Your are poorly mistaken. There are plenty of gorey pictures and videos of lots of dead and dying protesters in Tiennemen Square from that day. Thousands were killed according to many witnesses.

[+] Addfwyn@lemmy.ml -7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Out of curiosity, are you referring to that black and white photo of the "bodies" that gets passed around a lot? The one that is actually just a bunch of bicycles?

If you need an eyewitness account from a non-Chinese source, by all means: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html Some beatings, which obviously criticism could be levied at, by otherwise unarmed riot police, but not much more than that.

[–] electrorocket@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've seen more photos somewhere, but #12 shows a students brains and a Chinese army helmet. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/g36621881/tiananmen-square-massacre-photos/

[–] Addfwyn@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

There definitely was violence on both sides, even the official counts put the casulties around 200 last I checked. Which were sadly probably preventable had the PLA been equipped with nonlethal control measures rather than...nothing.

I do credit your link as it surprisingly shows the violence both ways, a lot of modern sources like to paint it as being very one-sided. One thing I did notice even in the Esquire article you linked, they explicitly never mention Tiananmen in any of the pictures showing violence. Because, like in the account I linked, there was no violence in Tiananmen Square. Now if you said "Hey, there were outbreaks of violence around Beijing on June 4th" yes, that would be true. Even the CPC official accounts don't deny that.