According to my aunt, whose parents fled the Cultural Revolution when she was a teenager:

It’s like if Chinese people kept trying to give you shit about the Kent State massacre and not Vietnam itself.

From my conversations with mainland Chinese, they often tout the line that the US was somehow involved, so it was partly an excusable defense of the homeland against dangerously co-opted students. That said, most acknowledge that it was pretty bad. But these are also well-educated Chinese working abroad, so I assume the majority of Chinese don’t know much.

One story I heard retold by an English teacher working in Nanjing that I used to know was about the experience of one of the people involved in the protests…or at least they were an academic in Beijing at the time of the massacre. They were really depressed 20 years later and felt that nobody around them, particularly their students, knew anything.

The people I have spoken to in China understand something happened, and most of them know that it was the suppression of a student protest movement. From there the knowledge diverges as to what kind of protest movement and how violent was the suppression and whether it was justified. My family will kind of halfheartedly repeat some version of the party line but acknowledge it was a fucked up situation, and they also understand that the censorship surrounding it is awkward and unnecessary.

Generally the Chinese I have spoken to are mostly aware of and opposed to the CCP’s censorship, but they also don’t really like to talk about it for obvious reasons.

Edit: Sorry for the wall of text. I typed too quickly and didn’t even realize how long this is…

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I wasn’t born at the time so I have no first-hand account of the events. My parents heard about it briefly mentioned on the news and they also heard about it from relatives. The only thing they learn of was that there was a demonstration, then the news stopped talking about it. My parents and grand parents are pro- Communist Party, they didn’t really care about the protests being suppressed, they wanted stability more. But remember, China has a culture of what westerners refer to as “Social Harmony”, and don’t like to “causs troubles”. In 1912, when people were uprising against the Qing Monarchy, most parents would not have wanted their children being revolutionaries either. Same thing when Communists and Nationalists were fighting a civil war. The youth always want change, but no parent would ever want their child getting involved in stuff. They don’t want to lose their childen. This is the same sentiment regarding Tiananmen. Change is risky, causes too much instability. China not being united is what allows foreigners to invade China. (Eg: Eight Nations Alliance invading China, Concessions in China (Chinese land that was occupied by foreign countries), Japanese invasions of China during the midst of Communist-Nationalist Civil war, etc.) Even though the students in Tiananmen called for reforms, not revolution, the Communist leaders feared riots or a violent uprising, so they decided to violently suppress it before it “got out of hand”. Most people in China are probably just glad that it ended without fracturing China, they didn’t care which side won, as long as the country is still stable.

I learned about the events in Tiananmen when I was around high school age, many years after immigrating to the US. I left China when I was in 2nd grade, so it’s not surprising I didn’t know about it, I mean most kids thag age don’t get taught history. My older brother who learned about it on the internet first told me about it. At first, I just thought: meh, another one of the government’s conflict with the people But that wasn’t the important thing. What was odd to me was that they censored it in China. I mean, in my public school in the US, I was learning about slavery, how George Washington was a slave owner, most founders owned enslaved people. Natives were forcibly removed from their hones and put in so-called “reservations”. And learning about the fact that even after the US Civil War, there’s still racism against black people. I mean, the US had so much atrocities that I learned in a US public school. And I started learning that stuff around like 3-5th grade. Yet, my older brother who was like 7th grade in China didn’t know about the Tiananmen stuff. So that was really odd to me. It was odd that the US was so open to teaching atrocities, but China didn’t want to.

Then, I learn about how they put a firewall around the entirety of China’s network. Now the government started to look very shady to me. I mean, at this point, I’m still very Patriotic for China. But I’m also starting to wonder: hmm, wtf is going on in the government?

Then one day my mother told me about how she has to take a risk to conceive me during the One Child Policy. She was supposed to be sterilized after my older brother was born, but she bribed a government official to fake the certificate of being sterilized. Then also bribe them again to hide that she was pregnant with her second child (the second child being me, obviously). So she went to a nearby city to be less likely to be found by her village elders. So then I was born in the city hospital. Now that I’m already born, they can’t kill me anymore since somehow forcing a woman to abort her child was okay, but they didn’t want to go as far was actually killing someone who was already born.

But my mom had to be sterilized. My parents had to pay a fine. Something like tens of thousands of Yuan(¥)/Renminbi. It took years to pay off. (And if you don’t pay it off, they don’t give you your documents, birth certificates, ID, etc. Basically becoming a legally non-existant person, despite actually existing). So that’s my personal grudge against the CCP, I mean who wouldn’t hate an organization that essentially tried to kill you? Idk why my parents still support the CCP to this day. Everytime they spew Pro-CCP propaganda, I’d just say: “So you support the One Child Policy? Should I not have been born?” That usually shuts then up.

I personally view what happened in Tianamen as a tragedy. I mean, they weren’t even threatening to revolt, just wanted to talk some sense into the CCP leaders and start some reforms. The government didn’t need to use tanks to suppress it. Such unnecessary violence.

Authoritarianism and the One Child Policy are both reasons why I oppose the Communist Party of China, although the One Child Policy is much more personal to me. They have since changed it to Two Child Policy, but still wtf is this shit. It’s equivalent to US red states forcing women to give birth. Two sides of the same coin, both are governments dictating the lives of others.

I’m currently a US Citizen, I’m probably not going to visit China any time soon. (Not only because of China, but visiting China can also cause the US government putting you on a list of suspected CCP spies, and I don’t want that to happen.) And right now idc what happens in China, it aint my country anymore.

(Although if China and the US is at war, that’d be terrifying. That shit would cause another Internment camps, this time for people with Chinese Ancestry. Being a US Citizen with Chinese Ancestry is as being stuck in the turbulent oceans between 2 unsafe shores. No safe harbor for people like me. I have to deal with China labling me a traitor, and also the US suspecting CCP spies. What a shitty situation that’d be.)

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