An occasional reader brings this article to my attention.
Gregory Clark's "valuable service" is to advise that a Google search of "Tiananmen Square massacre" no longer brings up photos of Chinese army soldiers who were killed by protesters. They were killed on June 4 1989 and the hours immediately before the crackdown on the students in the square. I haven't tried the search, but I'll take his word for it. That there were soldiers killed in the square is well known, at least to those of us who were there or taking note at the time. Which includes me, and J, who spoke to the soldiers on the tanks immediately before. We certainly knew that soldiers had been killed and burnt and hung up, in horrific ways. And Clark does further good work to preserve the photos on another site, here. [This is Google Drive, and one wonders if they might in time be "disappeared" from there as well]
If Google now censors those horrid photos as an attempt "to further demonise Beijing", as Clark claims, well maybe.
Does the killing of soldiers excuse the killing of students that followed? Of course not. Though Clark's line appears to be that since soldiers were the first ones killed this somehow mitigates student deaths.
Which deaths, by the way, remain unknown. Soldier numbers killed? Maybe in single figures. Student numbers killed? Don't know. Figures of "thousands" are quoted. Then, "thousands" is a real lot and would surely have shown up in media even well before Social Media days. There were plenty of international journos there, most of them most of them, I imagine, sympathetic to the students, yet we see no footage of anywhere near "thousands". My own guess is somewhere in the hundreds, perhaps even high hundreds, but unlikely "thousands".
That's still a lot. And does nothing to mitigate the crackdown and especially the brutal followups with widespread arrests of student leaders and sympathisers throughout the country that followed for months and years after June 4th.
I remember at the time many saying that China would pay for the crackdown. Many thought that the student movement would go underground and continue. Neither of these things happened.
So it's interesting to consider the counter-factual. What if Zhao Ziyang, the then premier, had prevailed and a soft line had been taken with the students? What if Zhongnanhai had given in to some or all of the student demands? What then? Where would be today?
The problem with this counter-factual is that it is far more uncertain than most. And there are some who say "counter-factuals are bs". I don't know. I rather like them. Like the ones on "what would have happened if Hitler had won?" That's led some great books and films. But Tiananmen? No so clear. Would nothing much have happened, and China just muddled through? Or would there have been a gradual spread of democracy? Or would there have been chaos? Cases and Netflix series could be made around any of these counter-factuals. But then look back at some of the student leaders. The highest profile, perhaps, Wu'er Kaixi, in his pyjamas (he'd been on hunger strike) in a chair facing the Chinese leadership and lecturing them on what they needed to do. He came across, to me at least, as an entitled shit. Arrogant, condescending and preening. Just the sort to make a great little apparatchik. None of the others gave any sense of comfort that they could run China instead of Deng Xiaoping, who'd only recently regained power and used it with brutal effect in Tiananmen. So, while it's a most uncertain counter-factual, the reality, 32 years later, is that China, the majority, the government, has not suffered.
None of which is to mean I'm any fan of today's government in Beijing. I'm not. But as to whether China would have been better off if it had given in to student demands, that's surely doubtful.
