As ridiculous and provocative as it may sound to the average person whose perception of the events of Tiananmen square are based on extremist right-wing propaganda from the white house, Tiananmen square rioting was a product of Operation Yellowbird with many student leaders collaborating with the CIA out of Hong Kong. The US also used their spy networks and criminal triads to smuggle the criminals behind the riots out of China and take them to the US when the communist party restored order afterwards. Additionally, many facts and events of Tiananmen square are completely fabricated or heavily distorted by the US regime. The famous “Tank man” was never harmed by the military and even mounted the tank, opened the hatch, and harassed the driver. Many members of the PLA were killed or injured by rioters, with some even hanging.
Of course, the US has no sense of irony for their ham-fisted and propagandistic depictions of Tiananmen riots. After one of their officers executed an unarmed civilian by the name of George Floyd, they used rubber bullets and lethal force to suppress protests against police violence, and their police force is still despised by the citizenry to this day not only for their crimes during that time, but the long history that the police force has of harassing and lynching their own citizens, especially those of ethnic minorities that are persecuted by the police.
Knowing everything that we know now, I would say that the communist party of China not only handled the situation as carefully and with the least amount of harm to the people as possible, but I would be willing to personally drive a tank into Tiananmen if the protests were happening today. I think any person who truly chooses the proletariat over class enemies should do the same. Western liberals perceive support for the Chinese police as comparable to the blue lives matter movements of the west or the unhinged worship of police in a liberal society. This comparison completely ignores class struggle and is therefore anti-marxist. It also rejects differences in political and authority systems around the world making it first-worldist and undialectical. A person who wants to build a socialist state rejecting the authority of the socialist state to police itself and defend itself is extremely bizarre, and seems to be based on past experience being persecuted by the bourgeois state in various ways. Of course a police force is not perfect and even in a socialist society there can be reactionaries infiltrating or operating within any organization, but the difference is accountability and the protection of the civil rights of the citizens which cannot exist in a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU
This is the best video of Tank Man I can actually find. The CBS vids are filled with artificial editorializing, whereas this is pure and cuts to the chase.
Note the tank commander coming out of the tank as though to negotiate with him. In China, due to not fighting foreign wars often, Chinese soldiers are taught to think of themselves as the People’s Army and schoolchildren are taught to think of cops and soldiers as their protectors.
The dissension over the violent action in 1989 comes down to how unnatural it is for the PLA to have to put down a civilian insurrection (for details, look elsewhere) when it is against their ethos.
I’m glad that overseas Communists are reassessing how they handle 1989, though, because there is no guidance from the CPC (unless the Foreign Ministry put something out), and this is a topic that liberals and fascists will bring quite often.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
3 day old account:
Why would us, communists, engage in such senseless, barbaric violence against our fellow people? This doesn’t set a good precedent for the community and people at large. Why were the people even rioting, hmmmmm? :smuglord:
The tanks in the Tank Man video are actually driving away from the square. When the man stops them he’s gesturing back to the square. It’s quite possible he was actually telling them to go back and stop the riot.
There’s no record of what was said between the man and the tank crew when he climbed aboard, nor does anybody know what happened to him. We just have the video. So what he actually wanted is pure speculation.
The western media have twisted the man into some kind of anti-communist hero. But whenever the video is shown, they only show the part where he steps up in front of the tank and tries to play chicken with it. They cut out his gesturing back to the square, they cut out him climbing up the tank and having a conversation with the crew, then climbs back down, and they cut out the part where a bypasser moves him aside and then he just leaves (sometimes they’ll claim the bypasser was secret police, but that’s again pure speculation). They also leave out the context that the tanks were moving away from the square and the rioters.
Whatever happened exactly, we can still observe that everything that happens in the video, aside from the stand-off, is not typical behaviour of an army that has received orders to kill civilian protestors.
The truth is that, when it comes down to it, the debates about the numbers, the optics and the moralizing that the Western narrative revolves around, and which MLs since have poured ink doing “damage control” for, are fundamentally irrelevant. The only question at all for ML discourse between MLs is that, when it comes down to it, does the Party and the People have the duty and the resolve to defend the revolution by all means from genuine counter-revolution. A principled position was already given just a few months after the defeat of the counter-revolution and it remains the most well articulated to this day.
[…] The facts are that in Beijing not all the guns were fired by the soldiers. In Tienanmen Square the army negotiated with the students and a majority of the latter decided to leave of their own accord. But the criminal counter-revolutionary elements, who were in charge and bent upon over-throwing the socialist system, were by no means agreeable to such an outcome. They tried forcibly to prevent ordinary students from leaving. They instigated and indulged in wanton violence against the soldiery.
When it became absolutely clear that this criminal coteries would accept no other resolution of the problem than the complete overthrow of the socialist system and its replacement by capitalism, that to achieve this nefarious end the conspirators were prepared to kill, burn and loot, to practise thuggery and intimidation, the Chinese Government and the army decided to take resolute action. It would have been a criminal dereliction of duty in such grave circumstance for the Government and the army not to have resorted to the use of force. In fact, should we not accuse the Chinese Government and the army of not having acted resolutely early enough? Should we not accuse them of showing patience for far too long? Should we not accuse the Chinese authorities of tolerating the presence in Beijing and elsewhere of hundreds of bourgeois journalists, who acted as cheerleaders for the criminal conspirators in Beijing in flagrant disregard of Chinese law?
The Chinese people achieved the liberation from imperialism in 1949 after a long and arduous struggle. During the course of this struggle millions of Chinese people perished and many more suffered extreme hardship. After liberation they completed the democratic task of the revolution and under the leadership of the CPC, the vanguard of the Chinese working class, they went on to begin the construction of socialism. They have made untold sacrifices and suffered much in order to reach the present stage of affairs when no Chinese dies of hunger, there is no illiteracy, there is basic health care available to everyone, and last but not least, China is no longer a pushover for imperialism. It is no longer possible for the imperialist powers to wage opium wars against China or to sack Nanking or Beijing.
Having reached this state of affairs, the Chinese people, with their long revolutionary traditions, the history of their struggle and sacrifice, are not lightly going to let a few thousand criminal elements, albeit with strong connections with international imperialism, overthrow the socialist system. The People’s Liberation Army is a guarantee of that: it is the cutting edge of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and if this causes outrage among imperialist circles, their hired hacks and their ideologues, the Chinese people can afford to treat it with the contempt such outrage deserves. If the resolute actions of the Chinese Government and the PLA sent petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’ - the Trotskyists and the Euros and even some would-be Marxist Leninists - into a stat of paroxysm, this only goes to show that at every critical juncture in the development of the revolutionary movement the world over, during every major crisis, our petty bourgeois socialists are as unfailingly bound to support the imperialist bourgeoisie as they are to stab the working-class and the national liberation movements in the back. […]
[…] It is for this reason, and being guided solely by the interests of the proletariat, that we unhesitatingly support the suppression by the PLA of the counterrevolutionary rebellion in Tienanmen Square. It is for this reason that we denounce and oppose the sanctions and pressure being sought to be put on the Chinese government by US Imperialism and its junior partners.
- Harpal Brar, Chinese Counter-Revolution Crushed. August/September 1989.
The real takeaway lesson, both for modern AES and all MLs in general, is whether they take the words of Engels’ On Authority seriously, as the CPC did in 1989:
“A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?”
If you want to go and ask me where I think wiser action might have saved lives, it’s ironically NOT because I think the students could have been talked out of it. They couldn’t because of firebrands and fifth-columnists like Chai Ling.
It was because the Zhao Ziyang government thought that the students were sincere; that they could have been talked out of it, and Zhao Ziyang, himself, came down to the students and cried in a desperate attempt to get them to peacefully end their demonstrations, to no avail.
If Zhongnanhai had accurately known that the democracy movement was a CIA-front, that the US embassy was acting to arm the proletarian protests against the PLA, Zhongnanhai could have acted more swiftly to forcefully nix the protests, such that lethal force would not have been required, or required in such large degrees.
That is what I mean when I say “Tiananmen is a truly unfortunate incident that has been exaggerated and distorted by the Western press, and the loss of life on both sides is truly regrettable.” It’s a dogwhistle, onlookers can be dragged into the “myths of Tiananmen” research, including by Western journalists who were on the scene, as far as they are willing, but I do not support a hardcore approach of straight denialism.
The best part, imo, is that the unreliable liberals were shown for who they were, and purged, but tbh, this would likely not have been possible if the protests had not gotten out of control.
In retrospect, I’d say Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a positive for China for the very reason that political liberalization was kicked brutally off the table. We see clearly the results of the alternative in modern Russia, with an out-of-control oligarch class.
