Name: How Satellites Reveal China's Taiwan Invasion Plans
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:37:43.000Z
Duration: 38 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In early January of 2025, a satellite captured a curious image of something happening in the

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Chinese megacity of Guangzhou near the country's southern coast. A dry dock in the city was busy constructing this strange-looking ship, something that a handful of foreign intelligence analysts at the time suggested could be a Chinese landing vessel. And then only a couple of months later, in March of 2025, the completed vessel and two other similar-looking ships were spotted by satellites again, this time off of China's far southern coastline practicing a series of interesting maneuvers. This time, the satellite captured the three barges connecting together to form a huge causeway from the rearmost barge, and then through the front barge directly towards a beach, with accompanying Chinese civilian cargo ships and ferries practicing right alongside them.

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And then, only a few weeks later after that, a series of photos taken by the Chinese themselves of the exercises began spreading around on the internet, showing the three barges from the perspective of being down on the ground on the beach itself, showing the long causeway from the rear barge connecting all the way to the front barge with an offloading ramp extending directly onto the beach, interestingly just wide enough to accommodate the offloading of a heavy main battle tank. It didn't take very long for many analysts to begin recognizing that these new barges could be a part of China's ever-evolving strategy to launch an all-out invasion of Taiwan at some point in the future. The island that the government of China regards as a rogue, renegade province that China's leader, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly promised would be brought under

Chinese Communist Party rule some way or another, either through diplomacy or through force.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles that has been standing in the way of an all-out Chinese invasion of Taiwan for decades has been the fact that Taiwan is an island, and in order to get their army over to that island, China will need to transport their soldiers, vehicles, and equipment over the sea in a titanic amphibious invasion like a modern 21st century version of the D-Day invasion of Normandy during World War II. And China is aware that any amphibious invasion of an enemy consists of two different steps. The first step is rather straightforward, and consists of actually assaulting the beach, storming and overcoming local enemy positions, and establishing a localized beachhead. The second step is more complicated, and is likely what these new barges are designed to help out with. After the initial beachhead is established, the invading force has to make the beachhead sustainable in order to actually hold onto it, and to expand their control even deeper into the enemy's territory. The beachhead has to be logistically supplied with adequate amounts of reinforcements, ammunition, fuel, food, medical supplies, and other materials to make sure that they don't just run out of supplies surrounded by hostile territory and implode in on themselves. So in order to make a beachhead sustainable, the invading force usually has to take over a nearby port that's ideally closely located to the initial beachhead. Through which they can then begin bringing in all of their necessary supplies and reinforcements for the troops to hold the beachhead, and then expand beyond it. But in most cases, securing a nearby enemy harbor to the beachhead that's still perfectly intact is no easy feat. During the Allied amphibious invasion of Normandy during

World War II, the Allies' solution to this problem were the now famous Mulberry Harbors, which have no doubt been studied extensively by Chinese military planners for a possible Taiwan amphibious invasion today. Rather than spending huge amounts of time and resources trying to capture well-defended enemy-occupied ports, that would probably be sabotaged and damaged anyway, and take even more time to repair and bring back online, the Allies' solution was to simply bring their own temporary portable harbors to the coast of Normandy instead. Merely hours after the Allies had established their beachheads in Normandy after the initial D-Day amphibious assaults, the many sections of the Mulberry Harbors were towed from England across the Channel and put into position in two different beachhead locations, Mulberry A and Mulberry B.

The Mulberry Harbors basically consisted of a series of floating breakwaters, pontoons, piers, and floating roadways that the Allies were then able to stitch together and use to rapidly offload reinforcements and supplies through onto the beachheads, which enabled them to become sustainable and to be able to expand deeper into the interior without the need to spend crucial time and effort capturing any of the sabotaged German-occupied ports in northern France instead. Nonetheless, even during this operation, Mulberry Harbor A was destroyed by a violent storm just a few days after it had been established, limiting the Allies to the use of only Mulberry

Harbor B for the next several months. Now, for China's modern considerations for a 21st century amphibious invasion of Taiwan, there are many geographic facts about this part of the world that will make it even harder to pull off than the Allied invasion of Normandy was.

The distance that the Chinese invasion fleet will have to travel across the Taiwan Strait will be roughly similar to the distance that the Allied invasion fleet had to travel across the English Channel. And just like the Allies experienced in Normandy in 1944, the Chinese can also expect that Taiwan's defenders today would likely sabotage their own ports rather than risk them falling into Chinese hands intact. Which means that the

Chinese will have to bring their own ports with them in order to sustain their initial beachheads.

However, a significant amount of the Taiwanese coast is ringed by extensive coral reefs that in some locations can stretch for hundreds of meters off the beaches, severely complicating the ability for an invasion force to bring their own Mulberry Harbor style portable ports to bear.

Moreover, the island of Taiwan just also has very few suitable beaches that a traditional amphibious invasion force can choose from to attack with any good odds of success.

The island only has a total of 14 so-called red beaches dotted around the island where conditions are considered optimal for an amphibious assault. Where the coral reefs extending from the shoreline are either small or non-existent, where the terrain is relatively flat and easier to assault than the rugged towering cliffs that are seen across most of the island's east coast, and where the beaches themselves are also located nearby to strategically crucial targets for the Chinese to capture. Such as Taiwan's capital and the largest city in the north, Taipei, and Taiwan's principal and largest maritime port down in the south, Kaohsiung.

However, the vulnerability of all 14 of these red beaches are very well understood by Taiwan, and so they're consequently the most heavily fortified and well-defended beaches on the entire island, making any traditional amphibious assault on them a difficult task.

All of these problems though can potentially be solved by China's new invasion barges that have been spreading around the internet these past few months, which western intelligence sources have nicknamed the Shui Kao class of vessels, literally Mandarin Chinese for water bridge.

When hypothetically approaching the Taiwanese coast, these Shui Kao barges, which will probably always operate in pairs of three, will carefully position themselves one after the other in a row. With the smaller barge of the trio in the front, the medium-sized barge in the center, and the largest sized barge back in the rear. Each of the barges carries a set of super heavy retractable legs with them on board. When the barges are still in transport, these legs will be retracted and stowed above the ship. But once they're in position near the beachhead, the legs will be lowered to pin them down to the seabed beneath them, and to lift their hulls out of the water, giving them increased stability in the choppy coastal waters almost like miniature offshore oil platforms. Each of the barges also has a tower in their front and a long bridge stored on their decks while in transport. Once the legs have stabilized the barges in place, the towers at the front will telescope out their bridges to create a giant portable causeway extending out from the rear barge to the center barge to the front barge to the shore, extending out nearly 825 meters from the rear barge. It's also been suggested by several other analysts that these heavy-duty bridges will be capable of supporting and fitting heavy vehicles such as armored personnel carriers and even main battle tanks. Together, the Shui Kao barges effectively function as both a movable port and a movable bridge at the same time.

Working in unison with Chinese civilian roll-on roll-off or row-row ferries commandeered for military service, the People's Liberation Army can then rapidly dock these row-row ferries carrying vehicles with the larger rear barge and disgorge their heavy vehicles and equipment into it. They can then rapidly storm ahead across the causeway and directly onto the beachhead.

Two analysts affiliated with the China Maritime Studies Institute, J. Michael Damm and Thomas

Shugart, argued in a paper they wrote in March 2025 about these Shui Kao barges that they would likely be capable of offloading onto the beach an entire heavy combined arms battalion, including roughly 150 vehicles in only about 40 to 60 minutes after they had extended their causeway.

Over the course of a full day, they could theoretically unload several hundred armored vehicles, all brought to them by any number of China's dozens of civilian row-row ferries commandeered for military service, which have all been intentionally designed for dual-use purposes with the capability to handle unloading and offloading heavy-duty military vehicles like tanks.

With their long length far out from the beach, the row-row ferries will be able to safely offload all of their vehicles onto the rear Shui Kao barge without any fear of them running aground in the shallower waters closer to the beach. With their very shallow draft and distance out from the shoreline, the Shui Kao barges also appear to be designed to overcome Taiwan's coastal coral reefs that ring most of the island, opening up more potential beaches beyond the 14 well-known and well-defended red beaches that the Chinese invasion force could potentially assault.

Going even further, the Shui Kao barges could also theoretically extend their causeway to connect directly to one of Taiwan's coastal highways, disgorging their vehicles directly to the island's highway system and ignoring the beaches altogether. This is potentially the biggest threat that the new Shui Kao barges pose to Taiwan's defense. They've been estimated by some analysts to potentially expand the number of beaches that the PLA could land at on Taiwan by around 40, on top of the original 14 red beaches, greatly expanding the number of potential beaches that the Taiwanese will now have to consider preparing for their defense and risking them spreading out their limited resources too thin and leaving behind weaker vulnerable defenses at some beaches that the PLA could find and exploit during an invasion scenario. The PLA would likely only utilize the

Shui Kao barges after their navy and air force had already achieved maritime and aerial supremacy and after the initial beachheads on the shore have already been established by the first wave of D-Day style amphibious assaults, granting the PLA the ability to then rapidly offload their heavy equipment and supplies onto the island to press on the assault deeper into the island's interior. If the Shui Kao barges arrive too early without PLA maritime or aerial supremacy established first, they'll just be sitting ducks while trying to offload their equipment and will be easy targets to defending missiles, drones, and artillery. Moreover, the satellite images that have captured the Shui Kao barges practicing have so far only shown them operating within calm waters, which might mean that they could struggle in rougher weather conditions that commonly happen within the Taiwan Strait, just like what the Mulberry harbors experienced during the Normandy landings when one of them was destroyed by inclement weather within only a matter of days.

A second set of Shui Kao barges have already been observed by satellites to be under construction in the same Guangzhou shipyard in China right now, and if China ends up building enough of them, it's conceivable that they could help China overcome one of their greatest challenges of all when it comes to an invasion of Taiwan, seizing control of the island before anyone from the outside world can intervene against them and stop them, like the United States, Japan, and Australia. If the initial PLA amphibious assaults are successful at establishing their beachheads on Taiwan like the Normandy landings were, and then if the Chinese can bring in their Shui Kao barges and their commandeered civilian Roro ferries, within hours of that happening like the allies were able to do with their Mulberry harbors and Normandy, Thomas Shugart wrote in his paper that I mentioned earlier that it would be conceivable that the PLA could unload up to eight heavy brigades complete with all of their vehicles, supplies, and around 60,000 troops on a Taiwan during just the first wave of the attack within just the first 24 hours, with significant reinforcements being delivered over the following few days. If the PLA could achieve a rapid takeover of Taiwan before the outside world even had the time to react to it, then would they? Some other analysts argue that in this light, the

Shui Kao barges are designed as a psychological weapon just as much as a real weapon. They serve as a major symbol that China is very serious about investing resources into establishing their ability to actually invade Taiwan, and they add a degree of plausibility to Xi Jinping's frequent threats of invasion. China, naturally, would rather that Taiwan surrender without a fight at all, and convincing Taiwan's leadership that the invasion will be both inevitable and successful is the best way to do that, and these new Shui Kao barges certainly send a message that the odds of an invasion are at least more plausible than they were before. Regardless, in order to even use the barges in the first place, the PLA will have to face fierce resistance from determined

Taiwanese defenders while crossing the Taiwan Strait and while assaulting the beaches to establish the initial preliminary beachheads, and they could potentially face determined American,

Japanese, Filipino, and Australian auxiliary defenses as well that could all work to deny them the ability to even accomplish this first phase of the amphibious assault altogether, and render the Shui Kao barges a rather moot point. So in order to reinforce both the psychological and real potential of the Shui Kao barges, China has to be able to credibly threaten the destruction of any allied intervention on Taiwan's behalf as well. In order to try and deter any allied intervention from happening in the first place that could slow their invasion down and potentially defeat them, and in order to understand how the PLA is doing that, we actually have to travel very far away from Taiwan and the seas around the island to a very unlikely location, the remote and sparsely populated deserts of far northern and northwestern China, thousands of kilometers away. This is the

Dingxin Test and Training Base located in China's section of the Gobi Desert, a massive facility used by the People's Liberation Army Air Force for weapons integration testing, training, and tactics development. It is an ideal location for them to do all of this because it's in a very remote sparsely populated location with huge amounts of wide open airspace, leading some analysts to compare the importance of Dingxin to China to Nellis Air Force Base in the deserts of Nevada to the United States.

And relatively nearby to the Dingxin Test and Training Base out in another one of China's remote deserts known as the Taclomacan, satellite imagery has recently captured a lot of things that kind of seem to indicate what the People's Liberation Army Air Force is actively training for. On the 1st of January of 2024, Planet Labs released an image that one of their satellites had captured in China's remote Taclomacan desert, showing what looks like a mock-up of an aircraft carrier, and not just any aircraft carrier, but a nearly perfect one-to-one identical mock-up of one of

America's most advanced current nuclear-powered supercarriers, the Gerald R. Ford Class. There is a structure in the mock-up that's almost precisely in the same location as the Ford Class' island, and there are exactly four mocked-up catapult launcher tracks on the deck that are located exactly where they appear on the real Ford Class carrier. Based on Planet Labs data, it appears that the PLA began constructing this mock-up US carrier in the desert sometime in

November of 2023, fairly recently. However, going further back in time, there's been a general outline of an aircraft carrier here in this exact location for a while, since at least 2021.

And before it was completely filled in with a full aircraft carrier that we can see now, the PLA had built two smaller aircraft carriers within the overall silhouette.

And interestingly, this aircraft carrier is far from the only American ship that the Chinese have built a one-to-one replica of out here in the desert. In fact, the area is almost littered with them. Just four and a half kilometers away to the northwest is another full-scale replica of another US Ford Class aircraft carrier. And dotted all around nearby are multiple one-to-one mock-ups of what appear to be Arleigh Burke Class guided missile destroyers.

One of the US Navy's most modern and capable class of destroyers at the present that are typically used to escort carriers in a strike group formation. But most interestingly of all, is this line that snakes across the desert in between all of these mock-ups of US warships.

This line appears to be a very large railroad, roughly six meters in width, approaching four to five times as wide as a usual railroad is. Interestingly, this super wide railroad begins at what appears to be a storage facility of some sort, and then extends for several kilometers in a straight line before curving rapidly through the desert and then curving again to simply end in the middle of nowhere. The railroad doesn't curve to avoid any obstacles in the flat desert. And the reason why it curves this way starts to become apparent when you see other photos of the railroad and understand what its true purpose is.

Yeah, the PLA is using the railroad to load up one-to-one models of US warships like the Ford

Class aircraft carrier, and then sends them down the railroad to simulate a moving target for the

Air Force and Rocket Force to fire at. That curve through the desert appears designed to simulate the carrier's evasive maneuvers through the ocean that it would take to avoid an incoming missile.

There's other satellite photos of mocked-up carriers on this exact railroad blown to bits after being targeted by missiles and rockets. And there are satellite photos of the stationary aircraft targets blown to pieces as well. It's pretty clear what the PLA is preparing for here, but if it wasn't any more clear, the location of all of these ship mock-ups in the

Taklamakan Desert isn't just for the remoteness and clear open skies. The location is also about 2,600 kilometers away from known People's Liberation Army Rocket Force launch sites that are located in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Which is just about the same distance to simulate long-range missile strikes from the interior of Central China into the South China Sea. A region that China claims almost in its entirety against the competing claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Far away in the similarly remote deserts of Inner

Mongolia near to those PLA rocket force launch sites is another curious creation that the PLA built here around the end of the year in 2022. Which might not look like very much at first until you see this other satellite image below it with the same roads highlighted in red. This is an almost exact one-to-one mock-up of the area around the presidential office in downtown Taipei. The capital city of Taiwan that is similar to the National Mall in Washington DC. That's the site of most of Taiwan's most critical and sensitive government offices and buildings. Conveniently located nearby to a PLA Air Force aerial bombing and gunnery practice range. This mock-up is likely being used by the PLA Air Force to simulate aerial strikes on the most sensitive part of the Taiwanese capital. China's testing of aerial attacks here and their testing of anti-ship missiles at the site in the Taklamakan desert on one-to-one mock-ups of US warships that sometime even move and take simulated evasive maneuvers is a clear indication of China's evolving military capabilities and their ability to target US warships and to attack the US's ability to project power into the western pacific. And they're clearly not even really trying to hide any of it. Like the Shuikou invasion barges, the targeting of one-to-one mock-ups of US warships in the Taklamakan desert sends a clear message from Beijing to Washington that America's warships will be vulnerable and potentially sunk if they choose to intervene militarily on behalf of Taiwan the day the invasion eventually comes. And so they serve both a psychological as well as a real purpose. Over the past several years, China has embarked on the largest military build-up ever witnessed in human history. And it's been a build-up that has largely been designed to counter

US strengths in the pacific theater. China has poured resources into the People's Liberation

Army Rocket Force to make it the largest land-based missile force in the world today, giving them somewhere in the ballpark of 3,100 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles of all different kinds of ranges to work with during a conflict over Taiwan. These missiles give China the ability to launch enormous salvos of attacks against military targets on Taiwan before launching the main amphibious invasion. And they also give China the ability, if they so choose, to attack US and allied military targets throughout the western pacific from the relative safety of the Chinese mainland as well, with hundreds of their longer-range conventional missiles capable of striking targets accurately as far away as Guam. The fear on the American side is that China is equipped with enough of these anti-ship missiles to attack virtually every US warship in the South China Sea and nearby Taiwan with enough firepower to overwhelm each individual ship's own onboard missile defense systems. The US, of course, is well aware of the Chinese missile threat to their surface warships, which is a major part of why the US military has shifted so much to a strategy of countering China by positioning air, missile, and rapid amphibious response assets of their own nearby to Taiwan on land bases in Japan and the Philippines instead.

But China has been hard at work developing other counters as well. China has a vastly, vastly larger capacity to construct new ships than the US or any other country in the world has. The US currently only possesses four state-owned shipyards, while China possesses dozens of them. China possesses a whopping 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States right now. And to put it in a perspective for you, just one single state-owned shipbuilder in China built more vessels by tonnage last year in 2024 alone than the United States has collectively built since the end of World War II to the present. A fact that has helped China seize the title of the world's largest navy today.

And the types of ships that China is building are not only designed to carry out an invasion of

Taiwan, like the Shuikou barges and the countless dual-use civilian and military Rourou ferries, but some of them are also designed specifically to counter some of the US Navy's few remaining strengths in this theater. While the PLA rocket force has been carefully calibrated to counter

US surface warships, that still leaves behind the incredibly advanced and capable US nuclear submarine fleet that operates beneath the surface that the rocket force's missiles will not be able to reach. The US has by far the largest and the most competent nuclear submarine fleet in the world that could be brought to bear on China's Taiwan invasion fleet as it crosses the Taiwan

Strait. But China is working on counters to this advantage as well. One of the ways that the geography of the Taiwan Strait actually benefits China in this way is how relatively shallow it is.

The average depth throughout it is only about 60 meters, making it much easier to find and attack submarines operating there than in deeper waters. China's newest class of guided missile stealth frigate, the Type 054B, was just recently commissioned into the People's Liberation Army

Navy in January of 2025, and it is purpose-built to be an anti-submarine warship. China has the huge shipbuilding capacity to begin rapidly churning out a ton of these anti-submarine stealth frigates over the coming years, and if they can concentrate enough of them in the Taiwan

Strait to escort the invasion fleet by the time it happens, they can pose a major threat to the operation of any U.S. nuclear submarine operating beneath the Taiwan Strait, while the rocket force on the Chinese mainland can pose a similarly major threat to the operation of any U.S. service warships operating nearby to Taiwan as well, greatly raising the stakes for the U.S. to decide on intervening or not. And China is attempting to use their massive military buildup to make the potential cost of intervention clear for other U.S. allies in the Pacific as well, most notably Australia. Earlier this year on the 11th of February of 2025, a Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy frigate appeared off of the northern coast of Australia, and then sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

This attracted only minor attention until later on while off of Australia's east coast, the initial frigate was joined by two additional PLAN warships, a cruiser and a replenishment tanker, as they collectively transited through the Coral Sea and continued moving further south before briefly entering into Australia's exclusive economic zone near Sydney.

But the attention the PLAN ships were receiving in the Australian media reached an almost full-on panic only a few days later, when the vessels began issuing radio broadcasts to airlines warning them that they were conducting a series of live fire exercises in between Australia and New

Zealand. The Australian Civil Aviation Service was forced into issuing an emergency alert that caused almost 50 planes to divert their course to avoid the area. From there, the PLAN ships continued travelling south of Tasmania, entering into and out of Australia's exclusive economic zone again, then travelled west to within only 170 nautical miles of Perth, just days after a

U.S. nuclear submarine had visited a nearby base, before then heading up north back towards China again after having nearly spent a month completely circumnavigating Australia, in a new and never before seen show of force that has left the Australians feeling particularly vulnerable ever since. The PLAN's trip around Australia came at a rather unique time in Australia's history, when the country's own navy has been languishing away for years, and as Australia's traditional alliance with the United States is coming under increasing strain, with Donald Trump back in the

White House again. Australia's modern navy is currently in a dismal state, and it's the smallest and most outdated it's been since the Second World War. The PLAN frigate and cruiser that circumnavigated the Australian continent carried with them a combined total of 144 vertical launch missile cells, interestingly pretty close to the entire Australian Navy's 10 warships combined total of just 200 vertical launch missile cells. It was also the furthest south that the PLAN has so far ever sailed, and the message it sent to Australia was crystal clear. Even though Beijing said that the warships were constantly operating within international waters, and they had every legal right to do so as every other navy does all the time, the message that the Australian homeland was vulnerable to Chinese military action in the event of Australia or U.S. military bases in

Australia intervening to defend Taiwan during an invasion scenario was clear as day. And it came as

China's navy has continued expanding its reach in other areas as well. The same month as the PLAN flotilla was busy circumnavigating Australia, the Japanese defense minister stated that PLAN warships had passed through the waters around the country's southern Ryukyu islands between the

Japanese mainland and Taiwan a total of 68 times throughout 2024, a massive increase in frequency from the only 21 reported times that they did so back in 2021. A few months later in June of 2025, the same Japanese defense minister said that one of the PLAN's aircraft carriers, the Liaoning, was spawned out in waters to the east of the island of Iwo Jima, marking the first known time that a

Chinese aircraft carrier has ever sailed beyond the so-called second island chain. The rear line of defense the U.S. employs against China that is centered on Guam, and perhaps most notably of all, there's the enormous construction project that satellites have recently captured going on just to the southwest of China's capital city, Beijing. Taking a closer look at the site, this was what it looked like when taken by satellite imagery on the 5th of February 2022, just a little over three years ago before this video's production. It doesn't really look like very much of notice happening yet, but then simply fast forward the clock by a year to the 25th of February of 2023, and you'll see that the entire area has been completely cleared out of everything that used to exist there, with all of the previously existing residential buildings flattened and erased.

Then fast forward the clock by a little over another year to the 26th of June of 2024, and you'll see another huge change with a massive new monumental construction project taking shape in the area, with the whole place now looking basically nothing like it used to back in early 2022. Fast forward just about another year later to March of 2025, and you'll notice a complex of buildings taking shape in the center, and with dozens of construction cranes still active, making this appear to be a truly enormous construction effort. Chinese government websites have not publicly commented on any of this construction to date, and the Chinese government has refused to answer any questions pertaining to the construction site by journalists.

That has left a lot of speculation online as to what exactly this huge construction project going on actually is, and to most outsiders it certainly appears to be something military related.

The final image of the construction site taken in March of 2025 appears to show around a hundred construction cranes active at the site that are busy building deep subterranean tunnels, facilities, and passageways that all seem to be being reinforced by thick layers of concrete, making whatever is going on here appearing to be an extremely sensitive military PLA site.

The area is truly huge, coming in at around 1,500 acres or 5 square kilometers in total, or in other words roughly 10 times the size of the pentagon near Washington DC.

The building that is usually regarded as the world's largest office building currently. Some high-ranking U.S. defense officials have voiced their belief that the site is being constructed to offer greater security for high-level Chinese officials from advanced U.S. bunker buster munitions during a time of war, or even from U.S. nuclear weapons, as evidenced by all of the extensive and deep subterranean construction going on at the site and all of the secrecy surrounding it. It's probable that with the site being built so close by to Beijing, this new complex captured in satellite imagery could become the PLA's new top military headquarters and serve as China's wartime command center during an invasion of

Taiwan scenario, serving a highly similar role as the pentagon does for the United States military, but on a vastly larger physical scale. As often concerns the People's Republic of China, however, matters of such importance as massive subterranean military fortresses, barges designed for huge armored amphibious invasions, and remote airfields designed for target practicing of U.S. warships in the Taiwanese capital are rarely ever mentioned or discussed publicly by the country's government.

While China has spent the past several decades gradually opening itself up to the world,

China has also continued growing even more authoritarian and centralized around the leadership and vision of Xi Jinping. China is currently ranked as the third least free country in the world in terms of freedom of the press, just barely behind the blatantly totalitarian states of North Korea and Eritrea. There are still many elements about China that remain closely guarded and highly sensitive subjects of the state, and perhaps none of them are as controversial, muddied by propaganda, and misunderstood as the events that took place 36 years ago at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June of 1989. You're probably already pretty familiar with this event, and you've probably heard of it by any number of different names that people with all kinds of different agendas have attempted to label it as. The Tiananmen Square Massacre, as it is often referred to in the West, the June 4th incident, as it is usually referred to in China, or the more vague Tiananmen Square Incident or Uprising. Many of the images taken from the events that took place around Tiananmen Square in 1989 have become some of the most famous photographs ever taken in history. Like the tank man photo that shows a lone, never identified, unknown man standing in front of a column of People's Liberation Army tanks leaving from the square, merely hours after the army had just violently cleared the square out of tens of thousands of student-led protesters. The details of what exactly happened over the 48 hours before this photograph was taken, while the PLA cleared Tiananmen Square out, is one of the most contentious subjects of the entire 21st century. The official Chinese government story is that only 241 people were killed during the army's two-day operation to clear out the square of protesters. But multiple outside Western sources at the time reported much higher figures. The U.S. ambassador to China at the time who was present in Beijing reported that a minimum of several hundred people had been killed.

Hospital records from Beijing that were compiled shortly afterwards recorded at least 478 deaths that were likely caused by the events. Amnesty International initially put their estimate for the dead at between several hundred and close to a thousand, while the Chinese Red Cross initially gave a figure for around 2,600 deaths during the incident before withdrawing their claim under

Chinese government pressure. And the Swiss ambassador to China at the time gave a similar figure of around 2,700 deaths, while there were also less credible estimates from the British ambassador to China at the time who initially gave a dramatically higher minimum figure of 10,000 deaths, but who then later revised his estimate down to between 2,700 and 3,400 deaths instead.

Finding out the true scale of the violence that happened at Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 is difficult, if not even outright impossible, because A. China goes to extreme lengths to enormously censor the event in an attempt to bury any memory and discussion about it, and B. Western sources were and still are heavily incentivized to embellish or over-exaggerate the brutality of it. Searches for Tiananmen Square massacre, June 4th, Tank Man, and sensitive numbers like 6-4 for June 4th or 89-6-4 are all blocked or returned no results on Chinese search engines like Baidu to this day, while posts about the events on Chinese social media apps like

WeChat and Douyin, China's native version of TikTok, remain auto-deleted by algorithms or shadow-banned. The events are entirely omitted from all history textbooks in mainland China, and even foreign scholars who have published work about the Tiananmen Square events will often be denied visas or access to the Chinese archives, collectively making the Tiananmen Square events the most heavily censored event in modern history, and probably the most difficult modern historical subject to properly research. Nonetheless, I still made an entire video about my own investigation into the Tiananmen Square June 1989 events in my Modern Conflict series, which I create new videos in every single month, taking deeper dives into more recent, controversial, and darker subject material surrounding modern wars, operations, and conflicts. Over the past four years of doing this,

I've created around 50 total episodes in Modern Conflicts covering other topics as diverse as the undeclared war and skirmishes between North and South Korea since 2000, China's policies of repression against its Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang, the Myanmar civil war and that regime's modern genocide against its minority Rohingya people, the border fights between China and

India across 2020 and 2021, and dozens of other episodes with brand new ones like this Tiananmen

Square 1989 episode coming out every single month, all exclusively on Nebula. Because of the inherently violent and controversial details surrounding the discussion of all of this, my episode investigating what actually took place around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 would never work on YouTube, because it would instantly become demonetized and age-restricted, which means the

YouTube's algorithm, which is based around showing you ads, would never be incentivized to actually show the video to you or to promote it. I deal with very large numbers of my videos on YouTube getting demonetized and age-restricted as they are, and that's why I upload all of my episodes in Modern Conflicts exclusively to Nebula, and why signing up to Nebula is the absolute best thing that you can do to support me and my channel, and you'll also get access to way more content than just my own exclusive Modern Conflicts series there as well. Because the best part about

Nebula is that it's jointly co-owned by myself and hundreds of other independent creators to make the projects that we're all actually deeply excited about without any fear of being censored or demonetized like we are on YouTube. And that's why there's tons of other new unique content on Nebula that's coming up all the time too that you'll also love, like Neo's Under Exposure series,

Wendover Productions' The Logistics of X series, TLDR News' What to Follow USA series, and so, so many others. I also know that there's a lot of streaming platforms out there right now and you don't really want to get stuck with another monthly cost to keep track of, but I also know that if you've watched this all the way through to the end, there is so much content on Nebula that you'll love as well, and so much more coming out with every new month that you could consider a lifetime membership to Nebula as well. You just pay once and then you'll get lifetime access to everything that I and hundreds of other creators will ever produce on Nebula for as long as we both last. And then you'll never have to worry about a recurring subscription or ads ever again. That's the best way possible to support what I'm doing here on Real Life Lore. But even if you'd rather not make that large of an upfront commitment, you can still greatly help support me by signing up for a yearly or a monthly subscription to Nebula as well, which you can get for a fantastic deal with 40% off by scanning the QR code or clicking the button here on your screen right now, or by following the link that's down below in the description. Any of which will also give you access to everything that's on Nebula for the very low price of just $3 a month or $36 a year. I hope that you'll consider signing up. And as always, thank you so much for watching!