
1989 Tiananmen Square Protests - sebastianconcpt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
======
anoplus
I see similarities to the <edit>wikipedia picture</edit> protest in Israel's
Tel Aviv main square from yesterday, in terms of social distancing.

[https://www.rt.com/news/486269-israel-protest-social-
distanc...](https://www.rt.com/news/486269-israel-protest-social-
distance/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS)

And also, I was just having philosophical thoughts about the distribution of
power in the world. I wonder if advances in technology will one day create a
coalition of super powerful people who will control the world and will make
the rest of humanity slaves at best and completely worthless at worst.

I mean, do ethical people naturally gravitate toward power? or does power tend
to attract the less empathetic (to put it nicely)?

[edit]

I even fear one day we won't be even able to post about this topic.

~~~
codegladiator
power tends to corruption

~~~
Zenst
People tend towards corruption, power just enables that tendency. But not
always the case and few examples of people in power throughout history who
have been shining examples of showing us that it can be done right.

~~~
codegladiator
i am sure every rule has exceptions.

~~~
Zenst
It does, hence tends encapsulates that niche. But then nothing is perfect so
their will always be an exception.

Reminds me of an old IT joke - We finally made the perfect code, it debugs
itself. Alas when we run it, it electriculted the programmer.

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saagarjha
Is there a reason this was posted today?

~~~
pedrocx486
Probably OP trying to "test" if HN is controlled by China.

Some weird logic I've seen recently where if you post something about China
being bad, and it gets deleted, then that place is "tarnished".

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sgillen
I mean if everything bad about one country gets deleted, but this treatment is
not given to other countries, I would call that a problem. Not saying that’s
where HN is at at all.

~~~
lukifer
It's plausible that individual users are simply downvoting for not finding it
interesting: information that isn't new, preaching to the choir, etc.

While it's possible, I'd be very skeptical that YC/admins are intentionally
silencing anti-China messaging; I've certainly seen many posts critical of
CCP. It certainly seems plausible that the Chinese state has agents and/or
bots that nudge online content in accordance with the party line; if so, I'd
be curious to know to what extent HN is on their radar, compared with more
highly-trafficked sites like Reddit.

~~~
yters
Yes, I don't think HN leadership is pro-CCP. However, I do think there is some
kind of CCP influence at work. Whether it is normal HN participants that are
more understanding of CCP, and dislike the blanket dismissal they get, or
there are actual CCP agents at work, is unclear to me. It is clear there is
dislike of the outright criticism that CCP gets. My comments critical of the
CCP get many more downvotes than even I am used to getting.

I also think that HN mods should have access to enough user data to be able to
run some tests and see if particular accounts are more targeted towards CCP
critical posts and comments than would be expected by a normal HN reader.

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rwmj
His style is not for everyone but the BBC recently repeated Clive James in
Shanghai, from 1989. You can see the protests going on and he comments on how
the police and army are completely absent (which I guess was around
April/early May). It's also interesting to see China in 1989, so massively
different from when I visited last year.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gx15](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gx15)

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duxup
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/opinion/tiananmen-
square-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/opinion/tiananmen-square-
china.html)

It's interesting to see that after all that a new generation is out there,
some willing to simply dismiss the value of knowing that such an event even
happend.

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tehjoker
Note that the protests occurred in the backdrop of market reforms to the
economy. Not an expert on Tienamen Square, but that seems important.

"The reforms of the 1980s had led to a nascent market economy which benefited
some people but seriously disaffected others, and the one-party political
system also faced a challenge of legitimacy."

~~~
supernova87a
Of course this opinion will not be popular here, but I think that there are
legitimate historical assessments to be made on whether the Chinese leadership
did this (and not to excuse them by the way), because they saw they were in
danger of falling down the USSR route.

I.e. allowing the form (but not substance) of democracy to come in before
people were ready for it, just as they making some progress on the
constructive path of controlled economic liberalization, and derailing it to
produce a oligarchic kleptocracy that would plunge the country into long-
feared poverty and chaos. Which we can now see what happened to the USSR.

If you think of that as the choice that was facing those leaders at the time,
their actions are more understandable. Just like how we look back now at the
Soviet scare era of our history and wonder how we ever got caught up in that
ridiculous hysteria.

Again, I say understandable, not excusable. Of course there likely were
aspects of preserving power for its own sake, but looking at Deng's intentions
and actions (other than Tiananmen Square) throughout his career, one has a
hard time saying that he was motivated mostly for maintenance of power and not
some public good.

It is a complicated story, and worthy of more than just a knee-jerk reaction.
And yes, the important democracy movement and its terrible tragedy ought to be
commemorated.

~~~
yters
I would say even poverty and chaos is preferable to the collective farms and
gulags that killed over 100 million during the Soviet regime. Read
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" for context, even just the first chapter of
his massive work is extremely eye opening.

Update here since I am rate limited. Check wikipedia for non combatant death
counts. Read the first chapter of Gulag Archipelago, and with the very bloody
revolution, disasterous collective farming, and constant purges of innocent
civilians, you may find 100 million very plausible, if not even sounding on
the low side.

Also telling is that Stalin had the UN change the definition of genocide so
his gulags and policy disasters would not be counted.

~~~
tehjoker
The 100M+ number published by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
(funded by the USG) includes Nazi war dead.

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cm2187
Is hackernews still accessible from China?

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yorwba
It's been at least partially blocked since August last year:
[https://en.greatfire.org/https/news.ycombinator.com](https://en.greatfire.org/https/news.ycombinator.com)

