Sounds a bit like that Beatles song…

It was 22 years ago today that I sat enraptured by CNN’s coverage of democratic protests in China. I didn’t know much about China at the time, and the only thing I’d read about Chinese culture was The Tao of Pooh, which, as I discovered later, doesn’t have anything to do with Chinese culture at all. I was a high school student and rather green. Democracy was good and it looked like the Chinese were finally going to achieve it, and via young people just a little older than me: university students who had stood up to a stagnant, corrupt, and domineering regime. Clearly, these Chinese activists had cheek; their Western counterparts – I had it on good authority – often rebelled by drinking too much beer and cutting class on Monday morning.

It certainly seemed as though the demonstrators had gained the upper hand. Mao’s portrait was defiled, and one imagined it being burned and stomped on, or revolutionary statues being pulled down to lie supine beneath the democracy banners blotchy with Chinese characters. Perhaps the leaders would face charges; there would be elections. But then the tanks rolled in and all hope was extinguished.

We all know what happened next: students were gunned down in and around Tiananmen Square and crushed by PLA tanks. Hundreds died; maybe thousands, sacrificed so the Chinese Communist Party might continue its legacy of tyranny. Needless to say, I learned much more about China from that event than from some allegorical book featuring a honey-loving bear.

In the West, “Tiananmen Square” came to represent not a place, but a slaughter; a reminder of or an insight into how the Chinese government conducts its affairs. The event has become seared into global consciousness. Books have been written about it and songs have been sung. It’s still the news story most non-Chinese associate with China, a shame because there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. The Tiananmen Square Massacre is a convenient bit of fiction, a historical non-event.

When the tanks and troops entered the city that day, June 3, 1989, after seven weeks of protests, live fire was used to clear the way, and people were almost certainly shot dead then. However, by the time the army reached the square itself, most of the demonstrators had left. Those who hadn’t were permitted to leave – unharmed. There is not a particle of evidence to suggest that even a single person died inside Tiananmen Square.

There was massacre during the crackdown, but it occured after midnight (June 4) and after the square had been cleared. It occurred a few kilometres west of the square on Changan Jie [The Street of Eternal Peace], the same street on which the famed tank man would later make his stand. The slaughter mainly involved workers and passersby, not students. Workers had been targeting PLA soldiers for weeks: lynching them, burning them, and beating them up. I used to work with a Welsh fellow who was in Beijing at the time. He managed to smuggle out a photo he had taken of two communist soldiers surrounded by an angry mob. The soldiers were standing back to back with oddly serene expressions on their faces. Moments later, my coworker told me, the crowd tore them to pieces. The squadrons of livid labourers were a much greater concern to the government than the students, and in the wee hours of June 4, the PLA killed several hundred of them. The Chinese government admits 300 died; of course, it’s believed the actual number is higher.  

In doing research for my book, Why China Will Never Rule the World, I interviewed journalist and author of Red China Blues, Jan Wong, to ask what she had seen from the balcony of her room at the Beijing Hotel. She talked seeing people being shot in the back as they ran down Changan Jie (June 4), and the tank man, and the sound of gunfire coming from the square (June 3 and 4), but made no mention of students being shot or a massacre. This afternoon, in an interview on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Mrs. Wong said she believed 3,000 people were killed in the square, arriving at such a number by noting down the number of shots heard and the intervals between them. Incongruously, perhaps, she also claimed she “watched all night as the massacre unfolded” and saw the bodies as they were removed from the square.

That there is no evidence of anyone being killed in the square itself has been reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, but it has not been enough to rein in a myth hatched by false eyewitnesses and perpetuated by indolent reporters. Still, hundreds of people did die during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest crackdown, and it’s important to remember that.

Some might argue it hardly matters where the protesters died, but I would counter it does. The West often accuses China of playing fast and loose with the truth, and rightly so. It would be a pity for the West to continue to do the same thing.

As anyone who has ever spent any amount of time in the Chinese world can tell you, the Chinese often have little idea as to what ideas Westerners harbour about them, even if those ideas are incorrect. Prior to the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government suggested using Tiananmen Square to host the volleyball competition. And Chinese people have no idea what The Tao of Pooh is.

China, to the China observer, can seem a collection of myths, the Tiananmen Square Massacre being one in a long line. China’s impending domination is the latest myth. If we are ever going to understand China, it’s imperative to start replacing those myths with facts.

To learn more, check out the following links.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/08/china.olympics2008

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbX0gAk3zRA

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/rc20110526a4.html