Tiananmen's motivations in the Protesters' Words

Someone claimed that "Tiananmen was fundamentally about corruption, not democracy" and that it is "the western narrative" that it was about democracy.

I guess the Goddess of Democracy that the protesters built in Tiananmen was really a Goddess of Non-Corruption.

I suppose the protesters, Chinese observers and even Zhao Ziyang had their minds colonised by the West, since they didn't cite corruption as the major reason for their protests.

But given that this person also claimed that the Hong Kong protests are really about property prices (despite the protesters clearly articulating their grievances) that is no surprise.

From the bastion of the Western narrative that is the South China Morning Post:

Voices from Tiananmen

"“Everybody was seeking new ideas, new knowledge,” he said, 25 years later on the phone from Austin, Texas. “It was exciting to learn and discuss how life was changing for the better.”...

Like most students, Zhou was told to watch the television series “River Elegy” produced in 1988 that encapsulated the debate at the time. Broadcast by China Central Television, the programme argued that Chinese culture was backward and oppressive, and that it needed to learn from the West to achieve modernisation. “It might have been the most important television programme that has ever been made,” said Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and politics at the University of Oxford. “Very few television series have sparked a political movement. These people were really serious about ‘saving’ China.”...

The economic reforms had started to touch the foundations of Communist Party rule, said veteran journalist and Party historian Yang Jisheng. “After the Cultural Revolution, liberal thought began to sprout,” he said. “Liberalism was an attack on one-party rule - it was the wish for democracy, the wish for rule of law, the wish for respect for the constitution.”...

He soon wrote one himself, comparing China’s constitution with the American Declaration of Independence.

The students “were expressing their desire for advancing reforms," Hu's successor Zhao Ziyang wrote in his memoirs. "Hu had always been a proponent of reform.”...

Zhou, like many others, gave his first speech on the square. “As we marched to the square, we would try to rally support by yelling slogans like ‘We want freedom of the press!’,” recalled Zhou. “But then someone said you must yell ‘Fight corruption!’ to get better resonance with the crowd and so we did. It worked.”

The students drafted a petition to the government. Among their seven demands were the abolition of censorship...

Independent student unions started to spring up on university campuses. Feng Congde, one of the seven students who set up the first such group at Peking University, said their demands did not challenge the Communist Party’s rule. "At that moment, we only called for freedom of association and freedom of speech within university campuses"...

“The students chanted pro-democracy slogans over the heads of soldiers and police at government leaders as they entered the hall”...

“The current movement is no longer simply a student movement, it has become a democratic movement,” Wang Zhixin, a student at the University of Political Science and Law, told him...

Art students had rolled the Goddess of Democracy, a replica of New York’s Statue of Liberty about 10 metres tall, onto the square"


Oddly, if Tiananmen was really about corruption, why did the CCP crack down? The CCP claims corruption is a bad thing after all and works to stop it.