Video shows Gen Xu Qinxian explaining why he refused to deploy troops to crush 1989 student-led demonstrations
Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.
General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.
The six-hour video recording of Gen Xu’s court martial hearing the next year sheds light on the rare act of defiance. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history”.
Mods, mods, this russian propaganda article by the "guard"ian (sounds kinda tankie) is saying that only hundreds of people died “around” tiananmenn square. Everyone who isn’t just a bot on lemmy knows that thousands died in the square and were ground-up by tanks and washed down the drain.
This article is typical tankie triad genocide denial.
The sad thing is 98% of liberals who see this will ignore that part, brush it off if you bring it up, dismiss you as a tankie and come away from this just more convinced with one more piece of evidence in their mind that it was a violent massacre of thousands of peaceful people by an evil, violent regime so terrible one of its own military officers defied it. They’ll file it mentally right next to tank man as evidence that the Chinese were so brutal and ruthless their own troops hesitated or refused to obey their commands and were surely secretly murdered afterwards.