I find people are generally more polite when you don’t call them hypocritical blind tribalists and nationalists for not conforming to what you think they should believe based on what you’ve simply osmosised from the hegemonic liberal view on the matter and instead stick to polite questions and requests for clarification until you’re more informed.

not terminally online

Yeah you seem like a real grass-touching type, throwing a fit over being corrected.

Wikipedia agrees with the communists on that part:

Government officials have long asserted that no one died in the square in the early morning hours of 4 June, during the “hold-out” of students’ last batch in the south part of the square. Initially, foreign media reports of a “massacre” on the square were prevalent, though subsequently, journalists have acknowledged that most of the deaths occurred outside of the square in western Beijing. Several people who were situated around the square that night, including former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post Jay Mathews[i] and CBS correspondent Richard Roth[j] reported that while they had heard sporadic gunfire, they could not find enough evidence to suggest that a massacre took place on the square.

Student leader Chai Ling claimed in a speech broadcast on Hong Kong television that she witnessed tanks arrive at the square and crush students who were sleeping in their tents, and added that between 200 and 400 students died at the square.[269] Ling was joined by fellow student leader Wu’er Kaixi who said he had witnessed 200 students being cut down by gunfire; however, according to Mathews, it was later proven that he had already left the square several hours before the events he claimed to have happened.[212] Taiwan-born Hou Dejian was present in the square to show solidarity with the students and said that he did not see any massacre occurring in the square. He was quoted by Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident to have stated: “Some people said 200 died in the square, and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say I did not see any of that. I was in the square until 6:30 in the morning.”[270]

In 2009, human rights activist Robin Munro, stated that he was present during the clearance of Tiananmen Square and that, according to his account, there were ten Western reporters near the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the time. He also reported a Spanish television crew that recorded footage of the event. Munro disputed Wu’er Kaixi’s claims of mass killings inside the square, stating that he did not witness fighting there and instead observed students peacefully complying with the soldiers’ demands to leave the square in an orderly manner. He further noted that the Spanish TV crew reported not seeing killings within the square during the final clearance.[271][272]

In 2011, three secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing from the time of the events were leaked and published by WikiLeaks, all of which stated that there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square itself.[195] Instead, they said Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters in Beijing outside the square, around Muxidi station, as they fought their way from the west towards the centre.[195] A Chilean diplomat who had been positioned next to a Red Cross station inside the square told his US counterparts that he did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds in the square itself, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops who entered the square were armed only with anti-riot gear.[195][217]

It’s important that we take study of allegations like this seriously and don’t fall for bourgeois mythos.

Hey champ, would you like to respond to Cowbee? No? Were you blown out by a Wikipedia article? E m b a r r a s i n g.

You know you can do this neat thing of looking into things before you speak, right?

“Wow people generally seem to speak very positively of Brendan Fraser. This must be because he’s secretly evil and they just wont admit it!”

Maybe there’s a lot of positive talk about China and not a lot of critique because China, in general, does a whole lot of good and not a lot of bad.

Or because the users here don’t exist separated from the world in which they exist. That world, for most of them, is one where every miniscule thing China has done (and hasnt done, as this thread shows) gets relentlessly critiqued in the mainstream all the time, so the users here might not feel a need to add to that.

Or, to be honest, since I feel like I’ve been a bit too hostile to you, there is also a bunch of lemmy/hexbear/lemmygrad/etc users who reflexively shout at anyone saying anything that goes against their beliefs, because every forum and instance has a massive issue with people assuming they are “the one true ideologue” so that means they don’t have to investigate their own beliefs when they get challenged, instead it just means the challenger is a bad person - In the case of dumbasses speaking about bullshit they dont know and then doubling down that’s true though. Or not “bad” but definitely “shitty”.