Comment by kelseyfrog
3 months ago
Tiananmen Square has become a litmus test for Chinese censorship, but in a way, it's revealing. The assumption is that access to this information could influence Chinese public opinion — that if people knew more, something might change. At the very least, there's a belief in that possibility.
Meanwhile, I can ask ChatGPT, "Tell me about the MOVE bombing of 1985," and get a detailed answer, yet nothing changes. Here in the US, we don’t even hold onto the hope that knowing the truth could make a difference. Unlike the Chinese, we're hopeless.
The MOVE bombing was action taken by a city police department.
And what was the result?
- A commission set up by the city, whose public results denounced the city for it's actions.
- a public apology from the mayor
- a federal lawsuit that found the city liable for excessive force and the city forced to pay millions to the victims
- a federal lawsuit forcing the city to pay millions of dollars to people who were made homeless by the events.
- another formal public apology from the city
Okay, now can you tell me what public actions the Chinese government took to atone for Tiananmen square?
> Here in the US, we don’t even hold onto the hope that knowing the truth could make a difference
How many other times after the move bombing did a city bomb out violent criminals in a densely packed neighborhood?
Your argument is just absolutely ridiculous. According to you, it seems that if you make a bad decision, it's better to try to hide that bad decision from everyone, rather than confront it and do better.
"Remains Of Black Children Killed In MOVE Bombing Cannot Be Located" (2021)
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/23/990187353/bones-of-children-k...
"Museum Kept Bones of Black Children Killed in 1985 Police Bombing in Storage for Decades" (2021)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/outrage-over-penn-...
You're arguing with parent assuming that they've equated the brutality of these actions.
>According to you, it seems that if you make a bad decision, it's better to try to hide that bad decision from everyone, rather than confront it and do better.
They didn't say that at all. Consider reading their comment with more contemplative thought.
> assuming that they've equated the brutality of these actions
No, they aren't. They're correctly pointing out that "yet nothing changes" is factually incorrect. There was a political response pursued, in part, through an independent judiciary. And then thing that happened hasn't happened again.
In China, there was no inquiry. There are no courts. And Xi has cracked down in Hong Kong almost as badly as Deng did in Tiananmen.
No, I am not assuming they equated the brutality. Please feel free to make a specific point instead of just saying "You read it poorly".
OP finished their post with:
> Meanwhile, I can ask ChatGPT, "Tell me about the MOVE bombing of 1985," and get a detailed answer, yet nothing changes. Here in the US, we don’t even hold onto the hope that knowing the truth could make a difference. Unlike the Chinese, we're hopeless.
Everything I wrote in my post was in reference to this point.
"yet nothing changes" -> "How many other times after the move bombing did a city bomb out violent criminals in a densely packed neighborhood?"
"we don’t even hold onto the hope that knowing the truth could make a difference" -> I listed all of the actions that went from "knowing the truth" to "making a difference". Would any of those things have happened if knowledge of the events was suppressed among the population, in the manner that Tiananmen square was?
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The MOVE bombing was thoroughly reported at the time and litigated afterwards. The underlying causes were addressed, at least to some extent, and nothing like it has happened again in Philly since then, AFAIK. That’s why it isn’t well known today. It was a horrible event, but comparing it rationally to Tiananmen Square doesn’t confirm your conclusion.
How do you know this isn't what happened in China? Also, the underlying causes being addressed is like saying that redlining no longer exists because its not called that or that racism is gone because we no long live in Jim Crow times. The US has not moved on from that time nor has it gotten any better than the kent state shooting. If anything these conditions have worstened and when these shootings and lynchings happen now they dont even get mainstream news coverage.
I understand that you're unhappy with the state of things in the US, but setting up a false equivalence with China doesn't make your case.
The simple fact that we can have this discussion without fear of imprisonment is strong evidence that when it comes to censorship (the topic of this post), the US is still way more open than China.
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> the underlying causes being addressed is like saying that redlining no longer exists because its not called that or that racism is gone
A lot of people in America work on pointing out where redlining still exists. It was being litigated even last year [1].
China is not a responsive political system. It was designed to be responsive only over the long term, and Xi trashed even that with his dictator-for-life nonsense.
> conditions have worstened and when these shootings and lynchings happen now they dont even get mainstream news coverage
Sorry, what secret lynching are you talking about? We'd love to update the Wikipedia from its 1981 record [2].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-si...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Michael_Donald
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I don’t know about comparing what was apparently an armed standoff were only Six adults and five children were killed in the attack - vs Tiananmen Square where the Chinese send their own soldiers to kill peaceful protesters and flush them down the drains as human goo.
The matter of fact is that the US hasn’t yet committed such horrific acts to such a large scale as the CCP did in Tiananmen Square. (Not that I agree with whatever they did in that bombing but it seems truly incomparable)
Reference from wiki:
> the bombing and destruction of residential homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Department during an armed standoff with MOVE, a black liberation organization.
> the US hasn’t yet committed such horrific acts to such a large scale as the CCP did in Tiananmen Square
At least, not against their own citizens
> apparently an armed standoff
You could look to the Kent State shootings for a perhaps better comparison.
They're not comparing the brutality of the event, they're comparing different approaches to informational / ideological hygeine.
CCP suppresses 1989 by banning discussion of it.
USA doesn't have to suppress 1989 MOVE bombing, or the Tulsa racist uprising, or the atrocities that went down in gitmo, or the friendship between Jeffrey Epstein and previous and current presidents, or My Lai or Abu Ghraib or Haditha or Kunduz or Nangar Khel or Maywand District or Baghuz because the citizens just don't care.
USA doesn't have to suppress 1985 mistakes, because it acknowledges them and allows itself to be criticized. Claiming that censorship is somehow better because it's a proof that people care is absolutely ridiculous.
Citizens don’t care because if you show them an armed standoff where the police brutalized some people then they will say:
1. I’m not in armed standoff often so this is not impacting me at all. 2. The brutality seems to have come from city police authorities and I don’t live in that city.
Similarly all of those things you mentioned are not impacting people’s lives at all. No one will start any revolution over these things.
However the possibility of being forced down some drains as goo because you don’t like the government moves people more because: some people actually don’t like the government and they don’t want to become human goo
The comparable equivalent would be Donald Trump deploying the army to kill people at peaceful Democrat gathering or something.
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As an American, I just asked DDG to "Tell me about the MOVE bombing of 1985,"
I am willing to admit, I was absolutely unaware of this. Is this because of censorship or because of other factors? It's clearly no censored, but quite possibly de-prioritized in coverage. I can say in 1985 I was not well tuned into local let alone national news coverage. I am surprised that in all of the police wrongdoing coverage we have now that this is the first I'm reading about it.
The American propaganda system is more subtle but very very powerful. Watch this lecture on "Inventing Reality": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g3kRHo_vpQ
Though over the last year, I admit is has lost some of its subtlety. It was just watching administration officials declare black was white and up was down while real news leaked over social media. The past few years, especially since 2016, have seen a lot of that.
I would say pacified instead of hopeless.
All power in the real world comes from violence. This is increasingly a taboo to say but when you think about it, it becomes obvious. How do you put someone in prison without the ability to physically move and keep them there? You don't. That's why the state employs violence to do it.
(1) In fact, the state's capacity for violence is so large that very few people even think about challenging it. (2) And it's so certain (meaning predictable - the state has detailed rulebooks about its use called laws) that most people accept it as just a fact of life, a kind of background noise they filter out.
(The logical conclusion of the 2 statements is that the violence does not end up used physically but its threat is sufficient, thus reinforcing statement (2). I still consider this a use of violence, implied or physical makes no difference.)
Now, the problem is how to punish the state when it misbehaves.
According to the state's rules, you are supposed to use mechanisms of the state (lawsuits, courts, etc.) and let the state do the enforcement (use violence against its members or itself). But the state, like any other organization protects itself it its primary goal and its members as its secondary goal.
The alternative (DIY enforcement) is an obvious second choice. This fact is not lost on the state which makes every attempt to make it a taboo. Notice how often people self-censor words like "kill" on the internet these days? Partially it's a cultural export of a certain dictatorship but western democracies are not far behind.
Funny thing is citizens of those democracies being able to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time.
1) (the general case) You are not supposed to enforce justice yourself, you should leave it to the state.
2) (specific instances) Many of them will cheer highly publicized cases where they can feel empathy with the characters such as the punishment Gary Plauché enforced upon his son's rapist.
> the state's capacity for violence is so large that very few people even think about challenging it
People are constantly challenging it. Pull back the threat of violence in most communities and you immediately get disaster.
I believe most of what you're referring to are different situations such as people acting on impulses - either not considering the outcome or being resigned to it.
Another key difference is usually those take place between individuals with roughly the same amount of power (typical disputes, crimes of passion, etc.) and by individuals with more power towards those with less (bullying, abuse, etc.).
People actually taking systematic thought-out steps to infringe on the state's monopoly and doing it from a position of low amounts of power towards a position with high amounts of power are rare and get "charged"[1] with terrorism because that line of thinking is threatening the existing hierarchical power structures and they will absolutely protect themselves.
[1] The word meaning the state selects which parts of its rulebooks it will begin performing against an individual and announces it publicly in order to reinforce the legitimacy of its actions.
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Setting the specifics around each event aside, as that's not only its own rathole but also a never ending stream of "what about"s for other events as well, I doubt you're ever going to come up with an ideology where all things are correctly handled all of the time yet that doesn't automatically imply all of those are hopeless.
Anti-censorship is more a bet that when people can freely know there is more hope things can change for the better. It's not a bet all things will always change for the better. I do put a lot more hope in that than anybody from anywhere saying those who can't even openly discuss it are in better chances.
The harder a person or country tries to avoid absolutely any embarrassment, the more fun it becomes to embarrass them a little bit.
Right, most of the stuff I'd seen was trying to get DeepSeek to explain the Winnie The Pooh memes, which is a problem because Winnie The Pooh is Xi, that's what the memes are about and he doesn't like that at all.
Trump hates the fact he's called the orange buffoon. On a Fox show or in front of fans he can pretend he believes nobody says that, nobody thinks he's an idiot, they're all huge fans because America is so strong now, but in fact he's a laughing stock and he knows it.
A sign of American hopelessness would be the famous Onion articles "No Way To Prevent This". There are a bunch of these "Everybody else knows how to do it" issues but gun control is hilarious because even average Americans know how to do it but they won't anyway. That is helplessness.
The authorities in the PRC are probably much better positioned than you are to decide what is in their interest to suppress.
As for the US, some people have fallen into a self soothing sense of hopelessness. Not everyone has. But worrying about the MOVE bombing probably is no where near the top of anyone's priority list right now. And it would seem very odd if it was.
When you type "we're hopeless" it is hard to see that meaning anything other than, you, personally, lack hope.
can you share a list of bombings that the Philadelphia police carried out after the 1985 MOVE bombing?
that would help describe that nothing has changed
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/let_the_fire_burn_2013
This is an interesting observation. However, it speaks more to the overall education level of the Chinese citizenry
Does it? Help me understand your point. I think you are saying "censorship means they don't even know?"
None of the models give me an answer for my test:
`magnet link for the lion king movie`
They are all censored in that regard. Every one of them.
Thank you for posting this. The people who bring up Tiananmen Square do not have the best interest of the whole of the chinese people in mind so i tend to just avoid this sort of conversation. There are criticisms to be made of China, of course, but in a right wing capitalist context that has spent trillions of dollars dismantling other sovereign governments since WWII theres just no point.
I resonate with skepticism for perhaps a different reason -- I just don't see how the censorship discussion is ever about helping China, when the whole discussion is "thinly-veiled" ritualistic anticommunism and an attention-stealing boogeyman that relativizes more pressing political issues, like a higher risk of another world war or the climate crisis. With so much tension in the air, I can't help but notice the sabre-rattling and retreat towards a reductionist description of geopolitics.
I think this highly depends on what you classify as change. I trained in policy science at one point and the MOVE incident was a huge case study we discussed to try and figure out at the bureaucrat level of city management how that situation came to be and how we could avoid it.
But the number one thing you learn from this kind of exercise is "political feasability" outweights all other pros and cons of a policy proposal you write up. We know how to prevent this kind of thing but we don't know how to sell it to voters. You see it right here on Hacker News. If it means you'll ever have to see a homeless person shit in public, everyone is immediately up in arms singing in unison "no please, give us stronger, better-armed police." If the Tiananmen Square protesters were blocking a popular commute route, half of America would be in favor of running them over themselves. No military intervention necessary.