alt Hacker NewsThe general who refused to crush Tiananmen's protesters
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These are the sorts of people that deserve national holidays. Many of them come from problematic background, or had problematic politics, but when it mattered they showed up.
archive: https://archive.is/k388E#selection-1339.61-1339.70
video of the trial (6 hours): https://youtu.be/1RBV9i4jaPo?si=oesH721IFLnmzEcW
Gutsy move by whoever got it out of the archive and into Wu’s hands.
Out of curiosity, what were China’s current leadership up to during the Tiananmen Square massacre?
To be perfectly clear, other generals had no such qualms. Many hundreds to thousands of student protesters were massacred by the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Army tanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
Edit: To address latincommie's claims based on one of 250k "cables" (meant to be quick reports without much vetting) from that Assange/Manning leak: I think that a plausible explanation here is deception from PRC counter-intelligence. Chile was in a state of flux at the time, to say the least.
The general did not 'refuse' to crush the protests because the government did not want to crush them - the protesters were Maoists, who thought that the government had become too capitalist and wanted the army to do a coup to return to Maoism. They were preventing the tanks from getting out of the square - not entering - for that reason, and that's what the Tankman was doing in the magically cut/edited video of the BBC. Magically, because they cut a ~2 minute footage to almost 10 seconds, to parts showing only the close plane, because if you show it zoomed out, it becomes evident that the tankman was preventing the tanks from exiting the square.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk
And no, he did not die or anything - he just walked away with his bags full of food in the end - the food which he was carrying back to his comrades in the square, who were preventing the army from leaving.
It would be nice to read about an Israeli general, or even a junior commander, who refused to send airplanes knowing that many palestinian children, women and elderly would be killed as a result.
Or about an american commander refusing to sign papers to export offensive weapons to Israel knowing what is going on there (which was clear very soon after October 7th).
But instead, people in the west will continue to read such propagandistic stuff, and most will even believe, or pretend to believe, that they are better than Emmanuel Goldshtein.. (remember the archenemy from 1984?)
Salute to this guy, Xu Qinxian.
Funny how (possibly worse) anti-democratic massacres done by US allies (and much more recently) don't get continuous coverage US/Western/Business/Tech press.
As Lenin once said, The Economist is just the voice for British bourgeoisie.
The "massacre" of Tiananmen is nothing compared to any currently mass demonstration and their response in the USA (hello, G. Floyd, rest in peace).
Actually, the "massacre" of Tiananmen isn't, just take a look at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html. I'm Brazilian, and if you've been to any demonstration here in Brazil or have ever organized any political struggle for basic rights, you're well aware of the real meaning of oppression and relentless pursuit for demanding basic rights -- the shallow part is having your house scouted by official police cars, your family receiving death threats.. you don't wanna know what happens next, but if you're curious, just search for what our military dictatorship practiced between the 60's and the 90's (trained by the USA, of course) and got away with it. By the way, the military and the police here are still doing people in ways you don't want to know. The only country with similar proportions where repression forces are more violent and tyrannic is the USA.
May his name be remembered and on our lips for ever, and may his memory be a blessing for his family.