The General Who Refused to Crush Tiananmen's Protesters

> China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was the little-known party chief of a city in the coastal province of Fujian during the unrest in 1989. But the PLA’s crushing of that unrest, and the failure of the Soviet army to do the same in Moscow in 1991, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse, clearly left a deep impression. He has often referred to a critical lesson from it all: the PLA must remain the party’s army and it must be kept under control. It all helps explain Mr Xi’s relentless “anti-corruption” drives among the high command.

Xi was 36 years old in 1989, older than almost all of the current Politburo members. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had very minor roles at that time. Xi’s role was at least partly because he was a princeling - his father was a comrade of Mao Zedong from the old days.

I recommend reading Yashen Huang's "Rise and Fall of the E.A.S.T." [0] - it has a good overview of the cadre during Tiannamen - along with the dated but very comprehensive Tiannamen Papers [1]

[0] - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300274912/the-rise-and-f...

[1] - https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/liang-zhang/the-tia...

“On 14 August 2013, the Egyptian police and to a lesser extent the armed forces, under the command of then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, used lethal force to clear two camps of protesters in Cairo. Estimates of those killed vary from 600 to 2,600.”

The gaslighting is ongoing, IMO that’s what keeps it in the western consciousness.

Compare that how Tiananmen Square massacre is taught in China.

I assume the outsized focus on it is somewhat related to the lack of contrition and accountability.

Source?

Wikipedia article says nobody has a clue who he is/was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

Chinese state TV treated him like a protester, and spun it as an example of what nice guys the Chinese Army is:

  CHINA TELEVISION ANNOUNCER: [subtitles] Anyone with common sense can see that if our tanks were determined to move on, this lone scoundrel could never have stopped them. This scene flies in the face of Western propaganda. It proves that our soldiers exercised the highest degree of restraint.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcript.html