The CCP will go down as one of the, if no the most, murderous and villainous organizations to ever achieve legitimacy and limiting its influence should be of top concern to all nations and peoples of the world.

Nonsense. The students (who had enjoyed front page support in the People’s Daily throughout their demonstrations for restoring their scholarships and providing post-graduation jobs) left Tiananmen Square peacefully and were gone by 7:10 am.

Taiwanese entertainer Hou Dejian summarized his experience, ”Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others claimed that two thousand died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I don’t know where those people died. I myself was in the Square until six-thirty in the morning.” Future Nobelist Liu Xiaobo, subsequently praised for urging students to withdraw peacefully, remained to the end and said he saw nobody harmed.

The riot in Chang’An Avenue was a sinister affair: professional thugs led by an MI6 operative who was spirited out of China and later convicted of murder by a London court.

The Beijing Municipal Government published a full report a few weeks later. On July 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing[1] delivered the results of the official enquiry: ”More than 7,000 were wounded or injured and two hundred forty-one killed, including thirty-six students, ten soldiers and thirteen People’s Armed Police during a riot in Chang’An Road.”

The Tiananmen incident ranks among the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Long after the massacre story was debunked it was being used as a pretext for new sanctions and embargoes on China and blackening its name.

Some reporters had second thoughts, “I believe we tried to put a ‘made in the USA’ democracy stamp on it,” said Jackie Judd[2] of ABC. Photographer Jeff Widener[3] said he took the Tank Man photograph on July 5, more than a day after the students had left the Square, though AP still distributes the image as if it were from July 4. Widener’s photo shows a man stopping four tanks but Stuart Franklin’s wide angle photograph, taken a few seconds earlier, shows that the tanks are leaving the Square heading east, out of the city.

Another propaganda scam, in other words.

[1] Beijing turmoil – More than meets the eye. Che Muqi. Foreign language press, Beijing 1990, ISBN 0-8351-2459-2; 7-119-01305-X
[2] Coverage of the Crisis
TURMOIL T TI N NMEN
STUDY OF U.S. PRESS COVER GE OF THE BEIJING SPRING OF 1989.
[3] Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen, NYT