That Said Tiananmen 89

That said, I would also caution that I am not so sure if you can be 100% firm in interpreting
Chai Ling’s words as necessarily a call to a riot, though, on the other hand, I’m reading the
English and while I do know some Mandarin, it’s not complete enough to read all the
characters (and made even harder by the fact these are “traditional” [“complex”] characters,
not the simplified characters I’m more familiar with), so perhaps there are nuances I am
missing due to translation, but it doesn’t seem to me like she is saying to go riot
or create blood, i.e. to kill others, more as to be willing to have, and perhaps entice, the
government spill their own blood and that it’d be great if the whole street were filled up
with their blood. In other words, they were posturing themselves as a sort of martyrs for
what was to be protested.
(E.g. it says “To push the government into extreme and use butcher knife to against its
citizens.” - but this isn’t saying they would use butcher knife against the Government’s
citizens, but that they wanted to ‘push’, by unspecified means, the Government to use such
knife. In other words, they wanted the Government to show itself for what it was really made
of, to see how barbarous it really is or isn’t compared to what they believed about it.)
That said, I do think the CIA angle is important, and the fact that Chinese gov’t was mulling
Western democracy and it looks like then why that didn’t go through was the West
essentially blew it. In other words, they were willing to consider the idea, but it would have
to be on their terms, with their agency respected, and no, Mr. USA decided “NO! You have
to do it on UNCLE SAM’s terms!” and of course, they decided “fuck that, you don’t get to
boss us around. We are real humans with real agency.”. I.e. the US was both exerting its
colonial savior mentality and being politically irresponsible in handling this. And yet another
regime change op that fits in 100% perfectly with the long-standing foreign policy history of
the US ever since the 19th century and the specific use of the CIA in this capacity with its
employment in that scheme ever since its inception - think about the 1953 Iranian coup
(now officially admitted by the CIA), etc.
(And if there is ever to be Western democracy or indeed any kind of democracy in China

since we should not restrict the idea so tightly, it really does need to be on the people’s
terms and ideally in an orderly fashion because a catastrophic, revolutionary collapse of the
existing CCP government would be a both humanitarian and international economic
disaster on a scale that I don’t think many at all who “hawk” China can/do understand. A
stable CCP government, for whatever warts it can/can’t be legitimately accused of having,
is still bettre than a catastrophic, Libya, Venezuela, etc.-style collapse of a country of 1.4
billion people that has made so much progress. Change must be with an eye toward
maintaining stability and onward progress as best as possible and any westerners who want
to advocate for it NEED to make it very, very explicit that they acknowledge this reality
which imo is THE #1 beef I have the Western attitude to China. I do not want to see China
fail. I don’t think the CCP is above and immune to all criticism, but I also know that
you have to not only acknowledge by take into account and even value and seek to preserve,
the genuine, good that they have done for the Chinese people.)
And another thing to point out. And that’s that there really is an undercurrent of yet more
very arrogant, patronizing colonial mentality in the form of that basically painting the
Chinese as wailingly oppressed people who all are just deep-down crying out so loud for a
Western democracy and when they object or question the western support for TianAnMen
that that means they have been brainwashed by the CCP: yet as you can see here, the
concern is quite clearly that they want law to be upheld, or at least feel it should be. And
yet, there are many Americans who react to what they feel as “excessive” protest
with exactly the same sentiment, e.g. Ferguson. And I’m not, by making that comparison,
stating any opinion whether that law-crossing protest is/isn’t “right”, I am saying that in fact
if you use this standard against the Chinese then you also have to use it against the
Americans as well. So are Americans “brainwashed”? Moreover, thinking that they cannot
actually, gasp, be similar, seems very much to me, in my mind, to constitute a form of
Othering. Whether you agree or disagree with either the Chinese or American attitudes or
both, that’s not the point: the point is both are more alike and more human than you wan to
admit. The point is to underscore unity, the unity of humankind, and to detest Othering.
Regardless of the truth of TianAnMen or similar incidents and other controversies

surrounding CCP (e.g. Tibet, Xinjiang, FaLun Gong, etc.) I have to say I grievously detest the
prevailing American/Western attitude toward China. Toward not even trying
to understand things. The smugness, the superiority. The arrogance and conceit and more
importantly just how freakishly well it fits into the big-picture history of colonization and,
yet, it (at least, the western “education machine”) has dragged many, many people who
might otherwise proclaim opposition to other manifestations of colonialism e.g. the need
for the US to grapple more with its history of slavery, into actually just marching to the drum
when it comes to this.
(Even more still, any attempt to criticize the CCP must be done with a very careful eye
toward the culture, and understanding the cultural roots of the practice as opposed to
thinking it just an “aberration” of “tyrants”, and thus at the very least, the fact that you can’t
be so assuming of the Chinese people in the way you are.)
Can you say “brainwashing”? Oh wait, sorry. We call it “SOCIALIZATION”, and it’s been
an explicit goal of US educational policy.
No, sir.
Purposefully trying to control what people think so that it all falls in line to make them neat
little SheeP (SP: SOCIETY PERSON) is brainwashing. Yes, maybe China does it too. But so
does the US. Neither can righteously criticize the other or, if they do, then they both have to
deal with it.

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That said, I would also caution that I am not so sure if you can be 100% firm in interpreting

(And if there is ever to be Western democracy or indeed any kind of democracy in China

Regardless of the truth of TianAnMen or similar incidents and other controversies

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