It is actually wrong, but you’ll never admit to being wrong.

You’re right on one point, however: I will be denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Because there was no massacre at Tiananmen Square. The massacre in Beijing was a couple of kilometres away and wasn’t of students: it was of workers. The very link you so smarmily threw at me like it was evidence of your stance contains this:

In 2011, three secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing agreed there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square.

Embarrassed yet? Of course not. Your kind is never embarrassed by being flatly wrong. You’ll contrive some excuse why you’re actually right or why being right doesn’t matter or some other horseshit like that. So don’t bother reading past the line here. The rest isn’t directed at you. It’s directed at people willing to actually learn and understand.

The problem is that you’re on the receiving end of as much propaganda as any citizen of China. It’s just that your propaganda is slicker and less centralized so it’s less obvious. But if you actually read that thing you so cavalierly linked to (without bothering to note that it directly contradicts your stance), you’d note that the Tiananmen protests were an absolutely tiny part of a very widespread set of protests that had spread out across the nation. And the core of these protests wasn’t the students in Tiananmen (nor even students in general) but rather workers.

So why is it you only know about students in the square? And “know” about a “massacre” in that same square that never actually happened?

In two words: lazy press.

Tiananmen Square is near the hotel favoured by foreign journalists (then and now, even) in Beijing. It was easy to “report” by walking out the door, sauntering down the street, and watching the antics of the student protestors. Further, there was a certain adorableness about these kids building their “Goddess of Democracy” statue and it suited the messaging and narrative that people the world over just wanted to be just like Americans. Nothing quite like pandering to your base, after all, when you need their money to keep operating, right?

But the real story was far larger, far messier, and, here’s the critical part, far less what the wealthy owners of your press owners wanted to have published. Because the real story was of abused workers nationwide having had the fuck enough and starting to rise up against it. (Can you think of any reason why that message would not be one that wealthy press owners would want promulgated?) The fact that these protests were all over the country, nowhere near universities outside of cities known for being university towns, and, this is the part that terrified the government most and drove them to irrational stupidity, included PLA members (!) is what led to the 1989 Beijing massacre. (There were massacres in other cities too, but information on these is very hard for me to access and no western sources have it because they couldn’t even bothered to go more than about 500m from their hotel in Beijing, not to mention other actual cities!)

Of course if you thought for even a few moments (and didn’t “other” Chinese people—that’s critical too!), you’d understand why the narrative of massacred students never made sense whatsoever. In 1989 Beijing, university students would have been the scions of the cream of the fucking Party. They’d have been the sons and daughters of the most powerful men in the country. Do you really think that the authorities would order the slaughter of their own fucking children?! Just how fucking much do you dehumanize people who disagree with you!?

So on to the actual massacre. On June 4 the square was cleaned out. Riot police went in and brutally beat the students that hadn’t yet fled: the students had been leaving in the 48 hours leading up to that because they knew what was coming (courtesy of negotiators’ frank language), leaving only the hardliners behind. (Apologists for the authorities will point at students fighting with the cops, but I have no sympathy for that view. Of fucking course the students fought with the cops. That was the entire point of this: fighting authorities and demanding better!) By the end of June 4 the student protest was gone. In the process students had been killed … but not in the square. A dozen or so had been crushed by tanks on nearby Chang’an avenue. Other civilians who tried to storm the square (including parents of the students who mistakenly believed their children were still in the square) also got shot with, likely, a few more dozen dead. (Actual numbers are impossible to get and anybody who claims to have them is a fucking liar.) But by evening of the 4th the square was empty of all but soldiers and, critically, the massacre had not yet begun.

The real massacre happened the next night near a bridge at Fuxingmen (about 2km or so away from Tiananmen square) where the aforementioned protesting workers had laid an ambush for APCs using burned out vehicles to corral them and then attack them with molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons. They were, predictably, gunned down in large numbers. (Realistic numbers say in the high four figures to low ten figures.)

So in your zeal to “score” something, not only were you wrong (and proved by the very link you provided, comically enough!), you also erased a far darker story in favour of a fantasy pitched to you by wealthy press owners and lazy reporters for over 30 years now. Congratulations! You’re a free thinker!