In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.
He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.
In response, Meta restricted access to his account.
Given the reports from Western journalists, this is closest to the truth (though we don’t know if there was an actual threat or if the gunshots around the area were enough threat on its own). China basically treats 6/4 like the Israeli hospital bombing “it wasn’t us, but if it was then we didn’t actually cause it, and if we did then people didn’t actually die, and if people died it was only a few people.”
This is, of course, in the context of growing corruption in government and increasing influence of American intelligence in the Chinese mainland. We know that some of the pro-democracy activists were funded and supported by American interests and that, at least according to American propaganda, that American psyops divisions were operating in China to orchestrate and escalate the event. 6/4 is a failed coup. American interests wanted to see further Chinese liberalization and tried to apply the same playbook that they had applied before in South America and the Middle East (and later in Ukraine, Pakistan) to China.
Further economic liberalization was not in the best interests of the people. While Deng’s economic reforms had helped to grow China’s economy in the globalizing economy at the end of the Cold War, it also created a new bourgeois and petite-bourgeois class that China is still grappling with today.
