contemporary interviews by students whose positions lead them to have different biases), and then I realize I’ve wasted my time.