Chapter 80 – Tiananmen
BETWEEN FIVE WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN, PERU AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FIVE LANGUAGES
A Story of Media Stupidity and Mendacity
1. The Tankman photo
2. The Hanging Corpse Photo
3. Atrocities Photos
4. Political Background to the Mayhem
5. The Historical Background
6. The Reluctant Repression
7. Inside the Massacre ‘Myth’
8.State Department Records
9. All the News the is Fit to Print: the NYT
1.The Tankman Photo
We can begin there. It symbolises the mendacity of the so-called Tiananmen Massacre
The world is familiar with the photo. For critics in the West and elsewhere determined to highlight Communist China’s malfeasance it is supposed to represent a brave Chinese student confronting the armed might of China’s tank brigades. Tankman is supposed to be trying, even if only symbolically, to prevent the tanks from moving towards Tiananmen Square to crush the June 3-4, 1989, uprising of student protestors in Square. Time magazine has declared it “an iconic picture of defiance in the face of aggression.”
But is it?
According to the man who took the photo, Jeff Widener of AP, the true story is very different. The photo was taken June 5, not June 4. The tanks were going away from, not towards, the direction of the Square. They were blocked not by a student but by a man with a shopping bag crossing the street who had chosen to play chicken with the departing tanks.
The lead tank had changed direction to avoid causing him injury. The shopper continued to confront the tank, the tank continued to move away, time and again until the shopper got tired of the game and went away. The tanks then were able to continue their move away from the Square. And Time was able to tell us how it had discovered this “iconic picture of defiance in the face of aggression.”
Widener notes how the evening before he saw a soldier being dragged from his troop carrier by angry crowds and killed.
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This was just one of distortions, misunderstandings and outright lies surrounding the so-called Tiananmen Square massacre. But it was a particularly bad one, since the facts were readily available. How can a magazine of international reputation let itself publish something like this without checking?
Widener was not a protestor supporter; he himself was almost killed the night before by rock thrown by a protestor seeking to kill soldiers.
2. The Hanging Corpse Photo
● If the anti-Beijing critics were honest they would admit there were plenty more photos telling a story very different from the one they were peddling.
● We are familiar with the photos of PLA soldiers marching up the Chang’an avenue leading to Tiananmen Square on June 4 and shooting wildly into civilians blocking their way. That, in most global imaginations, was the Tiananmen Square massacre
● But maybe there was some reason for the normally well-disciplined soldiers to be behaving in this monstrous way..
● Soon after on the Internet we could find photographic evidence of atrocities against the PLA soldiers before, and not after, that June 4 march. In particular we have s photo by a Canadian giving time, date and name of a soldier whose charred corpse had been stung up under a traffic overpass.
Patrick Chovanec
@prchovanec
June 4, 1989, 4:45am – Infantryman Cui Guozheng is stabbed, lynched, and burned at Chongwenmen intersection.
That photo alone gives at least one reason why later that day soldiers were marching up that avenue shooting wildly. They were seeking revenge.
3. Atrocities Photos
Other photos attached to this article give many more reasons to believe that the June 4 Chang’an Avenue march shootings were revenge for the far greater atrocities that had occurred earlier. Some show an almost unimaginable hatred of the regime and its soldiers. Inevitably the soldiers would seek revenge.
In all they are supposed to have killed about 200 protestors and citizens during the June 4 march. The number of soldiers killed by anti-regime protestors, students and others, would have been far greater.
But first some notes about the background to this mayhem.
4. Political Background to the Mayhem
For me, the background had begun many years earlier with a Maoist evil called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR).
To rid China of this piece of insanity Premier Zhou Enlai had organised the ping-pong diplomacy in 1971 (in which I had participated) and the opening of contacts with the US. But GPCR insanity did not die easily.
I had seen and spoken to Deng Xiaoping in 1973 on his first reappearance after GPCR suppression, but it was not long before he too was forced into humiliating obscurity again by the fanatics.
There was some revival of hope with the emergence of the reformist CCP general secretary, Hu Yao-bing. His death on April 15, 1989, sparked an outflow of sympathy by thousands of mourners into Tiananmen Square.
Coinciding with the arrival of Western media to cover a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev, the one month of anti-regime demonstrations widely reported internationally got underway sparked by the presence of those mourners.
This was followed by images of soldiers marching towards Tiananmen Square and firing indiscriminately into helpless crowds of protesting civilians and students.
Brutal suppression of dissent? That, at least was the verdict of the world’s media now gathered in Beijing to report as the event unfolded after the Gorbachev visit.
But knowing China, and knowing how mendacious and/or ill informed our media could be when faced by tumultuous events in a country they did not know and with a language they could not understand, I realised there had to be more to the story.
It was not hard to find. For shortly after the alleged Tiananmen Square massacre one needed only to scan the Internet to find the images not only of that charred soldier corpse hanging from an overpass with traffic moving serenely underneath. Nor was it just the images of scorched and mutilated PLA soldiers strung up to die on the sides of badly damaged buses or badly burned PLA solders hiding in doorways or spread out on public staircases.
What really explained it all were the long queues of burned out military buses on the entrances to Beijing plus wrecked and burned out military troop carriers.
It was the sight of the hundreds, if not thousands, of badly burned soldiers who survived and escaped from those vehicles which inflamed the revenge anger of the soldiers marching up Chang’an Avenue, June 4.
So what came first? Soldiers shooting wildly into crowds, or the burned out buses, the mutilated PLA corpses and all the other carnage?
Even the slightest twinge of curiosity should have made people to realise that the so-called Tiananmen ‘massacre’ involved more than soldiers suddenly marching up a street and shooting at students.
Somehow some anti-regime people had been able to unleash extraordinary violence against PLA soldiers before the time we were being told the soldiers were shooting the civilian and student protestors.
And why the almost complete failure of mainstream Western media to investigate the photos of the widespread atrocities against PLA soldiers which could be found easily on the Internet, even without searching, at any hour and for many months after the event.
I discovered later they had been taken from a book published in English by the Beijing Book Store available soon after June 3-4,1989, events, and cliaming to give the true story of those events.
Just a brief glance at those photos would have destroyed the narrative of unprovoked aggression by the regime against its protestors. But it seems that our critics were too lazy, too biassed or too ignorant even to glance.
5. The Historical Background
To say the Communist Party began its rule in China with popular support is to say the obvious. Even the refugees I met in Hong Kong in the late fifties/early sixties admitted that while they could not have lived under a communist regime they had fled, China at the time had no choice but to accept it.
A continuation of the alternative – the corruption and chaos of the rival Nationalist regime – was unthinkable.
And for a while the regime performed well. But then news of Mao Tsetung’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late fifties began to trickle out to us in Hong Kong – chaos in the countryside, mass starvation, even cannibalism.
What was going on?
Things recovered somewhat in the early sixties as moderates like Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping took over. But it was not long before the fanatics were back – this time using the name, if not the blessing, of Chairman Mao to launch their monstrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). The year – 1966.
Those of us who saw the remnants of this disaster when China opened to outsiders in the early seventies should have been appalled. Certainly I was – Potemkin factories producing slogans rather than goods, constant stories of people who were ’struggled against’ (beidoufa) for minor infractions of Maoist dogma or rumours of past bourgeois connections, and so on.
On farm visits I wandered by the useless pig iron slabs made from the valuable farm and house utensils thrown into the crude three meter high mini-furnaces which Mao and his regime had ordered them to build.
China was going to beat the UK in steel production, it was claimed. It would eventually, but not by relying on those Mao-ordered furnaces.
Later I was to visit Shanghai slums. There the frustration of the proletariat had turned to anger directed at anything in sight, including me. Some thug-like types were out for violence. I escaped, but barely.
In the universities, libraries had been purged of almost all but useless communist tracts. To provide sensible books would be a sign of bourgeois weakness and another excuse for beidoufa.
Sanity returned in the seventies and eighties but it was slow and hesitant. In theory, and to some extent in reality, the evil of the GPCR had to continue till Mao’s death in 1976 and the arrest of his wife Jiang Ching.
Efforts by reformers such as Hu Yao-bang, the former party secretary, restored some normality. But he too had to face of conservative opposition. When he died on April 15, 1989, the mourning ceremonies in Tiananmen Square attracted an estimated 50,000 students, many of whom stayed on to cause the one month of Tiananmen anti-regime protests .
6. The Reluctant Repression
This was the setting for the June 3-4, 1989, Tiananmen Square confrontation. The record of the US Embassy and other reliable sources makes it clear the regime at first wanted to handle the students with kid gloves; after all, many of the students were the sons and daughters of the communist elite.
Unarmed soldiers were sent in, though subways and by buses, to persuade the students to leave.They were met by crowds, including angry grand-mothers, at the subway exits and elsewhere and told to go home.
Those sent in by bus were less fortunate. From the photos it is clear the leading buses were set alight first, leaving dozens of buses following unable to move and vulnerable to the arsonists. Unarmed and having to struggle for the exits from burning vehicles, many of the solders ended up as our photos have shown – scorched, bewildered and barely alive, scattered over the streets and parks of Beijing.
The regime has since claimed that the atrocities were caused by pro-US elements who had infiltrated the crowds. And it is possible US agencies were busy in the weeks before June 3-4; apart from anything else, someone must have taught the anti-regime elements the making and use of Molotov cocktails – a weapon not seen in China before.
But it is far more likely that violently anti-regime elements can trace their origins to that criminaly absurd Cultural Revolution. Any normal Chinese subjected to the insanity and cruelty of that Maoist idiocy would have had anti-regime instincts.
In panic the regime had declared martial law. But it also tried to negotiate with the student protestors. June 3 represents the day when the regime finally decided it had to do something to reclaim the Square with its Heroes Monument as a leadership symbol. But it was not prepared to deploy the armed troops it had brought into staging areas in the Beijing suburbs.
It was not until the day after, June 4, that armed troops were sent in.
It seems unlikely they were sent in primarily to suppress student protestors in Tiananmen Square – apart from anything else very few, if any, of the soldiers actually reached the Square. As they stormed up Chang’an Avenue shooting wildly in every direction it seems clear they were out mainly get revenge for the atrocities unleashed by the thugs and anti-regime elements the previous day and night against their fellow soldiers – in particular, for the burning of the buses bringing them into town and from which many had barely escaped.
That revenge was wreaked on all and everyone who got in their way – citizens, student protestors, anyone, with several hundred killed. I imagine that with some vocabulary licence that can be considered a kind of massacre. But it followed a far more brutal massacre of PLA soldiers the previous days. And neither massacre was in Tiananmen Square.
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Western observers in the Square say most of the students left peacefully in the early hours of the morning of the next day, June 5.
Indeed, the then Spanish ambassador to China, Eugenio Bregolat (whom I later got to know in Tokyo) was so incensed by the massacre reports, that he later wrote a book about his experience and that of the TVE television crew (I have a copy.)
He claimed that the bogus reports of a massacre came manly from media people hiding in the Beijing Hotel nearby and unable to see the Square centre. For me, having seen the sloppy reporting by media people during the Jakarta riots that met Tanaka Kakuei’s visit some 25 years earlier, I was not surprised at the inventiveness and mendacity of their stories.
That said, it is possible some student protestors were attacked in the more remote areas of the enormous Square not visible to foreigners in the middle of the Square; no one should argue that none of the troops sent in failed to reach the Square. But too many Western observers, including some known to me personally, failed to see any violence in the main parts of the Square itself. And certainly no soldiers got to near the Monument to Heroes in the centre of the Square, where most of the foreign observers had gathered.
In short, the Tiananmen Square massacre was a myth. And one of the more mendacious variety
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What does need to be explained is the seeming lack of shock and sympathy in photos of the faces of the crowds witnessing the atrocities against the soldiers. It seems the disasters imposed on the lives of citizens almost from the day the regime was established, and the difficulties suffered by would-be reformers, such as Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and others had left many disillusioned.
With Hu replaced by a hard-liner, Li Peng, the regime had lost credibility.
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Nor can we ignore the fact that among the 1989 masses there were some thugs out for blood and destruction. Years of ridiculous, cruel, GPCR polices and the poverty it engendered had produced a thuggish underclass only too ready to attack the regime and its works. Those ghastly photos of mutilated soldiers are the proof.
7. Inside the Massacre Myth
That said the regime also has its excuses. It did try to reach out to student leaders, only to be rebuffed by the more ambitious, cunning or violent among them. One of the student leaders (Cai Ling) had written how they hoped to export the violence and trigger a nationwide anti-regime revolution.
Far more inexcusable has been the refusal of Western media, intellectuals and others concerned even to be aware of the glaring evidence of anti- regime violence beforethe regime violence.
Also it is an undeniable fact that dozens of troop carrying buses were torched as they tried to enter assembly points near the Square. The photos are there for all to see. How come we rarely hear about those photos? And when we do, there is no curiosity about the fate of the soldiers they were carrying.
When it comes to Tiananmen, all that our biassed media, pundits and others want to believe is there was some kind of massacre in the Square despite minimal photographic evidence.
When, how and by who were the buses burned? They are far more crucial to the Tiananmen story than soldiers charging up Chang’an Avenue. Even in the addled minds of our mendacious media there has to be something called cause and effect.
Fortunately the word ‘myth’ is coming to be used by some of the more impartial observers. Some of their writings are collected below.
8. State Department Records
Amazingly, it is to the US State Department records we have to turn to get an honest account of what actually happened.
They note that “.. the initial moves against the students suggested to many that the Chinese leadership was still, as of the morning of June 3, committed to a relatively peaceful resolution to the crisis.”
From there we go to:
“fascinating eyewitness accounts of the disorganised and confused retreat of PLA soldiers from the centre of Beijing after their advance on Tiananmen Square was halted by crowds of demonstrators on the morning of June 3.’ (italics added)..’the soldiers were ridiculed by Chinese citizens and scolded by elderly women who called them “bad boys” and “a disgrace to the PLA”.
Would armed Chinese soldiers out to kill protestors let themselves be dictated to by elderly Chinese women? How come in all the accounts of a Tiananmen massacre we hear and see nothing of these June 3 events?
It is on the day after, June 4, however, that things changed: “Thousands of civilians stood their ground or swarmed around military vehicles. APCs were set on fire, and demonstrators besieged troops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails.”
Clearly something happened between the mornings of June 3 and June 4 to stir up the masses – both the the protesting citizens and the thugs – and I suggest it was the arrival of those revenge-seeking armed troops following events on June 3 or before – the burning of the buses and the atrocities against soldier victims of the burnings shown so vividly in those photos.
That, in sum, is the Tiananmen Square Massacre Story- no Tiananmen Square, no Massacre and no accurate Story.
Except, that there was more to come.
9. All the News thats Fit to Print: the NYT.
The most egregious distortion to emerge from this potage of Tiananmen lies and embellishment came from the newspaper that claims to be the paper of record – the New York Times.
The sensation of June 3-4 events was starting die when suddenly the New York Times front-paged a story by an alleged student taken from a Hong Kong newspaper with former pro-communist credentials, Wen Wei Pao.
Headlined ‘TURMOIL IN CHINA; Student Tells the Tiananmen Story: And Then, ‘Machine Guns Erupted.’ What followed was an obviously faked account of events: ‘The machine gunners took a prone position, with their backs to the Gate of Heavenly Peace. As soon as the placements were established, a huge number of soldiers and police appeared.’
The machine gun placements were supposed to be in front of the Monument to Heroes, with the guns beginning to mow down protestors in the hundreds. But most of the foreigners, including the Spanish TVE film crew, were standing around that monument.
Strangely none of the many foreign media persons gathered in front of the Heroes monument failed not only to see all this, but also failed to get mowed down.
Even the New York Times reporter, Nicholas Kristof, who was in the Square at the time had to try to play down the story. But his story was relegated to page eight the next day and was largely ignored.
The fake story being front page was widely welcomed. Attempts by myself and others to get the paper to correct the story later were ignored.
Ironically, this was the same Kristof whose colourful reporting of military actions on June 4 had earned him a notable press award and had done much to solidify the Tiananmen “massacre” story. If anything, it was his willingness after the event to challenge the phoney Hongkong report in his own newspaper that deserved the award.
Another key source for the original massacre myth was the student leader Wu’er Kaixi who claimed to have seen 200 students cut down by gunfire in the Square. But it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described. Wu’er later visited the FCCJ using his alleged Tiananmen experience in a press conference promoting Press Freedom. Press Freedom to do what?
The Wen Wei Pao position needs to be explained. Despite being a strongly pro-regime paper, the paper and its staff were so badly mauled and traumatised by Cultural Regime fanatics (newspapers were their favourite targets) that in the Tiananmen confusion its editor was prepared to run any anti-regime story at hand. That was his revenge.
And it was very effective. The story ran on June 12 in the lull after the initial violence of June 3-4 when the world was still trying to make up its mind about what had happened.
That story, combined with the seeming credibility of the New York Times, provided the judgement they wanted.
The Tiananmen massacre story was now carved in print.
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The BBC, that other voice of record, was also guilty.
Tiananmen Square protest death toll ‘was 10,000’
But instead of showing a picture of the claimed Tiananmen massacre, the BBC used a picture of a burning tank. Well, thank you very much.
In his catalogue of regime sins the Australia’s ABC managed to ignore how Australia’s Embassy in Beijing had reported a soldier being killed and disembowelled by its front gate.
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Please see some first hand reports and commentaries by others.
They are attached to let the reader draw his or her own conclusions of what happened.
In particular see:
The Tiananmen Myth and the Price of a Passive Press, by Jay
Williams
Columbia Journalism Review
and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence (The Art of Media Disinformation is Hurting the World and Humanity) (Volume 2) [1 ed.]
Columbia Journalism Review