Well that’s just it isn’t it? The claim that on June 2nd unarmed PLA officers were on the square and were attacked there is also unsourced in that Liberation News article. It’s just mentioned but there’s no footnote present that supports the claim.
And it’s hard to make that make sense. By all accounts, the protestors blocked all access to the square. They did so in the period of the 20th to the 24th (first attempt) and also tried to once the PLA was ordered to use violence when they moved in on the 3rd. So how exactly did this unarmed column of PLA soldiers manage to get there again?
And of course we know that the PLA was armed at that point since the protestors took their weapons (which we have tons of photographs of).
You seem to have quite uncritically bought into the CCP narrative of the events, even if the story presented doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Eyewitness accounts also dispute the CCP version. To be clear, they don’t dispute that the square itself was cleared (mostly) peacefully, but the events leading up to it and directly after certainly weren’t. And the images of that are quite gruesome, with PLA soldiers firing down streets and using expanding ammunition.
Historians don’t buy the western narrative that claimed tens of thousands died of course, that was horseshit. But the CCP narrative is heavily disputed too. The death toll likely is somewhere between 500 and 2600, based on eyewitness accounts and imagery of the events.
And just to be clear: these protests weren’t universally pro-US. The protestors were highly factionalised, some seeking better relations with the US, but nowhere near all of them did. This factionalism also made it harder to negotiate with them for the CCP, since there wasn’t a clear leader.
(Btw I have no idea what you’re referring to when you said I “walked things back”, as far as I can tell I did no such thing).
The only thing that Wikipedia mentions in regards to violence on June 2nd is this paragraph:
On the evening of 2 June, an accident occurred in which a PAP jeep ran onto a sidewalk, killing three civilian pedestrians and injuring a fourth. This incident sparked fear that the army and the police were trying to advance into Tiananmen Square. Student leaders issued emergency orders to set up roadblocks at major intersections to prevent the entry of troops into the centre of the city.
Regarding the unarmed soldiers, that was an intercepted bus that was moving soldiers in who had been ordered to take up arms and disperse the protests. There were beatings but Wikipedia does not mention any deaths here.
As for you walking a point back, I mean when you went in and saw the twitter account saying that the lynched PLA officer had murdered 4 people, which the twitter account stated came from the ones lynching him.
Perhaps that was a simple misunderstanding then. You brought up the thread in order to reinforce your claim that the protestors were killing unarmed soldiers (at least how I understood it). Yet the only claim the account made is that the soldier supposedly killed 4 people, so the killing was retaliatory. It does list “the murderers” as the source, but we don’t have a better one (at least not one provided there). I mostly pointed it out since that account doesn’t come across as very reliable or informed, they posted a couple pictures to set a narrative, but when questioned seemed to walk back the claims they made.
As far as the death toll, best estimate we have comes from Beijing hospital records:
Records from Beijing’s main eleven hospitals, compiled shortly after the events, recorded at least 478 dead and 920 wounded, though Timothy Brook notes that these figures are an undercount due to lack of information from other hospitals.
This is quite significantly more than what the CCP has claimed (and quite atrocious in and of itself, even if it’s less than the bogus 10k figure).
Well that’s just it isn’t it? The claim that on June 2nd unarmed PLA officers were on the square and were attacked there is also unsourced in that Liberation News article. It’s just mentioned but there’s no footnote present that supports the claim.
And it’s hard to make that make sense. By all accounts, the protestors blocked all access to the square. They did so in the period of the 20th to the 24th (first attempt) and also tried to once the PLA was ordered to use violence when they moved in on the 3rd. So how exactly did this unarmed column of PLA soldiers manage to get there again?
And of course we know that the PLA was armed at that point since the protestors took their weapons (which we have tons of photographs of).
You seem to have quite uncritically bought into the CCP narrative of the events, even if the story presented doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Eyewitness accounts also dispute the CCP version. To be clear, they don’t dispute that the square itself was cleared (mostly) peacefully, but the events leading up to it and directly after certainly weren’t. And the images of that are quite gruesome, with PLA soldiers firing down streets and using expanding ammunition.
Historians don’t buy the western narrative that claimed tens of thousands died of course, that was horseshit. But the CCP narrative is heavily disputed too. The death toll likely is somewhere between 500 and 2600, based on eyewitness accounts and imagery of the events.
And just to be clear: these protests weren’t universally pro-US. The protestors were highly factionalised, some seeking better relations with the US, but nowhere near all of them did. This factionalism also made it harder to negotiate with them for the CCP, since there wasn’t a clear leader.
(Btw I have no idea what you’re referring to when you said I “walked things back”, as far as I can tell I did no such thing).
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The only thing that Wikipedia mentions in regards to violence on June 2nd is this paragraph:
Regarding the unarmed soldiers, that was an intercepted bus that was moving soldiers in who had been ordered to take up arms and disperse the protests. There were beatings but Wikipedia does not mention any deaths here.
Perhaps that was a simple misunderstanding then. You brought up the thread in order to reinforce your claim that the protestors were killing unarmed soldiers (at least how I understood it). Yet the only claim the account made is that the soldier supposedly killed 4 people, so the killing was retaliatory. It does list “the murderers” as the source, but we don’t have a better one (at least not one provided there). I mostly pointed it out since that account doesn’t come across as very reliable or informed, they posted a couple pictures to set a narrative, but when questioned seemed to walk back the claims they made.
As far as the death toll, best estimate we have comes from Beijing hospital records:
This is quite significantly more than what the CCP has claimed (and quite atrocious in and of itself, even if it’s less than the bogus 10k figure).
Removed by mod