Well that’s just it isn’t it? The claim that on June 2nd unarmed PLA officers were on the square and were attacked there is also unsourced in that Liberation News article. It’s just mentioned but there’s no footnote present that supports the claim.
And it’s hard to make that make sense. By all accounts, the protestors blocked all access to the square. They did so in the period of the 20th to the 24th (first attempt) and also tried to once the PLA was ordered to use violence when they moved in on the 3rd. So how exactly did this unarmed column of PLA soldiers manage to get there again?
And of course we know that the PLA was armed at that point since the protestors took their weapons (which we have tons of photographs of).
You seem to have quite uncritically bought into the CCP narrative of the events, even if the story presented doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Eyewitness accounts also dispute the CCP version. To be clear, they don’t dispute that the square itself was cleared (mostly) peacefully, but the events leading up to it and directly after certainly weren’t. And the images of that are quite gruesome, with PLA soldiers firing down streets and using expanding ammunition.
Historians don’t buy the western narrative that claimed tens of thousands died of course, that was horseshit. But the CCP narrative is heavily disputed too. The death toll likely is somewhere between 500 and 2600, based on eyewitness accounts and imagery of the events.
And just to be clear: these protests weren’t universally pro-US. The protestors were highly factionalised, some seeking better relations with the US, but nowhere near all of them did. This factionalism also made it harder to negotiate with them for the CCP, since there wasn’t a clear leader.
(Btw I have no idea what you’re referring to when you said I “walked things back”, as far as I can tell I did no such thing).
I’m aware that the protests had wildly different requests, from hardliners opposing Reform and Opening Up to the “Pro-Democracy” student-led movement. The student-led movement had CIA connections at the leadership level, and by the time of June 4th the “Pro-Democracy” movement was all that was really left.
There wasn’t an “unarmed column of PLA soldiers,” you’re confusing the events of June 3rd with June 2nd. June 3rd saw clashes between rioters, who had taken PLA arms and were fighting, while reports are admittedly mixed on whether or not rioters murdered the PLA officers on the morning of the 3rd alone, or in addition to June 2nd. Either way, the rioters did jump unarmed soldiers who were not deployed as a part of the main force moving in, even wikipedia backs this up.
The CPC narrative has not been credibly countered. Eyewitness accounts do not point to hundreds of extra deaths in concrete terms, they just point towards that being a possibility. As for you walking a point back, I mean when you went in and saw the twitter account saying that the lynched PLA officer had murdered 4 people, which the twitter account stated came from the ones lynching him. I pointed that bit out and then you seemed to have walked it back.
Well that’s just it isn’t it? The claim that on June 2nd unarmed PLA officers were on the square and were attacked there is also unsourced in that Liberation News article. It’s just mentioned but there’s no footnote present that supports the claim.
And it’s hard to make that make sense. By all accounts, the protestors blocked all access to the square. They did so in the period of the 20th to the 24th (first attempt) and also tried to once the PLA was ordered to use violence when they moved in on the 3rd. So how exactly did this unarmed column of PLA soldiers manage to get there again?
And of course we know that the PLA was armed at that point since the protestors took their weapons (which we have tons of photographs of).
You seem to have quite uncritically bought into the CCP narrative of the events, even if the story presented doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Eyewitness accounts also dispute the CCP version. To be clear, they don’t dispute that the square itself was cleared (mostly) peacefully, but the events leading up to it and directly after certainly weren’t. And the images of that are quite gruesome, with PLA soldiers firing down streets and using expanding ammunition.
Historians don’t buy the western narrative that claimed tens of thousands died of course, that was horseshit. But the CCP narrative is heavily disputed too. The death toll likely is somewhere between 500 and 2600, based on eyewitness accounts and imagery of the events.
And just to be clear: these protests weren’t universally pro-US. The protestors were highly factionalised, some seeking better relations with the US, but nowhere near all of them did. This factionalism also made it harder to negotiate with them for the CCP, since there wasn’t a clear leader.
(Btw I have no idea what you’re referring to when you said I “walked things back”, as far as I can tell I did no such thing).
I’m aware that the protests had wildly different requests, from hardliners opposing Reform and Opening Up to the “Pro-Democracy” student-led movement. The student-led movement had CIA connections at the leadership level, and by the time of June 4th the “Pro-Democracy” movement was all that was really left.
There wasn’t an “unarmed column of PLA soldiers,” you’re confusing the events of June 3rd with June 2nd. June 3rd saw clashes between rioters, who had taken PLA arms and were fighting, while reports are admittedly mixed on whether or not rioters murdered the PLA officers on the morning of the 3rd alone, or in addition to June 2nd. Either way, the rioters did jump unarmed soldiers who were not deployed as a part of the main force moving in, even wikipedia backs this up.
The CPC narrative has not been credibly countered. Eyewitness accounts do not point to hundreds of extra deaths in concrete terms, they just point towards that being a possibility. As for you walking a point back, I mean when you went in and saw the twitter account saying that the lynched PLA officer had murdered 4 people, which the twitter account stated came from the ones lynching him. I pointed that bit out and then you seemed to have walked it back.