Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died at Tiananmen. We won’t ever know how many the government killed because, unlike literally every other event mentioned, the state continues to threaten violence as a punishment for even talking about what happened.
When I was studying at BeiDa literally only people whose families were from Beijing knew that “something” had happened at Tiananmen.
You know what you get when you search for “the June Fourth Incident” (aka the Tiananmen Massacre) on the Chinese internet?
The entirety of Weibo. 600 million active users. And there is nothing.
On Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, you get a jumble of random unrelated crap:
(The scene with blood is a photo from a Baghdad market.)
Literally nowhere can you find this image:
To even show my roommates this picture, I had to get a VPN to get through the Great Firewall of China. And one of them frankly told me she was pretty sure it was Western propaganda hoax and that the event had not occurred.
And it happened at Tiananmen fucking Square! That is the stage for political symbolism! Imagine if the U.S. government used Black Hawk helicopters to kill hundreds of protestors who’d been inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and Americans couldn’t even google it. And the consequences have been with China ever since. Not just the politics, but even the physical space: they put you through TSA-level security now before you can even step out onto the Square because they need to control speech acts on that symbolic stage.
The protestors wanted freedom of speech. And even the fact that they spoke up has been obliterated from history.
By contrast, the American government lets you google every single one of those American incidents. I have heard Neil Young’s “Ohio” at the fucking grocery store. We are all here talking about these events! We don’t even need to come up with coded alternatives!
Tiananmen should be remembered as a reference point of state violence. The subsequent blackout censorship is a direct result of the threat of state violence backed up with tanks. Until people are afraid to mention Ferguson on social media for fear of getting harmonised, I don’t see why we need to belittle the heroism of Chinese students and workers by making false comparisons.
Talk about American atrocities. Talk about Wounded Knee in both 1890 and 1973, while we’re at it. But there is a reason we talk about Tiananmen as state violence.
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