Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, and Chinese-speaking correspondent of the International Business Times, wrote:
“The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time — among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night.”
“Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed. All that has happened is that the location has been changed – from the Square itself to the streets leading to the Square.”
Thomas Hon Wing Polin, writing for CounterPunch, wrote:
“The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.”
“More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy.”
“All these facts were known to the US and other governments shortly after the crackdown. Few if any were reported by Western mainstream media, even today.”
- Thomas Hon Wing Palin. (2017). Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/
