Top search result for “Tiananmen Square” on China's top search engine Baidu

My guess is that you misunderstood the original word they used "歹徒", which is more like "gangster, villan".

And the clip you referred to, I think was the "tank man" video being aired by CCTV on 1989/6/5, with voice-over as:

"稍有常识的人都会看出，如果我们的铁骑继续前进，这个螳臂当车的歹徒，难道能够阻挡得了吗？摄像机拍下的这个画面，同西方某些国家的宣传恰恰相反，正好说明了我们的军队，保持了最大限度的克制。"

which roughly translates to:

"Any sane person can see that, if our 'iron horse' keeps marching, this 'gangster' wouldn't stand any chance, just like 'a mantis trying to stop a chariot'. In contrary to some western media had claimed, this clip showed that our troops remained utmost desciplinary."

So I would say the clip was used to reinforce CCP's official tone on the tragedy, which is something like "some gangsters colluded with foreign influences tried to overthrow Chinese government".

I know sometimes CCP's propaganda sounds dumb, but definitely not that dumb as "tank man was trying to rob the tank".

My understanding is that the men who dragged him away were plainclothes police officers. To my knowledge, nobody has ever shown any evidence he was seen alive after the incident.

That twitter thread had a link to a video where you can see the actual shootings (NSFW, blood gore): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI

Interesting, innit. Is there any downloadable info on HN voting patterns over time, per article or per comment?

It would make an interesting project to have such an aggregate over time.

When I see certain types of comments I check the poster's previous posts. Not so uncommon to get a long trail of obvious bias, often in the form of crude criticism of the US. Some members on slashdot, they could hardly be more obvious.

Where is this happening in US & Europe?

It's not censorship, it's "alternative facts" - far more effective!

Maybe or 6-7 years ago now Reddit decided to remove some extremely objectionable subreddits such as those that sexualise minors, then shortly after that it took action to remove subreddits which had been deemed extremely offensive by some higher ups at the company. During these times I remember people both on here and on Reddit were extremely concerned. I remember that although most people didn't like these subreddits they felt these actions might spell the beginning of further restrictions to their speech on the platform - a platform which once believed strongly in the principles of freedom of speech. If I remember correctly there was even significant media attention and many Reddit users were so upset they attempted to boycott Reddit.

However now Reddit bans subreddits all the time. Twitter and Facebook delete the accounts of individuals at a whim, even they're publicly relevant or political candidates. And the sad thing is no one really cares any more. We just accept it as the new normal. Now if the media reports on it they often celebrate it. It was deserved they say, based of course solely on their subjective moral objections.

It's really quite worrying.

Edit: Found the thread if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997

It's quite a balanced perspective, especially given the subreddit being banned in this case is /r/jailbait. I can't imagine anyone arguing that Reddit should allow that subreddit to exist today.

I suppose it surprises me how quickly perspectives have changed given we all now seem to accept private companies have the right to censor our legal speech online.

or, alternately, buy out the entire media and claim that the global level of implicit spin injected into everything is 'objectivity'...

this is a 2 edged sword which cuts both ways

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat who specializes in Chinese affairs, wrote an article in Japan Times recently, saying the Western media forged the so-called Tiananmen myth. Excerpts: The recent WikiLeaks release of cables has helped finally kill the myth of an alleged massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. But how did that myth come to exist in the first place? Several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any massacre. So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre? A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square. The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled "The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press". Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media's pack instinct created the false massacre story. Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed to have been present at the square when "troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds". Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted - one of the many black information operations. Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, "the strategic placement of lies and false rumors", while gray propaganda was "the production of slanted, but not fictitious, non-attributable information". According to Henry, it played a key role in helping justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965. The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing government had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption. Some then leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected. When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could. Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres in certain countries, still go out of their way to paint a false picture of "a brutal Chinese government willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands". An April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham's book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising , - whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre - provides a clue. It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, as having said that creating a "sea of blood" might be the only way to shake the government. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops, then the anger of the government becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that. Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.

The cake is a lie.