Serapindal
08-11-2005, 02:47
Excerpts from Washington Times article:
From Columbia Journalism Review September/October 1998
The Myth of Tiananmen And the Price of a Passive Press
by Jay Mathews
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.
"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 centre 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.
From Workers World Party
Distortions about Tiananmen
The central, key event that supposedly symbolizes everything bad about China took place on June 4, 1989--what the media labeled the "Tiananmen Square Massacre." After a few days of hysteria that created a lasting impression, some of the major media carried stories "correcting" their original version.
On June 13, the New York Times carried a retraction written by Nicholas Kristof from Beijing: "The central scene in the article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Several witnesses, both Chinese and foreign, say this did not happen. ...The great majority left unhurt and were not shot at," the witnesses say.
Were there casualties in Beijing on June 4? Yes, including many soldiers of the People's Liberation Army. Was there street fighting? Yes, some of it obviously very heavy. But the "massacre" that the capitalist media, and some of the left as well, are still railing about never happened. Probably 300 people died on June 4--roughly an equal number of PLA soldiers and counter-revolutionary demonstrators.
It is clear that the demonstrators who remained by June 4 were a far different group than those who had begun the demonstrations in April of that year. Demonstration leaders like Chai Ling have testified that their objective was to provoke the government, to create, in her words, a "bloodbath," that they were engaging in counter-revolutionary violence in hopes of touching off a civil war.
And the U.S. government was not sitting idly by, but intervening in many ways. Some in the ruling class here believed that after a decade of penetrating and weakening the socialist system in China, they might be able to win, might be able to overthrow socialism altogether.
Had they been successful, the type of disaster that has gripped the former Soviet states would have been multiplied many times over in a country that was far more populous and far poorer.
But the counter-revolution of 1989 did not succeed. There was no nationwide uprising, very little apparent support among the workers and even less among the rural population for the attempt.
From Columbia Journalism Review September/October 1998
The Myth of Tiananmen And the Price of a Passive Press
by Jay Mathews
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.
"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 centre 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.
From Workers World Party
Distortions about Tiananmen
The central, key event that supposedly symbolizes everything bad about China took place on June 4, 1989--what the media labeled the "Tiananmen Square Massacre." After a few days of hysteria that created a lasting impression, some of the major media carried stories "correcting" their original version.
On June 13, the New York Times carried a retraction written by Nicholas Kristof from Beijing: "The central scene in the article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Several witnesses, both Chinese and foreign, say this did not happen. ...The great majority left unhurt and were not shot at," the witnesses say.
Were there casualties in Beijing on June 4? Yes, including many soldiers of the People's Liberation Army. Was there street fighting? Yes, some of it obviously very heavy. But the "massacre" that the capitalist media, and some of the left as well, are still railing about never happened. Probably 300 people died on June 4--roughly an equal number of PLA soldiers and counter-revolutionary demonstrators.
It is clear that the demonstrators who remained by June 4 were a far different group than those who had begun the demonstrations in April of that year. Demonstration leaders like Chai Ling have testified that their objective was to provoke the government, to create, in her words, a "bloodbath," that they were engaging in counter-revolutionary violence in hopes of touching off a civil war.
And the U.S. government was not sitting idly by, but intervening in many ways. Some in the ruling class here believed that after a decade of penetrating and weakening the socialist system in China, they might be able to win, might be able to overthrow socialism altogether.
Had they been successful, the type of disaster that has gripped the former Soviet states would have been multiplied many times over in a country that was far more populous and far poorer.
But the counter-revolution of 1989 did not succeed. There was no nationwide uprising, very little apparent support among the workers and even less among the rural population for the attempt.