Category Archives: NED
Reposting Japan Times Article : The Tiananmen Square Massacre Myth by Gregory Clark
The Tiananmen Square Massacre Myth (slightly expanded version of my Japan Times article of 7/21/07)https://www.gregoryclark.net/page15/page15.html
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.
A repost for 64 : The Myth of Tiananmen
And the price of a passive press
By Jay Mathews
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THIS STORY
Reposting Mr Mathews’s piece in Columbia Journalism Review – Link here.
Mathews is an education reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
President Clinton’s precedent-setting visit to China filled the front pages of American newspapers and led the evening television news for many days this summer. The stories focused on his controversial decision to attend a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, despite the stain of what reporters called the massacre of Chinese students there on June 4, 1989.
Over the last decade, many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a Baltimore Sun headline (June 27, page 1A) referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” A USA Today article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” The Wall Street Journal (June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The New York Post (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.”
The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.
The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.
The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. 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. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.
Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story. Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre.
For example, CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene refers to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.” Black and Munro quote a Chinese eyewitness who says the gunfire was from army commandos shooting out the student loudspeakers at the top of the monument. A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel.
A common response to this corrective analysis is: So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place? That is an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction. Many of us feel bile rising in our throats at any attempt to justify what the Chinese leadership and a few army commanders did that night.
But consider what is lost by not giving an accurate account of what happened, and what such sloppiness says to Chinese who are trying to improve their press organs by studying ours. The problem is not so much putting the murders in the wrong place, but suggesting that most of the victims were students. Black and Munro say “what took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents — precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended.” They argue that the government was out to suppress a rebellion of workers, who were much more numerous and had much more to be angry about than the students. This was the larger story that most of us overlooked or underplayed.
It is hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression. Rereading my own stories published after Tiananmen, I found several references to the “Tiananmen massacre.” At the time, I considered this space-saving shorthand. I assumed the reader would know that I meant the massacre that occurred in Beijing after the Tiananmen demonstrations. But my fuzziness helped keep the falsehood alive. Given enough time, such rumors can grow even larger and more distorted. When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.
The facts of Tiananmen have been known for a long time. When Clinton visited the square this June, both The Washington Post and The New York Times explained that no one died there during the 1989 crackdown. But these were short explanations at the end of long articles. I doubt that they did much to kill the myth.
Not only has the error made the American press’s frequent pleas for the truth about Tiananmen seem shallow, but it has allowed the bloody-minded regime responsible for the June 4 murders to divert attention from what happened. There was a massacre that morning. Journalists have to be precise about where it happened and who were its victims, or readers and viewers will never be able to understand what it meant.
It’s June again soon, so the world must be reminded about Tiananmen
Always good to see alternative views. I am reposting a lost link, and this article appeared here by Critical Social Work Publishing house. A few links in that Critical Social Work Publishing house are also dead, likely due to age.
Let’s Talk About Tiananmen Square, 1989: My Hearsay is Better Than Your Hearsay
龙信明 | Friday, October 7, 2011, 18:31 Beijing
(Propaganda in the Western press had a lasting impact on China. For the Tiananmen Protest of 1989, the “reform and opening up” policies under Deng back-stepped when Western governments decided to scale back loans and FDI into China on the grounds the Chinese government were ‘butchers.’ The ‘butcher’ and ‘massacre’ narratives were concocted by the Western press to demonize the Chinese government (an on-going trend, by the way; see collective defamation). Through Wikileaks, we now know the U.S. government knew then what were the actual truth and confirmed China’s version of the event. The Western press lied all along, as the following excellent analysis by 龙信明 (original, here) pieces together how they systematically distorted truth to defame. Warning: some graphic images of burnt bodies.)
Let’s Talk About Tiananmen Square, 1989 My Hearsay is Better Than Your Hearsay
http://www.bearcanada.com/china/letstalkabouttam.html
Prologue
There are few places in China that seem more burned into the consciousness of typical Westerners than Tiananmen Square, and few events more commonly mentioned than the student protests there of 1989.
One blogger recently noted that “It must be June. Tiananmen Square is being trotted out again.” And that would seem to be true. Most of the Western media choose to promote a kind of “anniversary story” of this event, partly creating news by resurrecting an apparently dramatic event, and partly with perhaps some less high-minded purposes.
Tiananmen Square in Beijing as it looks today.
In any case, the stories persist, and perhaps it’s because they provide a kind of subversive consolation that leaves us feeling grateful for the superiority of our advanced societies.
Perhaps it leaves us firm in the knowledge (or at least the conviction) that “such things don’t happen here”.
It will be a surprise to many readers to learn that “such things” didn’t happen in China, either.
It is true that in 1989 China experienced a student protest that culminated in a sit-in (more like a camp-in, actually) in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
But thanks to Wikileaks and other (perhaps brave) Western journalists, we now know that this was all the Square experienced that day.
We now have conclusive and overwhelming documentation that the events in Beijing in 1989 were very different from those reported in the Western press. Not only that, we have substantial evidence that the Chinese Government’s version of these events had been true all along.
That story is our subject here. In one sense, it is not an easy story to relate because of the unfortunate emotional baggage Tiananmen Square has carried for more than two decades, and because both China and these events tend to become overwhelmed by ideology.
Where Do We Start? Why not the Beginning?
Let’s enter this ideology classroom and begin by posting on the blackboard some facts that are not in dispute. First among them would be that I was not in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. And neither were you. Hence the subtitle of this editorial. We are both depending on hearsay, on what we have read, on what we have been told and, more importantly, on what we have chosen to believe.
This leads us to another fact that is not in dispute – this one being that you don’t “know” what happened in Tiananmen Square. It’s true you can make the same claim about me, but right now we’re talking about you.
You have no personal knowledge of the events of that day. You don’t know what happened, because you weren’t there. Everything you have is hearsay. You may have watched the news on that day or read newspaper articles, but it’s unlikely you have ever met anyone who was actually present and could give you a first-hand account of events.
And, from whatever information you’ve acquired, you will have chosen to “take sides”. If you’re a Westerner, you have most likely chosen to believe that many terrible things happened that day.
But to do this properly, let’s separate your choice to take sides from your hearsay evidence – which as you are aware, would anyway be totally inadmissible in a court of law. Even in your country.
So, on your side of the fence, we have two factors:
(1) I read and heard about a bunch of really bad stuff that happened that day.
(2) I choose to believe that those things were true.
We’re going to deal with the first of these. You can do what you want with the second. The first is hearsay evidence that can at least be examined and compared with other sources and an assessment made of credibility. The second is founded on ideology, and ideological debates have no resolution so we won’t waste our time there.
What Do We Know For Sure?
Well, one thing we know, though it wasn’t widely reported at the time, is that there were two events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989. They were not related.
One was a student protest that involved a sit-in in Tiananmen Square by several thousand university students, and which had lasted for several weeks, finally terminating on June 4.
The other was a worker protest, the origin and detail of which are unimportant for our purposes. But essentially some number of workers were unhappy with their lot in life and with the amount of government attention and support, or lack thereof, which they were receiving. And they arranged their own protest, independently of anything related to the students.
Since these two events occurred simultaneously, and were conflated in the Western mass media reporting of the time, we will have to deal with these simultaneously as well.
The Student Protest
The students and soldiers in Tiananmen Square had no quarrel with each other that day.
Briefly, the students congregated in the Square and were waiting for an opportunity to present various petitions to the government, petitions dealing with government, social policy, idealism.
In fact, all the things that we as students all had on our list of changes we wanted to make in the world.
Since the government did not immediately respond, the students camped in the square and waited.
They brought food, water, tents, blankets, camp stoves – but no toilets. Tiananmen Square, after three weeks, was not a place for the faint of nose.
The government waited patiently enough during that period, but finally gave the students a deadline for evacuation of the Square – June 4.
Soldiers were sent to the Square on the day prior, but these soldiers were carrying no weapons and by all documented reports (including those of the US Embassy in Beijing, thanks to Wikileaks) had only billy sticks.
By all reports, there was no animosity between the students and the soldiers. Neither had a philosophical dispute with the other, nor did they see each other as enemies. In fact, both photos and reports show that the students were protecting the soldiers who were being chased by angry mobs of uninvolved bystanders. You will see some photos later.
The Workers Revolt
These are not students. You can see the burned-out buses in the background. Today, these rioters would be deemed “terrorists”.
One fact not in dispute is that a group of workers had barricaded streets in several locations leading to Central Beijing, several kilometres from the city centre and also from the Square.
Another fact not in dispute is that several hundreds of people – most of whom were workers, but of whom an undetermined few were students – attended these barricades.
An additional fact is that there was a third group present that to my knowledge has never been clearly identified but which consisted of neither students nor workers.
“Thugs” or “anarchists” might be an appropriate adjective, but adjectives don’t help the identification.
To deal with this problem, the government sent in busloads of troops, accompanied by a few APCs – armoured personnel carriers, to clear the barricades and re-open the streets to traffic.
Outside a bus, the body of a soldier burned to death by the rioters.
The violence began when this third group decided to attack the soldiers. They were apparently well-prepared, having come armed with Molotov cocktails, and torched several dozen buses – with the soldiers still inside.
They also torched the APCs. You can see the photos. There were many more.
Many soldiers in both types of vehicles escaped, but others did not, and many soldiers burned to death. I personally recall watching the news and seeing the videos of dead soldiers burned to a crisp, one hung by the thugs from a lamppost, others lying in the street or on stairs or sidewalks where they died.
Others were hanging out of the bus windows or the APCs, having only partially escaped before being overcome by the flames.
There are documented reports to tell us that the group of thugs managed to get control of one APC, and drove it through the streets while firing the machine guns on the turret.
That was when the government sent in the tanks and opened fire on these protesters.
Another soldier burned to a crisp. Note the other dead soldier hanging from the flyover.
Government reports and independent media personnel generally claim that a total of 250 to 300 people died in total before the violence subsided.
Many of those dead were soldiers. There was no “massacre” in any sense that this world could be sensibly used.
When police or military are attacked in this way, they will surely use force to defend themselves and cannot be faulted for that.
If you or I were the military commander on the scene and were watching our men being attacked and burned to death, we would have done the same.
From everything I know, I can find no fault here.
We can let ideology interfere with interpretation, and claim that the Chinese military used “excessive force”, even in self-defence, but that seems a useless claim. In a number of recent cases in the US, a dozen or more police fired 50, and in one case in Miami, more than 100, bullets into an unarmed man, with the courts later claiming this “was not an excessive use of force”. So let’s be fair and tar everyone with the same brush.
And in any case, soldiers were being attacked by a violent mob, (today, we call them “terrorists”) and were dying horrible deaths. We cannot blame the remaining soldiers for opening fire and killing those who were killing them. And yes, several hundred people died in that event.
A Live, First-Hand Report
Here is an eyewitness report from someone who was there, an excerpt from Tiananmen Moon:
“There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than student-like in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails.”
Who were these punks in shorts and sandals, carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously. Who taught them to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?
Editor’s Note: As with the student supplies, the Coleman gas stoves, the manuals, instructions, training, strategy and tactics, the logistics and many other elements, there is little question the providers were not domestic Chinese.
Another soldier burned to death, hanging by a cable from the burned-out bus.
Someone shouted that another APC was heading our way. My pace quickened as I approached the stalled vehicle, infected by the toxic glee of the mob, but then I caught myself.
Why was I rushing towards trouble? Because everyone else was? I slowed down to a trot in the wake of a thundering herd of one mass mind. Breaking with the pack, I stopped running.
Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement. I thought, there’s somebody still inside of that, it’s not just a machine! There must be people inside.
The throng roared victoriously and moved in closer, enraged faces illuminated in the orange glow. But wait! I thought, there’s somebody still inside of that, it’s not just a machine!
There must be people inside. This is not man against dinosaur, but man against man!
Someone protectively pulled me away to join a handful of head-banded students who sought to exert some control. Expending what little moral capital his hunger strike signature saturated shirt still exerted, he spoke up for the soldier.
“Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother fucker!” one said.
Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch.
“Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!”
He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice. “Get back, get back!” someone screamed at the top of his lungs. “Leave him alone, the soldiers are not our enemy!”
After the limp bodies of the soldiers were put into an ambulance, the thugs attacked the ambulance, almost ripping off the rear doors in an attempt to remove the burned soldier and finish him off. After that, charred bodies of soldiers were hung from a lamp post, and a large amount of ammunition was taken from the APC.
From a Chinese Government Report on the Worker’s Riot
Rioters blocked military and other vehicles before they smashed and burned them. They also seized guns, ammunition and transceivers. Several rioters seized an armoured car and fired its guns as they drove it along the street. Rioters also assaulted civilian installations and public buildings. Several rioters even drove a public bus loaded with gasoline drums towards the Tiananmen gate-tower in an attempt to set fire to it.
When a military vehicle suddenly broke down on Chang’An Avenue, rioters surrounded it and crushed the driver with bricks. The rioters savagely beat and killed many soldiers and officers. At Chongwenmen, a soldier was thrown down from the flyover and burned alive. At Fuchengmen, a soldier’s body was hung upside down on the overpass balustrade after he had been killed. Near a cinema, an officer was beaten to death, and his body strung up on a burning bus.
Over 1,280 vehicles were burned or damaged in the rebellion, including over 1,000 military trucks, more than 60 armoured cars, over 30 police cars, over 120 public buses and trolley buses and over 70 motor vehicles of other kinds.
The martial law troops, having suffered heavy casualties before being forced to fire into the air to clear the way forward. During the counter-attack, some rioters were killed, some onlookers were hit by stray bullets and some wounded or killed by armed ruffians. According to reliable statistics, more than 3,000 civilians were wounded and over 200, including 36 college students, were killed. As well, more than 6,000 law officers and soldiers were injured and scores of them killed.
Back to the Students
Students link arms to hold back angry crowds from chasing a group of retreating soldiers. Photo: AP Photo/Mark Avery
The gunfire could be heard in the distance from Tiananmen Square, but there were no credible reports of gunfire from within the Square itself.
And in any case, as mentioned above, the soldiers in the Square were not armed. They were sent to keep order, not to kill young people who were totally non-violent themselves.
The reports tell us discussions were held between the students and the soldiers at repeated times during the evening and throughout the night.
Almost all of the students were persuaded to leave the Square during the evening, and the small remainder left the following morning.
There is overwhelming documented evidence that no violence occurred in the Square, that no students were killed, and that there never was any “Tiananmen Square Massacre”.
There were reports of sporadic gunfire later the following morning around the perimeter of the square, but that was after all the students had already left, and the cause of that gunfire has not been determined.
Tanks and bulldozers did enter the Square the following morning, flattening all the tents and rubbish that had piled up during the previous three weeks, pushing the garbage into huge piles and setting them afire. This was the apparent origin of claims that “thousands of students” were crushed by tanks streaming through the Square, but this was just the clean-up crew and the students were long gone when the tanks and other heavy machinery arrived.
From a Chinese Government Report on the Student Sit-in
At 1:30 AM on June 4, the Beijing municipal government and the martial law headquarters issued an emergency notice asking all students and other citizens to leave Tiananmen Square. The notice was broadcast repeatedly for well over three hours over loudspeakers. The students in the Square, after discussion among themselves, sent representatives to the troops to express their willingness to withdraw from the square and this was approved by the troops.
At about 5 AM several thousand students left the square in an orderly manner through a wide corridor in the south-eastern part of the square vacated by the troops, carrying their own banners and streamers. Those who refused to leave were forced to do so by the soldiers. By 5:30 a.m., the clearing operation of the square had been completed. During the whole operation not a single person was killed.
But What About All the Rumours, the News Reports?
There were in fact news reports at the time, confirming that there never was any “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, no “crackdown”, and that no students died. One of these was written by Nicholas Kristoff of the NYT, but the Times buried his report on an inside page and instead ran with the more exciting front-page version of tanks crushing thousands of students and gunfire killing thousands more.
Many foreign reporters filed live reports directly from the Square, stating clearly that, while gunfire could be heard in the distance, there was no violence in the Square either by or toward the students. All reports from the Square were that the event ended peacefully.
However, there was a large group of foreign (mostly US) journalists reporting “live from the Beijing hotel”, and describing the view through their windows of all the gunfire, the deaths, the piles of student bodies. Unfortunately, and as other foreign reporters pointed out later, Tiananmen Square cannot be seen from the Beijing Hotel.
Those live reports were fabricated by journalists who apparently believed something was happening, lacked the courage to go and see for themselves, and who told their editors the most likely events according to their convictions and imaginations.
Fabricating facts and sensationalising events. It attracts viewers, sells advertising, and fits in well with the agenda. Truth is apparently dispensable.
CNN’s Mike Chinoy at the time played a “tape” of sporadic gunfire which was edited and condensed to a few seconds to give the impression that it was rapid and continuous.
Many reporters and journalists, including Spain’s TV channel that had a film crew in the Square for the entire event, have all denied the veracity of the reports of gunfire, violence and student deaths in Tiananmen Square.
In a well-researched 1998 article in the Columbia Journalism Review titled “Reporting the Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press,” the 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. According to him:
“A USA Today article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” The Wall Street Journal (June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The New York Post (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.”
“The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square. A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. (Some people), most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.”
You can read this excellent article titled “The Myth of Tiananmen: And the Price of a Passive Press”: Click Here.
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 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 U.S. and British black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting media.”
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 be shown by Western media. Photos of several dead students on a bicycle rack at the barricade are more convincing.
Here is a link to an article on this site, titled “Birth of a Massacre Myth: How the West Manufactured an Event that Never Occurred”. It contains much detailed information on the source of the rumours and false claims. You can Click Here.
They All Knew at the Time That the Reports Were not True
In addition, and I must say, to the great surprise of many of us, the US government, the NYT and all the US and foreign media, knew at the time that there was never any student massacre in Tiananmen Square. The reason we now know this truth is Wikileaks, who published all the cables sent from the US embassy in Beijing to Washington that night, confirming that there was no violence in the Square and no massacre of anybody.
But that knowledge didn’t prevent the US and other Right-Wing governments, dozens of US, UK, German, Canadian, Australian politicians, and all the Right-Wing media, from repeating this story endlessly for more than 20 years. In fact, the NYT features an annual “celebration” of its version of the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” in what can only be a deliberate and persistent attempt to perpetuate the fraud.
For all those years, the NYT and others knew the story was a lie, but they repeated it nonetheless. And not simply “newspapers” or TV stations, but the individuals doing the writing and reporting, all knew, or had to know, the stories were a lie.
Here is a link to another article titled “US Embassy confirms China’s version of Tiananmen Square events: Cables obtained by Wikileaks confirm China’s account”. To read it, you can Click Here.
For a short period, the Western media downgraded the 1989 student protests in Beijing from The Tiananmen Square Massacre to The Beijing Incident. But then, despite this knowledge, the media have once again started to impart conspiracy and horror into Tiananmen Square and characterize it as a massacre of students.
This falsification of history, which appears deliberate since the facts have become well known, deludes a new generation and prejudices it against China. The distortion of the happenings within Tiananmen Square reduces the media’s credibility and leaves its open to charges of grossly misrepresenting significant current events for cheap political gain.
And as Always, Thank You, America.
It seems plausible that the student protests in China during the late 1980s may, at their origin, have been spontaneously generated, but there is no shortage of evidence – facts not in dispute – that the entire student movement was quickly hijacked by the US.
It’s always the same. Whenever we find destabilisation, upheaval, discontent, an opportunity for chaos, we will always find the CIA. Thank you, America.
There is little reason to question the assertation that a major part of US foreign policy then, as today, lay in attempts to destabilise China and perhaps instigate a massive revolution that would open the door to US influence and control.
The student democracy movement was a large part of that strategy. And, though evidence is thin, it begins to appear that the worker’s revolt may also have had “outside help”.
For one, gasoline was rationed and not easily available. And who provided the training and organisation, the instructions for the Molotov cocktails – which were unheard of in China before that time.
Many of the students with whom I spoke, who were actually present at the Square, have told me of the supplies provided for them through some agency of the US government.
They particularly mentioned the countless hundreds of Coleman camp stoves – which at the time were far too expensive for students in China to acquire – and the well-established supply lines of these and other items.
And all university students of that day will tell you of the influence of the VOA – the Voice of America – and the picture it painted of “freedom and democracy”.
They tell of listening to the VOA in their dorms, late into the night, building in their imaginations a happy world of freedom and light.
The Voice of America. “The world’s most trusted source for news and information from the United States and around the world.”
They will also tell you that the VOA was broadcasting to the students 24 hours a day from their Hong Kong station during the weeks of the sit-in at Tiananmen Square, offering comfort and encouragement, provoking, giving advice on strategy and tactics.
And, in a much more dangerous and mean-spirited fashion, asking rhetorical questions that would almost surely lead young students to the wrong conclusions and incite them to inappropriate (and perhaps even fatal) actions.
One of the original participants in the student sit-in recently made this post:
“We settled down and continued with our study. We dated, found our loved ones, and many sought to go abroad. By the time we graduated there was almost no discussion about the student movement and we no longer listened to the VOA.”
“One thing I have been kept thinking was the role of the VOA. Many students were the fans of the radio station before, during and shortly after the student movement. Even when we were on the square many students were listening to their programs as if only they could tell us what was going on.
I remember at one stage it said the PLA stationed in Beijing was in a defensive position and then it asked some questions such as “Who are they waiting for and why are they in a defensive position?” I immediately drew a conclusion that there was a rebelling PLA force coming to support us!! Until I double checked with my cousin I realized how stupid I was to draw that conclusion.”
In case you don’t know, the VOA is funded and operated by the NED – the National Endowment for Democracy – which is a front company funded by the CIA that does much of that agency’s dirty work not involving actual killing – although sometimes it does that, too. The NED was founded as a vehicle to avoid the CIA’s increasingly bad reputation.
Allen Weintein, one of the founders of the NED explained to the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do now was done covertly by the CIA 25 years ago.” And like the CIA and USAID, the NED and a number of similar organizations – including the VOA – receive funding from the US Congress.
In the end, the students abandoned not only the Square, but both their revolutionary imaginations and the VOA as well.
The irony is the imminent death of Voice of America, as far as China is concerned. The US has finally realised the futility of broadcasting propaganda into China and this year (2011) the Obama Administration is planning to shut down VOA broadcasts from Hong Kong.
And not before time.
Revolutions Need Leaders. Who Were They, and Where are They?
John Pomfret, at the time an AP correspondent in Beiiing with a point of view. Now a reporter for the Washington Post.
There were five or six primary leaders of the Tianamen Square sit-in, those who led the organisation of students in universities across the country, who planned the demonstration in the Square and who pushed hard for a “death before retreat” martyrdom attitude in the students.
However, these leaders sensibly chose a “retreat before death” policy for themselves.
They were spirited out of China, first to Hong Kong, then to Taiwan. And very shortly thereafter were in the US.
Some chose intermediate countries and some didn’t. In those days, travel to Hong Kong was not quick and easy as today, so some clever logistics were necessary on the part of their handlers.
Several of these “student leaders” appear to have been rewarded handsomely for their efforts to destabilise their country, with prestigious university degrees, good jobs, and sometimes CIA (NED) salaries for simply continuing to protest.
The “general commander” of the student protesters, Chai Ling fled China after completing her handiwork in Tiananmen Square. As a reward by the US for her destabilisation efforts in China she was given an honorary degree in political science from Princeton university and a job with the management consultancy of Bain & Co.
She has since converted to Christianity and spends her time with a so-called “charity”, funded by the CIA-controlled NED, called “All Girls Allowed”, as a forum to complain about China’s one-child policy.
China has stated that a recision of the one-child policy would result in an additional 300 million births within a decade. Ms. Chai Ling informs us that if China rescinds this policy, she will undertake to provide, at CIA and NED expense, the full cost of not only feeding and clothing these 300 million extra children, but also providing for their education and health care as well.
No greater love has one for her fellow man than …
Alan Pessin, bearded Voice of America correspondent in Beijing. Ignored the martial law restrictions and continued to contact the ringleaders to pass on information, providing both instigation and asylum while dispatching many distorted and false reports.
After the protests, Wu’er Kaixi fled first to France and then to the US where the government rewarded him with a free pass to Harvard university.
This man was one of the contributors to the stories of student deaths in Tiananmen Square, claiming to have seen hundreds (or thousands) of students mowed down with machine guns.
He was quickly discredited by foreign journalists who confirmed that he was seen on the far side of Beijing at the time he claimed to have witnessed events in the square.
Hou Dejian was a Taiwanese singer who joined the protests in Tiananmen Square and then helped to broker the truce which allowed students in the square to evacuate safely. He was subsequently deported back to Taiwan and now writes screenplays in New Zealand.
According to A Government Report:
ln violation of the martial law decrees operative in parts of Beijing. John E. Pomfret. an AP correspondent in Beijing, kept frequent contact with the ringleaders, passing on information and providing asylum. The photo shows John E. Pomfret (middle) and Wang Dan (first left) together.
Alan W. Pessin, a correspondent of the Voice of America in Beijing, ignored the martial law restrictions and not only continued illegal VOA news coverage, but dispatched distorted reports and spread further rumours inciting turmoil and rebellion. The Photo shows Alan Pessin (with the beard) hiding himself among the crowd.
After the Government declared martial law, Chai Ling and the protest organizers were still distributing leaflets inciting armed rebellion against the Government, calling upon their followers to “organize armed forces and oppose the Communist Party and its government”, even making a list of names of people they wanted to eliminate. They claimed they would never yield and “would fight to the finish” with the government, scheming until past the end, to provoke a bloody incident in Tiananmen Square.
Back to the Hearsay
Just so it doesn’t go unsaid, I believe my hearsay is better than your hearsay. I live in China and, by a happy accident of fate, have access to, and constant contact with, many hundreds of people who were university students in China during the period in question. I’ve spoken to more than a few of them at length about the events in Tiananmen Square, and they confirm my comments and the content of the articles linked above.
When we began this exercise, we had two factors on your side of the fence:
(1) I read and heard about a bunch of really bad stuff that happened that day.
(2) I choose to believe that those things were true.
I’ve tried to deal with the first of these, with the presentation of a small part of the (by now) huge volume of evidence confirming that nothing other than a student protest occurred in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. You can still do what you want with the second part – your own ideology. You will believe what you will.
Epilogue
It has been 22 years since the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen incident. While the Western media has over the years toned down this ‘massacre’ myth, they are still using vague language to keep the ‘massacre’ narrative alive. For example, even NPR’s recent anniversary piece echoed an Associated Press article, described it as “the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.”
Now that Wikileaks and other documentation have confirmed what the Chinese government has always said – that no massacre occurred at the Square – the NYT, the UK Telegraph and other Western media are instead spinning this as, “the soldiers fired upon the protesters OUTSIDE of the Square”.
With declassified U.S. government documents and other Westerner accounts, Gregory Clark in his well researched 2008 article published in the Japan Times, “Birth of a massacre myth,” explained how the New York Times and other Western media were still pushing that narrative despite all evidence concluding otherwise.
Recent Wikileaked U.S. embassy cables also showed the U.S. government knew there was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square. Apparently, condemning China is okay while lying along with the media.
Westerners are hopelessly trapped in a view of the world constructed for them by their media. As Martin Jacques said, the West have not had to understand the developing world, because they have the might to not care. The hard truth for the Chinese from this tragedy is that progress comes from stability.
With Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab states in turmoil, the Western media have been keen to play up a possible ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. I can see people like Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times or the BBC journalist who got dragged away from Wangfujing think their careers will be catapulted into the stratosphere if indeed a 1989-scale protest breaks out in China.
Or for people like Jon Huntsman, an opportunity to position himself in the midst of it to maximize his credentials back home for his 2012 ambitions.
Above comments extracted from an editorial at Hidden Harmonies
Some Excellent Reading: More Information, Sources, Documentation
June Fourth, 1989: Another Look (From Hidden Harmonies) Read Here.
Birth of a Massacre Myth: How the West Manufactured an Event that Never Occurred Read Here.
The Myth of Tiananmen: And the Price of a Passive Press Read Here.
US Embassy confirms China’s version of Tiananmen Square events: Wikileaks Cables confirm China Government’s account Read Here.
Tiananmen Square protesters: where are they now?: Benefitting from CIA Financing Read Here.
UK Telegraph article “No Bloodshed in Tiananmen Square” Original Article.
tell it like it is 
