Interviews
Note: These are interviewers with authors other than Troy Parfitt. For interviews with Troy Parfitt, please see FAQs. Thank you.
Author: Jan Wong
Works: Red China Blues, Beijing Confidential, etc.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Jan Wong recently and ask her a few hasty questions. She had just given a talk in Saint John, New Brunswick, was clearly hungry (I fetched her some sandwiches), and was on her way to the airport. That’s the reason the interview is so short. Well, that, and sandwiches or not, she had no idea who I was.
As a spoiler alert, I should mention that this brief interview does appear in Why China Will Never Rule the World. After The Tao of Pooh and a long and dull history of China mainly dealing its dynasties, Jan Wong’s Red China Blues was the first “real” China book I read, shortly after I moved to Taiwan. It spurred me on to read more, and luckily my next selection was The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave, which has to do with China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was hooked and would go on to read many more. I have Jan Wong to thank for pointing me in the right direction. This interview, as it appears in Why China Will Never Rule the World, pertains to the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” an incident that never existed. No, this is not conspiracy theory or an exercise in revisionist or so-called alternative history. It’s a fact, one that has been reported by both The New York Times and The Washington Post; one that I’ll explain a bit more after the interview, which is as follows:
I asked Jan Wong about what she had seen on June 4, 1989 from the balcony of her room at the Beijing Hotel. Mrs. Wong informed me that she had a clear view of two lines of soldiers standing guard just outside the square. A group of approximately fifty people assembled some distance away and began screaming at them: “Blood debts will be repaid with blood!” The group didn’t approach, she said, and the soldiers took no action – until ordered to by their officers.
“The soldiers were in double formation,” she explained, “one row kneeling in front of the other. They’d raise their rifles and the people would run away, but instead of running into a side street, they would run straight down Changan Street. The soldiers shot people in the back as they ran. This went on all day. The group would assemble again, start cursing at the soldiers, and the soldiers would fire on them when their officer gave the order.”
“And how many times did that happen?” I asked, delicately. After all these years, I sensed that she still found it a bit difficult to discuss.
“About four of five.”
“And how many people would you say were shot and killed during each of those four or five rounds?”
“Two or three,” she said. “I just don’t know why they didn’t run into a lane. They didn’t have to run straight down the boulevard. I think it was because they believed that the soldiers wouldn’t do this, or couldn’t believe they were doing this. They had been so brainwashed into believing the People’s Liberation Army was their army.”
“And you say this went on all day?”
“Until about four in the afternoon. Then it started to rain and the group left. I just thought it was so strange. They weren’t afraid to die, but they didn’t want to get wet.”
A massacre did occur on June 4, 1989, but it involved workers and passersby, not students, and it happened a few kilometers away from Tiananmen Square, or Changan Jie, or the Street of Eternal Peace. The Chinese government admitted that 300 people were killed in what was a retaliation for workers targeting an lynching PLA soldiers. Certainly, people were killed as tanks rolled toward Tiananmen Square in order to clear it (and in subsequent days, as Mrs. Wong’s interview tells us), but students remaining in the square itself were allowed to leave inscathed. There is no evidence that even one died. For once, the CCP told the truth, and when it did, the West didn’t believe it.
For a longer interview touching on the same topic, click on this link:
