Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ComradeHakim Twitter: @YaBoiHakim00:00 Introduction and Framing03:27 Background, Reform-History and Class Comp...
Alright i feel like I have a good handle on the left counter-narrative about Tiananmen. But I’ve also seen a lot of content, including from scholars who don’t seem to be knee-jerk anti-China, that says that a shameful atrocity was committed.
Can someone who knows more than me play Devil’s Advocate here? What nuance is missing from the left response to the standard lib narrative?
I’m sure that if the CPC could do it again, they would have handled it differently. I don’t think it’s a particularly proud moment, even if it wasn’t the 'massacre" it is portrayed as. The reason we can tell this is because they have clearly changed what their response to semi-large pro-colonialist Western-backed demonstrations are (see the Hong-Kong protests where there were only two confirmed deaths of protestors, which for the sake of argument we’ll attribute to the police).
For one, there is clearly a lot more pre-emptive work going on from a surveillance level that didn’t go on before, especially tracking guns, and two, they are getting pretty good at isolating protestor demands and accommodating demands that are considered ‘reasonable’ (ones that were considered an ongoing issue in the party already), which fractures the protest movement, mostly leaving the truly ideologically radical sections, of whom the Western-backed ones aren’t actually willing to risk their skins, since they can make money as anti-China grifters in Western academia and Western media. That just leaves the ultra-leftists, who are broadly unpopular (because they are considered too Western-brained) in China and therefore do not really have any leverage.
Alright i feel like I have a good handle on the left counter-narrative about Tiananmen. But I’ve also seen a lot of content, including from scholars who don’t seem to be knee-jerk anti-China, that says that a shameful atrocity was committed.
Can someone who knows more than me play Devil’s Advocate here? What nuance is missing from the left response to the standard lib narrative?
I’m sure that if the CPC could do it again, they would have handled it differently. I don’t think it’s a particularly proud moment, even if it wasn’t the 'massacre" it is portrayed as. The reason we can tell this is because they have clearly changed what their response to semi-large pro-colonialist Western-backed demonstrations are (see the Hong-Kong protests where there were only two confirmed deaths of protestors, which for the sake of argument we’ll attribute to the police).
For one, there is clearly a lot more pre-emptive work going on from a surveillance level that didn’t go on before, especially tracking guns, and two, they are getting pretty good at isolating protestor demands and accommodating demands that are considered ‘reasonable’ (ones that were considered an ongoing issue in the party already), which fractures the protest movement, mostly leaving the truly ideologically radical sections, of whom the Western-backed ones aren’t actually willing to risk their skins, since they can make money as anti-China grifters in Western academia and Western media. That just leaves the ultra-leftists, who are broadly unpopular (because they are considered too Western-brained) in China and therefore do not really have any leverage.