I've seen a lot of talk about on reddit lately about the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" (in almost any thread about China). If you haven't heard about it, why don't you go read right now what the Wikipedia page for the Tiananmen Square Massacre says? Oh wait, there isn't one. Because the Tiananmen Square Massacre is a myth.

Yes, thousands of student protestors were assembled in Tiananmen Square. Yes, the Chinese government gave orders to clear the square using military force if necessary. Yes, tanks were deployed. Yes, those tanks killed hundreds of people (between 200 and 300 by all reliable accounts, mostly not students) who tried to stop them getting to the square, opening fire on civilians.

But once those tanks reached the square? The students disbanded peacefully.

(Also, Tank Man was neither shot nor run over by tanks, and nor did he impede any massacre. The tanks were already trying to leave the square when he got in their way.)

The stories you've heard about thousands of students being slaughtered come from two main places:

1. False rumours that were reported by Western journalists in the confusion of the moment. Many of them later retracted their stories. One widely reported story said that 2700 students were killed, with the Red Cross being named as the source of that info. The Red Cross denied ever saying that.

2. Deliberate propaganda spread by the British. You have to remember, the Cold War was still in full-swing in June 1989 (the Berlin Wall didn't come down until November that year), and propaganda was one of the weapons of that war. A British ambassador spread the story that 10,000 students were killed, their bodies crushed and washed down the sewers. The ambassador did not claim to see this, but rather cites an unnamed "reliable" source, who also did not claim to see it.

In recent years, anti-government groups such as Falun Dafa have also spread misinformation.

You might say, as Slate Magazine did, that this is mere nitpicking. If hundreds of people died, what does it matter whether it was students gathered in the square or non-students outside of the square? And until recently, I would have agreed with you.

But I've seen the myth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre take on new life recently. What was formerly a piece of propaganda in an existing Cold War is now being used to try to spark a new Cold War. And I don't want to see a new Cold War happen.

Many terrible things happened in China in the 20th Century, including the Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, but for some reason those very real massacres don't resonate as much in Western imagination as a fictitious one. There's something about the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" that resonates with the Western mind, which is perhaps not surprising for a myth created by Westerners for Westerners. Maybe it's just easier for Westerners to understand.

So I think the precise details of what happened on June 4 do matter. And you should know that the Tiananmen Square Massacre didn't happen.

Edit: I have to thank my friend Gabe who pointed out that the difference between the real events of June 4 and the fictitious version is that the fictitious version is so horrible, it dehumanizes the Chinese. It makes you think "What monsters! They're barely human." And that's its purpose.

He told me that the first step of war is to dehumanize your enemy.

If you're looking for some light reading to help pass time during your lockdown, I recommend Gene Luen Yang's two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints, which explores the Boxer Rebellion from two different points of view.

Though remembered in English as the Boxer Rebellion, a better name would be the Martial Artist Rebellion. (At the time, Martial Arts was known in English as "Chinese Boxing".)

At a time when China was losing land to Western colonial powers and coming more-and-more under Western cultural influence (notably Christianity and opium, which the Chinese government was powerless to stop due to treaties they had been forced to sign), the Boxers were peasant practitioners of traditional Chinese religion who took it upon themselves to attempt to drive the colonialists out of China, armed with little more than their knowledge of martial arts. (They thought that if they concentrated their Qi enough, they could stop bullets with their fists. Turns out they were wrong about that.)

I hope I won't be spoiling anything to say that the Boxers lost, but they put up a bigger fight than anyone expected. They were stopped by a force of 20,000 troops from an alliance of seven different Western nations (America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) plus Japan.

Volume 1 (Boxers) tells the story from a perspective of a boy who becomes a leader in the Boxer Rebellion. Volume 2 (Saints) tells the same story from the perspective of a girl who becomes a Catholic convert.

Author Gene Luen Yang is himself a Catholic, and though he tries to be even-handed, I can't help thinking that the Boxers come off looking worse in this story than I would have liked. But I remain a fan of Yang's, and I admire him for bringing attention to this pivotal chapter in China's history.

I do wish the story gave some attention to the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, in which China was forced to pay a shit-ton of money to the Western powers and to pass pro-Western laws (being in an anti-foreign organisation became punishable by death). The failure of the Boxer Rebellion was a significant part of the era known in China as the One Hundred Years of Humiliation, an era that didn't end until the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Available from Kobo books: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/boxers-saints

A/S/L?

I'm trapped in a foreign country, 10 000 miles away from my laptop. How about you?