this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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There's a difference between quickly suppressing a color revolt that is killing soldiers vs. invasions and coups that kill and displace millions of people. If Tiananmen revolt had spread or succeeded then a LOT more people would have died, and China would now be a western puppet instead of a sovereign nation.
They killed dozens of unarmed soldiers, hanging them by their necks and immolating their corpses. Many of the deaths were done by the mob and they started the lethal violence. They had hundreds of guns out of nowhere, likely supplied by the CIA. Good riddance to these fascist, west-collaborating "students" and the dupes who followed them.
Liberals always handwring at their enemies suppressing internal problems with unsophisticated violence, but that's often the only tool these nations have to sustain their own existence. They don't have sophisticated surveillance deep states with media narrative control, just simple brute force. It's why Liberals were aghast at "Assad using barrel-bombs on his own population" - the preferred method is to destroy street movements via a complex suite of spying, targeted media narratives, sheepdogging, hidden plain-clothes operatives, targeted assassinations of leadership like how Ferguson and the 2020 riots were handled. Assad had one button to have his nation continue to exist, and it was "drop the barrel bombs on the jihadists hiding in apartment complexes" so he pressed it. That makes him a giant villain to Liberals, despite their own funding of jihadists being the very reason he had to push that button.
China at the time of Tiananmen was an unsophisticated state in its suppression capabilities. It had one button to deal with the revolt and continue to exist. I don't believe it was a mistake for them to push it. You can contrast this to how the Hong Kong colonialist petty bourgie revolt was squashed, with 0 deaths. China would obviously prefer 0 deaths, they just didn't have the capabilities at the time.
This isn't accurate at all. The fighting happened when would-be insurgents ambushed pla troops. The pla had unarmed soldiers in the square for a long time. And i mean really unarmed. No helmets, no shields, no batons, no tear gas. When things finally touched off with the cia-backed "pro democracy) faction that was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the people involved the pla ordered everyone out of the square and everyone left. That was it. When the cia backed wannabe insurgents started attacking the pla everyone was ordered to leave and they left. They didn't do any brutal state repression. The cpc was in an extremely awkward position bc the vast majority of people involved in the June 4th incident were protesting against Dengist market liberalization, asking for a return to a more socialist economy. Others were protesting the restrictive social norms of contemporary China, arguing that the restrictive social norms were anti-communsit and that people should have more freedom to do simple stuff like publicly date and be publicly affectionate.
Ultimately a big part of the reason there was little reprisal is bc the cpc couldn't crack down on pro-socialist protestors, and because in the end the whole thing ended mostly peacefully. The narrative around it is so utterly twisted and distorted. And if you ask people in China about it they don't understand why westerners think it's important. It's just a minor incident in history from a long time ago.