"The masses shook off their good-naturedness only a good while later, when they were convinced that the ruling classes wanted to drag everything back and appropriate to themselves a revolution not achieved by them, just as they had always appropriated the good things of life not produced by themselves."
http://marxists.org/archive...

The class reckoning vengeance of the Chinese working class against the Stalinist bureaucracy and Chinese capitalist class will be devastating. Devastating for the Chinese bourgeoisie that is!

No wonder they do not want the Chinese workers and students to commemorate the 25th anniversary! So these soldiers were former peasants or farmers rural based and perhaps this was their first, hostile, significant, interaction with a movement of the working class to protect Deng's Stalinist regime.

What the working class didn't have was an experienced Trotskyist leadership schooled in the decades long fight against the Maoist-Stalinist bureaucracy to organise the action accordingly. This was the case in the February Revolution 1917 but as Trotsky explained this did not mean at all that this movement heading towards revolution was "spontaneously"; the workers were led in the streets, factories and barracks by "worker-Bolsheviks" reflecting the highly significant role of the subjective factor: the revolutionary party and it's, or, Lenin's, uncompromising fight against opportunism: the petty-bourgeois Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties.

"Decades of domination by Stalinism and the active suppression of genuine Marxism in China meant there was no revolutionary socialist, that is, Trotskyist, tendency in the working class. No organisation within the country could spontaneously advance the program that was implicit in the actions and sentiments of the Chinese working class—a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist regime and introduce major reforms into the economy for the benefit of the working class.

Posed before the working class was the necessity to take political power through the establishment of a workers’ government and to extend its authority and influence throughout the country. A statement issued by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, on June 8 elaborated this perspective:

“The Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy has already proceeded far down the road of capitalist restoration and therefore the political revolution in China today will have major social implications, first and foremost the necessity for the working class and its revolutionary party is to expropriate the class of capitalists sponsored by the bureaucracy, together with the foreign multinationals...

“What remains of China’s planned economy must be reorganised from top to bottom... Production must be placed under the control of factory committees, freely elected by the workers, and the quality and pricing of commodities should be put in the hands of a democratically organised consumers’ cooperative.

“Such a political revolution...would create the greatest shock waves of social revolution throughout Asia and internationally. Breaking the Stalinist straight-jacket of ‘socialism in one country’ and linking up its forces to those of the workers of Asia and internationally in the common struggle to put an end to imperialism, the Chinese workers would create the real foundations for developing socialism in China as part of the development of world socialism.”"

I wonder what percentage of the Chinese working class is aware of how the Tienanmen movement developed, how it failed, and how to sustain another mass protest movement.

"Contrary to Beijing’s claim that the mass protests were a “counter-revolutionary rebellion”, the broad-based movement was driven by deep opposition to rapidly increasing social inequality and bureaucratic profiteering created by the CCP’s embrace of the capitalist market in 1978."

And also by vigorous support (materially and politically) by Western (read American), so called, NGO's..I do not defend the Revisionism and capitalist degeneracy of the PRC, but deep American support for, and steering of, this uprising is an historical reality. The Uprising, had it been allowed to progress, almost certainly would have resulted in a mirror image catastrophe of what happened in the Soviet union - near complete NATO/IMF takeover of the interior of Asia..As is PLAINLY obvious from recent events, this is still the aggressive objective of the Finance empire

Agree. It's interesting to see how the liberal media and WSW share belief in the Tien An Men "massacre," when according to other sources it didn't happen at all. Both join in demonizing the CCP - the former as an enemy of the "free market" and the latter as "Stalinist." But one thing is sure: that as you point out, the usual suspects were at work backing the protestors, just as they were in Kiev recently. And they would love another crack at China.

This is rather puzzling, given what has come to light in the past 25 years. Here are some fascinating articles from the archives explaining why the CCP refuses to recognize the "Tiananmen massacre", and what actually happened there.

The Columbia Journalism Review critiques coverage of Tiananmen:http://www.cjr.org/behind_t...

Britain's Daily Telegraph:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

US State Department's cables at the time:
http://www.alternativeinsig...

And the most comprehensive source:
http://www.bearcanada.com/c...

An alternative history of the Tiananmen square event:
http://www.globalresearch.c...

I have not yet read all of this long article but it is an awesome revelation even for those of us who live or have lived in China. Thank you.