In his Oct. 23 article, "Remember the China lesson," Brahma Chellaney mentions four times the alleged Tiananmen Square "massacre" of June 1989. But there is now a wealth of eyewitness material -- much of it cited in my July 21 article, "Birth of a massacre myth" -- proving that there was no massacre, killings or even fighting in Tiananmen Square.
What happened was that when angry Beijing citizens moved against soldiers sent in, initially unarmed, to remove students who had been allowed to occupy the square for weeks, many citizens, students and soldiers were killed in fighting in the streets leading to the square. But that was a riot, not a massacre. The belief that there was a massacre in the square with hundreds, even thousands, killed owes much to U.S./British "black information" agencies.
Chellaney also makes much of anti-Han Chinese unrest and fighting in Tibet, without mentioning that the original catalyst for the unrest was the 1959 New Delhi-CIA attempt to create an anti-China uprising there and that, as the Los Angeles Times extensively reported at the time, the trouble in Lhasa earlier this year was directed at the disliked Hui (Muslim) Chinese community -- not at Han Chinese.
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