Tiananmen Square Events Revisted With Color Revolution Lens

As our imperial media brings up the Tiananmen Square massacre again, as part of the ongoing propaganda push against China, people from China are explaining the events as an early Color Revolution, with a smack-down response. The angry students, the burned soldiers, the crack down from the government....are all very familiar to us now, but not so much back then.


Via Robert K Tan
As opposed to myths or lies, the few simple truths about the Tiananmen tragedy are buried, suppressed and/or brushed aside by corporate media, NGOs and western governments.

1. No one was killed in Tiananmen Sq on June 4, 1989.
There were a dozen first-hand accounts by those present at TAM Sq at the material time, including a protest leader Hou Dejian, a couple of foreign diplomats and some foreign journalists. Even the cables sent by the American embassy in Beijing to the State Department stated so. At least three foreign journalists, James Miles from BBC, James Kynge of Financial Times, and Richard Roth from CBS have confessed to false reporting of TAM Sq massacre. Years after the event, they confirmed the fact that no one was killed at TAM Sq.

2. Hundreds died in the street leading to TAM Sq, particularly Wuxidi, as a result of violence started by the mobs and agents provocateur, many supported and supplied with petrol bombs by the American CIA and Taiwan forces. Subsequent clashes between the mobs and PLA soldiers ensued.
The death toll was vastly exaggerated and inflated by western press and NGOs. A few put it as high as 10,000, with one at a ridiculously high 200,000.
Official death toll was 300 plus, including soldiers and workers.
Several surveys of hospitals in Beijing put it at between 400 and 1,000. The Tiananmen Mothers group has so far registered only 212 .
Who do you believe? The western sources which have lied for decades to destabilize and regime-change independent sovereign states. Or local civil groups such as the Tiananmen Mothers and surveys of hospitals.
Remember Iraq's WMD, human rights abuses by Gaddafi and chemical attacks by Assad? And recently, up to 3 million Uighurs interned in concentration camps in Xinjiang.

3. Protests demanding democracy?
That's a lie. As Geodfry Roberts put it, the students wanted no more than BIG CHARACTERS democracy, something they learnt from Mao during the Cultural Revolution.
The students were mad at the government for withdrawing tuition subsidies. They were angry with inflation running at more than 20%, and they were pissed off at corruption.
The narrative that the protesters demanded democracy was fabricated by the Americans to justify the student protests and to overthrow the CCP government.

More on the false narrative of student protesters demanding democracy :

"But “democracy” was far from the minds of the students when the protests first kicked off – the primary three demands were related to: price , official corruption (particularly Zhao Ziyang’s son), and labor market competition.

Deng’s rural reforms had massively improved the lot of Chinese farmers and led to spiking crop yields – but the flip side is that the boost to farmer incomes led to price increases in urban areas for staple foods. This was compounded by inflation shocks throughout the 80s which had also shaken urban residents.

“in the late 1980s, with food prices and wages both climbing and the system flush with cash, overall inflation skyrocketed, averaging nearly 19 percent in both 1988 and 1989”

Ironically the driver of these inflation shocks were reforms proposed by Zhao Ziyang, who originally was the target of the protestors’ ire, though this abruptly stopped at some point during the protests. Stories of official corruption had also united various factions of protestors, with handbills pointedly asking, “How much does Zhao Ziyang pay to play golf?”

Concerns over prices weren’t simply “economic anxiety” though, this was also heavily tinged with elitism. Students and urbanites were not happy to see “peasants and farmers” do so well relative to them.

This “economic anxiety” also manifested itself a year earlier in Nanjing, where students affected by cuts to tuition subsidies took out their anger on African exchange students in a massive demonstration, even setting fire to the African students’ dormitory at Hohai University.
“Like most foreign students, the Africans enjoyed greater standards of living in China and some dated local women. Among the signs in the crowd at Hehai on Christmas Eve,1988, were placards demanding greater democracy alongside ones proclaiming, ‘death to the black devils’.”
Many of the organizers of the Nanjing anti-African protests later came to Beijing to participate in the Tiananmen protests as well: “The anti-African demonstrations spread to Beijing where, late on the night of April 19, student militants carrying banners saying, ‘No Offend Chinese Women,’ yelling ‘Kill the foreigners!’ and screaming insults at Deng marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.”

The student protestors were also contemptuous of the worker protestors as well: “A member of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation found the students were ‘especially unwilling’ to meet members of the Construction Workers’ Union, whom they drove from the Square, considering them as lowly ‘convict laborers. They ‘were always rejecting us workers. They thought we were uncultured. We demanded participation in the dialogue with the government, but the students wouldn’t let us. They considered us workers to be crude, stupid, reckless, and incapable of negotiating’.”
Wang Dan, another student leader at Tiananmen, stated “the movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others.”

“They (the students) exhibited a wariness about the articulation of economic demands by other groups, and wanted to keep the movement exclusively under their control”

In the early days of the protests, the students even went as far as to cordon off their own protests so that the hoi polloi couldn’t protest with them – from an eyewitness: “The marchers on the periphery of the parade held pink colored packaging twine that circumscribed the marchers. It was meant to exclude anyone else. If you weren’t a student from that particular school, you couldn’t just join in their march. They didn’t even want anyone marching beside them: I walked a block maybe, asking questions about what their demands were and what they hoped to achieve, and was basically told to bugger off.”

As the protests went on and the students unexpectedly (to them) received a good deal of sympathy, both from the general public and even the government (evidenced by the sympathetic editorials in the papers), the nature of the demands began to shift. Hardliners in the student protestors wanted to go beyond addressing corruption and price controls, and some advocated for the overthrow of the government.

“Chai Ling, who was recognized as the top leader of the students, gave an interview to Western reporters on the eve of June 4 in which she acknowledged that the goal of the leadership was to lead the population in a struggle to topple the Communist Party of China, which she explained would only be possible if they could successfully provoke the government into violently attacking the demonstrations.”

Working with Chai Ling and other protestor leaders was the CIA’s man in China, Gene Sharp, who wrote the book on “color revolutions” for the US and whose playbook continues to be used today by the USA. Sharp even had the audacity to smear the worker and union activists at Tiananmen as CPC agent provocateurs in later interviews.

None of this was met with broad consensus from the protestors. As Chai Ling and Feng Congde said themselves, they faced multiple “coups” from various factions of protestors.

“At the May 27th coalition meeting, Chai Ling and Feng Congde reported on the situation in the Square. The impression we got was that things were really chaotic. There was endless factional in-fighting, and sanitary conditions were terrible. We began to doubt whether anything positive could come out of this on-going stalemate. “

Feng Congde: “Often we had to suppress 3 or 4 coups a day. At the time I even joked, "Now I finally understand why Li Peng wanted to suppress the students."

By May 30th a significant portion of the students had left the square. This caused the student leaders to shift their policy and start to allow worker protestors (previously banned from the square) in to boost numbers.

With martial law declared and the central premise of the protests becoming more and more muddled – was it still about official corruption? Inflation? Or now about democracy and free press? – the leaders of the students turned to wilder plans.

“Moderate student leaders argued that, having made their point, the students should withdraw and live to fight another day but Chai Ling commanded them to stay because, “The students keep asking, "What should we do next? What can we accomplish?" I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?”

Of course, this was all very brave talk by someone who already had acquired a US visa in secret."

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