Living Shanghai, My Perspective!

This article echoes Fon’s reflection.

I don’t really know what’s happening in Uzbekistan, but some journalists (mainly the westerners) already got very excited to the high estimated death toll and couldn’t wait to call it another “state-inspired bloodshed” that compares to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Somehow I always resent the 1989 incident in Beijing being widely called a massacre by the western media world, sometimes on an intentional bias, because the fact I learned when I lived in the U.S. from various sources including some western-made documentaries and conversations with friends who were actually at Tiananmen Square that day and one of whom was even acquainted with one of the student leaders Wang Dan, simply does not fill the definition of the word Massacre which according to Merriam-Webster Online is defined as “the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty”. The fact was not like most average household westerners have imagined that a large group of helpless student demonstrators got rounded up by tankers and armed soldiers and were then machinegunned down. In fact, unlike the 5000 or even 3000 death toll many foreign reporters were telling the world by spreading the rumors they got from Hong Kong according to Fons, the total who died in that incident was estimated to be between 150 to 500, a figure that is agreed by both the Chinese officials and US NSA documents, and that number also included many young PLA soldiers who were killed by the mobs, a fact that has been largely if not entirely ignored by the western world for whatever reasons. The killing of many PLA soldiers indicated violent clashes not one-directional massacre took place that night. Many civilian casualties were caused by stray bullets in the crossfire while most soldiers who got killed were in fact burned, stoned, or beaten to death. I believe the curfew troops mainly made of younger peasant draftees were very much restrained in the early time but somehow more or less got into some revenge mood after having lost their men to cruel violence by the mobs (not necessarily the students) –imagine reactions from New York City Police if one of them got cruelly slain.

What the Japanese did in Nanjing between December 1937 and March 1938 where at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the invading Japanese troops (not mobs!!!) was massacre. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped; many of them were then mutilated or murdered. Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled. What Germen did in Auschwitz and other death camps in WWII was massacre. What Hutu mobs did to Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 was massacre -I couldn’t believe UN peacekeeping forces chose to stand by and let the carnage happen. What is happening now in Dalfour Sudan might be a massacre –US state department is still debating on it, and there have been many other massacres in the history of mankind, but not the Beijing one by any standard.

Early this year when I was doing a pilot project in a Detroit auto assembly plant, during a lunch break a line worker in his early 30’s abruptly said to me: “Since you are on this side of pond, you can now tell us do you like communist and are you here to flee the communists.” I was first stunned and then got interested and asked him if he had been to China and whether he really knew how it was like in today’s China. He honestly admitted that he had no clue except the Tiananmen Massacre and China is producing massive cheap goods using prison labors and by manipulating its money value. “That’s all what they say on TV!” he added.

My point here is not to defend or review what happened in Beijing 16 years ago –that was a nightmare by all means, but that unfortunately the mainstream western medias have been doing very poorly in winning the minds and hearts of the average Chinese people because of their biased reporting, selfish interests, lack of understanding of the average Chinese’s sentiment, and their often time unhelpful approaches towards the issues. News reports on China by many western medias a lot of time tend to either entertain their own domestic audiences or are politically or ideologically motivated, and all these are not helping to build a better world.