Begins: With the Beijing Olympics looming we see more attempts to remind the world about an alleged June 4, 1989, massacre of innocent students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The New York Times, which did so much to spread the original story of troops shooting student protesters in the Square with abandon, has published several more massacre articles recently, including one suggesting there should be an Olympic walkout. Other media, including the usually impartial UK Guardian and Independent, and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, have chimed in. None are interested in publishing rebuttals.
What Did Not Happen
So what actually happened in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 4? Fortunately we have some eyewitness reports, and they all say one thing – absolutely nothing. Graham Earnshaw, a Reuters correspondent, spent the entire night close by the iconic monument at the centre of Tiananmen Square – the alleged site of the massacre. There he interviewed students in detail, until those allegedly massacring troops finally arrived in the early dawn. As he writes in his memoirs ‘I was probably the only foreigner who saw the clearing of the square from the square itself.’ He confirms that most of the students there had already left peacefully much earlier that evening, and that the remaining few hundred were persuaded by the troops to do likewise.
His account is confirmed by Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident, now resident in Canada, writing recently in Asia Sentinal and quoting Taiwan-born Hou Dejian who had been on the hunger strike on the Square to show solidarity with the students:
“Some people said that 200 died in the Square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning.”
“I kept thinking,” he continued, “Are we going to use lies to attack an enemy who lies?”
Then there is the recent book (in Spanish only, unfortunately) by Madrid’s ambassador to Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, which denies angrily the massacre stories. He notes that Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew in the Square most of the evening, and that if there had been a massacre they would have been the first to see it and record it. He points out that most of the reports of an alleged massacre were made by journalists hunkered down in the safe haven of the Beijing Hotel, some distance from the Square.
What Did Happen?
True, much that happened elsewhere in Beijing that night was ugly. The regime had allowed the pro-democracy student demonstrators to occupy its historic Tiananmen Square for almost three weeks, despite the harm caused, or that would be caused, to regime prestige as foreign dignitaries arrived (including Gorbachev) and as Western media flocked to cover the demonstrations, not to mention the inconvenience to traffic, problems of garbage removal etc. Twice senior members of Deng Xiaoping’s regime, including Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang, had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate compromises with the students – compromises that some of the student leaders have since said they should have accepted. Eventually the regime lost patience and sent unarmed troops into Beijing to clear the Square. But those troops had quickly been turned back by barricades set up by the angry pro-student crowds that had been gathering in Beijing for days.
Zhao Ziyang
赵紫阳
Zhao Ziyang (with megaphone) addressing the student
protestors at Tiananmen on 19 May
1989.
Years later when Zhao wrote about his
efforts that day in his memoirs, it was picked up by
the media as proving how he had condemned a Tiananmen
'massacre.'
Photo Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zhao.jpg
The following day armed troops were sent in to do the job.
They too quickly met hostile crowds but this time they
continued to advance and this time some in the crowd began
throwing Molotov cocktails. Dozens of buses and
troop-carrying vehicles were torched, some with their crews
trapped inside. Not surprisingly, the largely untrained
troops began panic firing back into the attacking crowds.
As a result it is said that hundreds were killed, including
some students who had come from the Square to join the
crowds. But that killing was the result of a riot, not a
deliberate massacre. It was provoked by the citizens, not
the soldiers. And it did not happen in Tiananmen Square.
The Myth is Born
So why all the reports of soldiers setting out deliberately
to create a ‘massacre’ in Tiananmen Square?’
In a well researched 1998 article in the Columbia
Journalism Review entitled ‘Reporting The Myth of
Tiananmen, and the Price of a Passive Press,’ former
Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, Jay Mathews,
tracks down what he calls ‘the dramatic accounts that
buttressed the myth of a student massacre.’ He notes a
widely disseminated piece by an alleged Chinese university
student writing in the Hong Kong press immediately after
the incident, describing machine guns mowing down students
in front of the Square monument (somehow Reuter’s Earnshaw
chatting quietly with the students in front of the same
monument failed to notice this). Mathews adds: ‘The New
York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12,
just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found
to confirm the account or verify the existence of the
alleged witness.’ And for good reason I suspect; the
mystery report was very likely the work of the US and UK
black information authorities ever keen to plant
anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting or cooperative media.
Mathews notes that the New York Times reporter Nicholas
Kristof, who had been in Beijing at the time, challenged
the report the next day but his article was buried on an
inside page and so ‘the myth lived on.’ Ironically, this
was the same Kristof whose colorful reporting of military
actions during the riot had earned him a notable press
award and had done much to solidify the ‘massacre’ story.
If anything it was his willingness after the event to
challenge the phony Hongkong report in his own newspaper
that deserved the award.
(I might add that the New York Times tradition of ignoring
anything that contradicts its favorite dogmas, particularly
where China is concerned, lives on. A 2004 anti-Beijing
piece by Times opinion page writer, David Brooks, claimed
blandly that 3,000 students were massacred in the Square.
Both the newspaper, and Brooks in his blog, refused to
publish the rebuttal I sent.)
Another key source for the original massacre myth, Mathews
says, was the student leader Wu’er Kaixi who claimed to
have seen 200 students cut down by gunfire in the Square.
But, he notes, ‘ it was later proven that he left the
square several hours before the events he described.’
Mathews also lists an inaccurate BBC massacre report, filed
from that out-of-sight Beijing Hotel.
The Real Story
The irony in all this, as Mathews points out, was that
everyone, including himself, missed the real story. This
was not the treatment of the students, who towards the end
of their sit-in had decided deliberately to court trouble
and create a global sensation by forcing the regime to send
in troops. The real story, as Earnshaw also notes, was the
uprising of the civilian masses against a regime whose grey
hand of corruption, oppression and incompetence ever since
the Cultural Revolution days of the late sixties and early
seventies had reduced an entire population to simmering
resentment. It was the concern and embarrassment over this
proletarian rebellion rather than over student calls for
democracy that explains the ruthlessness of the regime’s
subsequent crackdown on alleged perpetrators.
I can confirm this anti-regime sentiment, having visited
China several times in the early seventies. Despite having
organized single-handedly over Canberra’s opposition an
Australia table tennis team to join the all-important
pingpong diplomacy I too suffered harassment from
bloody-minded, single-track authorities. One had only to
walk around the urban backstreets, in Shanghai especially,
to feel the palpably sulfurous mood of the frustrated
masses.
But that was China then. Today we have a very different
China, and one far too important to be subjected to CIA/MI6
black information massacre myths and Western media
gullibility. What makes it worse is the way the same media
seem very happy to forget the very public massacres of
students that have occurred elsewhere - Mexico in 1968 and
Thailand in 1973, for starters. There we saw no attempt by
the authorities to negotiate problems. The troops moved in
immediately. Hundreds died. But Mexico and Thailand were
not on the list of regimes the media and black information
people love to hate. So the massacre stories were soon
forgotten.
Distorted use of photos have helped greatly to sustain the
Tiananmen massacre myth. One showing a solitary student
halting a row of army tanks is supposed to demonstrate
student bravery in the face of military evil. In fact it
tells us that at least one military unit showed restraint
in the face of student protests (reports from the US
Beijing Embassy and elsewhere confirm this, saying only one
out of-control rogue unit was responsible for most of the
un-provoked ugliness that night). Photos of lines of
burning troop carriers are also used, as if they prove
brutal military behavior against innocent civilians. In
fact they prove the exact opposite, namely some fairly
brutal behavior by those civilians leading to the deaths of
quite a few fairly innocent soldiers.
Meanwhile we see little photo support for the other side of
the story. Earnshaw notes how a photo of a Chinese soldier
strung up and burned to a crisp was withheld by Reuters.
Dramatic Chinese photos of solders incinerated or hung from
overpasses have yet to shown by Western media.
Photos of several dead students on a bicycle rack at the
Square periphery are more convincing when it comes to
chronicling military brutality. But the declassified
reports from the US Embassy in Beijing at the time (which
used to be carried in full on the internet and which
confirmed the Earnshaw/Hou accounts of Square events, but
which have since been heavily censored) recorded how the
murder by students of a soldier trying to enter the Square
had triggered violence in the Square’s periphery.
Tiananmen Fallout
The damage from the Tiananmen myth has been enormous. And
it continues. It has been used repeatedly by Western hawks
to sustain an official ban on Western sales of arms to
Beijing. It was even used to refuse a request to the UK for
the riot control equipment Beijing says would have
prevented the 1989 violence. So next time there is trouble
in Beijing the regime has once again to send in untrained,
panicky troops to face the wrath of the crowds?
Chinese leader Li Peng was later quoted as saying how China
needed to train troops in riot control if it wanted to
avoid future incidents. Needless to say that remark was
distorted to make it look as if he was endorsing the
original Tiananmen massacre.
A major lesson from all this is the need to control our
Western black information operations. Few seem to realize
the depth of their penetration in Western media. Throughout
the Vietnam War the British disinformation people ran
something called Forum Features, making it look as if some
high-minded group of scholars and commentators were
cooperating for the benefit if readers and mankind. In fact
their insidiously distorted messages did much to perpetrate
yet another anti-Beijing myth – that Chinese was
responsible for Vietnam hostilities. As for their
responsibility for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese,
the less said the better.
But for their enormous success in creating the Tiananmen
Massacre Myth, here they really deserve some kind of award.
For at least a decade, and to some extent right through
till today, they have prevented an intelligent
understanding of a very important nation and its
leadership. Well done!
Note: All sources quoted above are available on the
Internet, under Tianamen.