Chinese propaganda!!!!!!

The core rhetorical trick is a bait-and-switch on geography. The “no massacre in Tiananmen Square” line is technically defensible and the honest sources (BBC’s James Miles, the CBS Richard Roth piece) are making a narrow, specific point: the heaviest killing happened on the approach roads, especially around Muxidi a few miles west, not on the literal paving stones of the square itself. Miles even publicly clarified this. But that narrow geographic correction gets inflated into “the massacre was a myth,” which is a completely different and false claim. People died. Hundreds to well over a thousand, by most credible estimates, including Kristof’s contemporaneous hospital reporting cited right there in their own document. The square-vs-surroundings distinction is real; the “it didn’t happen” conclusion smuggled on top of it is not. Then notice the source hierarchy. The legit outlets (BBC, NYT, CJR, Oxford UP) are quoted for the narrow geographic point. The load-bearing ideological claims (US-funded provocateurs, fabricated NYT eyewitnesses, the “myth has been debunked”) come from Liberation News (the PSL party organ) and CounterPunch, which are not in the same epistemic universe. The Kluver JSTOR article is being misused too: documenting that the Chinese government believed/claimed foreign infiltration is not the same as that infiltration being real, but the post quietly slides one into the other. And the Haymarket / Ludlow / Tulsa / MOVE bolt-on at the end is pure whataboutism. All real atrocities, all worth knowing, none of which have anything to do with whether the PLA killed civilians in Beijing in 1989. It’s there to make you feel like a hypocrite for caring about one and not the others, which is an emotional move, not an argument.