General Discussion

I saw a lot of pro Chinese comments on YouTube regarding this video. I was living in Japan at the time and met some Chinese and a British reporter who was there during the occupation and subsequent clearing of the square. A lot of reports in the US at the time (and now) claimed there was a massacre of students in the square. That is not true. The violence occurred, as this commentator descries, on the periphery of the city where citizens (workers) had set up roadblocks to keep the army from entering the city and attacking the students. Hundreds of workers were killed to make way for the army to approach the square. Meanwhile, student leaders, realizing that the army was about to attack, negotiated a peaceful exit by the students in the square. It was not a student massacre in Tiananmen Square. It was a massacre of workers tying to block the army from entering the city to clear the students. I also question the premise that the protest was primarily against corruption and inflation. While those may have been factors in the case of the workers, it was clearly a pro-democracy movement on the part of the student occupying the square.