Happy Tiananmen Square Massacre Day: everybody remembers except the Chinese

[Barrister]

Why?  Democracy seems to have worked wonders in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Bit of a scale difference there, dontchathink?  Plus a truly democratic China would have to reconcile somehow with independence movements in Tibet and East Turkestan.  Even in the best scenario it would be problematic.

Over 20 million people on Taiwan.  Independence movements in China's west would be an issue, but nothing that would prove fatal to the country's development as far as I can see.

[Josquius]

Scale is an issue.
Plus Taiwan and South Korea (Korea is better. Hong Kong has never really been much of a democracy but has always been rather free) went from being capitalist dictatorships to capitalist democracies.
Here we would be talking about a double change of dictatorship to democracy and communist-socialist to capitalist.
It would be happening at the same time the world's attention is more solidly focussed on the collapse of the Soviet block too. So.....yeah....

[Valmy]

Here we would be talking about a double change of dictatorship to democracy and communist-socialist to capitalist.

LOL?  China is presently a Socialist state?

[Josquius]

Here we would be talking about a double change of dictatorship to democracy and communist-socialist to capitalist.

LOL?  China is presently a Socialist state?

Huh? No.
They changed that. But they kept the dictatorship.

[DGuller]

Why?  Democracy seems to have worked wonders in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Problem is that a lot of Asian tigers weren't that democratic when they did their tigering.  Democracy came after.

[Viking]

Fascinating story Viking... pretty intense.

The thing that left the strongest impression wasn't actually the massacre itself. We didn't know what happened and we only heard rumors. We only learned the scale after we left the country. The truly strong impression I got was the empty country. Such a crowded country was suddenly empty.

[Jacob]

Fascinating story Viking... pretty intense.

The thing that left the strongest impression wasn't actually the massacre itself. We didn't know what happened and we only heard rumors. We only learned the scale after we left the country. The truly strong impression I got was the empty country. Such a crowded country was suddenly empty.

Yeah, I can imagine.

I've chatted with my in-laws about the aftermath where she was - far away. But her parents brought home a video, passed from friend to friend, that they watched. I don't recall whether she saw it or not, but her parents were very grim afterwards and made her swear not to talk about it to anyone.

Pretty much everyone knew. And everyone knows.

[Sheilbh]

The White House statement on this was pretty striking. Is it unprecedented or routine?