The foreign media continues to own the story of Tiananmen because no one in China can freely write about it
A witness to the uprising and crackdown in Beijing 1989 suggests the topic remains only partially understood because the dominant narrative originates in the West while China remains woefully silent.
The story of the Tiananmen demonstrations and the bloody crackdown that followed on June 4, 1989 has been told often enough, and with sufficient passion, creativity and verve, to take on iconic overtones, especially in the West. For those of us who were there and involved in the events of the day,, the countdown to June 4, commencing around Easter, takes on the sacral quality of a joyful story turned tragedy as it is recounted, step-by-step, moving inexorably closer to doom, like the Catholic stations of the cross.
From the mid-April call to gather in public mourning, to the heady parades in early May for free press, to the saga of ten thousand bicycles circling the city, to the mid-May declaration of a hunger strike, to the million-strong outpouring of civilian marchers in sympathy of the strikers, to the ominous declaration of martial law and the inexorable approach of the troops, to the last minute debates and desperate bids for peace to the fierce, bloody crackdown launched late at night on June 3, the night of no moon, and the killing of thousands that followed in the dark, the unsettled spirit of which haunts China still.
The first draft of history, polished and tidied up and packaged in the intervening years, makes for a clean, convincing narrative. After 36 years of incantatory repetition, it’s taken on spiritual, if not quasi-religious overtones.
To some extent, it is the very distance between East and West that has made the Tiananmen narrative as it is known to the world today possible. Seen from afar, the master plot possesses dramatic flair, a colorful cast of characters, a logical progression, and a tragic denouement, all of which, while not untrue, does not capture the context or anything close to the whole picture.
That is not to say that the early media accounts, mostly first-hand accounts, were intentionally inaccurate, though inevitable errors are still being unearthed, examined and addressed.
Tiananmen is so big and so emotional an event it’s almost impossible to write about without bias. Foreign scribes and overseas Chinese observers alike were enchanted by the youthful charm, the David-vs-Goliath odds and self-referential myth-making of the 1989 student movement, and the master narrative reflects that still.
Yet student media accounts of events, even as they unfolded, were also acts of manufacturing consent, and as such almost as nakedly propagandistic as the government narratives they were trying to dismantle.
Information was carefully hoarded and controlled, busybodies were put in charge of other people by fiat, by pluck or by other undemocratic mechanisms. Both inadvertently, and with intent, the student’s rhyming slogans, red banners, social controls, strident discipline and propaganda strategies were very much in the tradition of the communist party they had come to oppose.
Born under Maoism, coming of age in Deng’s China, could it be any other way?
The meaning of the event as we understand it would have reverberated quite differently had the students taken an anti-foreign tone, elements of which were plainly apparent in campus conflicts with African students and anti-Western sentiments leading up to the unrest in the spring of 1989. What was an initially fitful, but ultimately fateful embrace of foreign journalists took place in steps between April and May 1989. Journalists sought out students, students sought out journalists and a media feeding frenzy followed. The BBC, CNN and others became wittingly or not, conduits for student demands, making their local, one-sided story a global one, a story which changed the course of history, and the lives of so many involved.
From the day I was first spotted marching with students by a foreign camera crew and recruited to assist BBC News, I had my doubts about the foreign press corps, just as they no doubt had their doubts about me.
Almost none of them spoke the language or had lived in China for any length of time. I spoke Chinese reasonably well for a foreigner, though not nearly as well as I would like to have, and knew my way around well enough to be a bridge between cultures. That put me somewhere halfway between the journeyman foreign journalists who were under orders to get street interviews on camera and the locals who variously were unwilling to talk, hesitant to say anything other than pat phrases then in circulation or simply craved attention and talked too much.
It’s not easy being a bridge between two different worlds, especially when the traffic gets hectic and heavy. On the one hand, I was “one of them,” seen as one of the visiting Brits, by virtue of being a Caucasian foreigner in their midst, and on the other hand, I was this weird American, the “the Yank,” as I was affectionately known, who lived in a Chinese dorm and spoke the lingo and seemed knew a lot of people involved in the movement.
The BBC news teams included world-class cameraman and producer hacks seasoned in covering foreign conflict who were quick to supplement what little they had by consulting the latest from London and New York. The gap between the way foreigners saw what was happening and Chinese did was obvious to me even then.
The Chinese I approached and talked to, however deeply sensitive to cultural and political currents of the time, no matter how moved, inspired and confused they were by events as they unfolded, rarely saw things with the certainty or apparent clarity of the ace foreign journalists. They often asked us what was happening instead of the other way around.
The pronouncements of those khaki-clad journos passing through not only seemed to ring true but became the building blocks of the universal Tiananmen narrative.
There’s a Chinese expression about the clarity of bystanders, 旁观者清, (pang guan zhe qing) but it wasn’t necessarily a case of bystanders seeing things more clearly. Other forces were at work, such as the certitude born of covering famous conflicts, the reassuring comfort of home audience acclaim, the insidious influence of cushy hotels and expense accounts, the play of prejudice and media cliche, knowing how to play to the home audience, outright pluck and sometimes outright arrogance.
The more wily student activists instinctively grasped the demands of broadcast news to focus on the sensational, and sensational sells well, both at the editor’s desk and at the commercial level of paid sponsors. Fairly early on, students desirous of foreign media attention started using English signboards and praised the West for its exemplary democratic ideal, as epitomized by Miss Democracy, a statuesque monument done in the French style of the Statue of Liberty.
Student activists, when not quibbling among themselves for power and influence, put on a united front, offering up a simple, ready-made, easy-to-grasp narrative of good versus bad: students related a tale of innocence against evil, democracy against communism, and sadly, but not with prescience, visions of blood running in the streets.
Not surprisingly, the first draft of history, written mostly by Westerners being spoon-fed the student line, is rife with problems of accuracy, nuance and bias. Politically incorrect observations that touched on unpalatable truths about the crowd mind, like the grumbling of the BBC cameraman about the “little Nazis” with red headbands who refused to allow the crew to enter certain parts of the square, never got included in any coverage, cut long before it even had a chance to be discarded on the cutting room floor.
Overall, however, powerful pictures tell much of the story and tell it well. The net result is a reasonably informative first draft, which for all its imperfections remains incomparably preferable to the drone and drivel of China state media concerned only with protecting their political overlords.
China’s official story line remains simple; it is whatever party historians want it to be, whatever shows the party in the best possible light. Facts rarely get in the way, let alone compassion.
The party line on Tiananmen has undergone minor shifts over the years, but it comes nowhere close to the truth and remains fatally tainted by the faulty and ridiculous premise that the party can do no wrong.
There is no fealty to history, let alone common sense and decency.
People generally know the party line for what it is, an expression of the party’s line. It’s not the truth with a capital T, but a truth you have to pay lip service to. However, it is not necessary to believe the propaganda of the party line to be influenced by it.
Popular impressions of the event in China remain vague, muddled and confused, mistaking day for night and night for day. The party line provides bite-size, easy-to-memorize answers and twisted justifications. Today’s prosperity is claimed to be a result of Deng’s resolute action (ordering the PLA to open fire on unarmed civilians in the middle of the capital city)
To the extent that today’s officials still believe this, China’s prosperity is built on a lie. Official obfuscation with no regard for the truth makes reconciliation impossible. Even more disheartening is the realization that a huge historical event banned long enough—at the time of this writing 36 years and counting—can be made to disappear and fade away, transformed, by a malicious sleight-of-hand, into a non-event that never happened.
The lies are bad enough, but once it disappears, there’s nothing left to lie about.
The party line continues to function as a guideline. It provides actual witnesses of the peaceful popular uprising—at least a million people took part in it in Beijing alone and there were sympathetic demonstrations that broke out across the nation in other cities— talking points for staying out of trouble.
Witnesses and participants know to parrot the line when they have to and keep their private impressions private in order to get by and get ahead in a CCP-dominated society. It’s as if things they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears have been made, by the woeful wand of silence and forced forgetting, to vanish in thin air.
When a topic as critical as Tiananmen 1989 cannot be touched upon in China, it gives undue weight to whatever the foreigners are saying, which in this case means the visiting journalist’s first draft of history still stands as the master account. Properly understood, it was a record made on the go, an attempt to make sense of something as it was happening, hastily scribbled and commented on in the moment, bolstered by news programs and retrospective documentaries that followed.
To this day, the sum of US and UK media production, with some important output from Hong Kong and Japan inform the dominant narrative outside of China. There’s a black and white quality to many of the most-heralded accounts, with catchy covers and titles, most of which get the gist of the history, but miss important nuances and context.
As the author of a book about Tiananmen and consultant to over half a dozen documentaries, I am among the contributors to the narrative and plead guilty as charged. My own outpouring of words and images are part of an effort to make sense of something that still raises questions for me and is not always easy to grasp.
Using notes, photos and video but most of all memory as a guide, I put together a day-by-day account of my days and nights on the square, a personal journey recorded in the book Tiananmen Moon, published in 2009. The Economist reviewed it under the clever headline, “Spied from the Inside” but I prefer Jeff Kingston’s review in the Japan Times.
It’s about a bystander who caught up in the excitement of the moment and was invited to join in. Although at times acutely self-conscious about sticking out in the crowd on account of being Caucasian, I liked marching with fellow students and felt at one with the cause when the focus was on free speech. When the occupation of the Square began, I enjoyed having my place in it and being part of something much bigger than any individual. Eventually I was drawn away to help the media, but I continued to spend my free hours on the square in support of demonstrators exercising peaceful assembly, even if there wasn’t a fundamental right to do so in China.
Even when I started to freelance for BBC, and later ABC TV news, I did not see myself as a journalist, but as a concerned observer, trying to convey what I understood to be happening as it happened. When the hunger strike expanded beyond all expectations, I found myself in disagreement with some of the slogans and tactics, but it’s hard to have any impact once you are out of sync with the prevailing mood and crowd mind.
As a graduate student who spent a good part of the years leading up to Tiananmen on college campuses in China, I was better informed and more aware of what was going on than the jet-set journalists, but also more stridently partisan. Despite concerns that observers can influence that which they observe, I did my share of fanning enthusiasm for the movement as it picked up speed. Even when the hunger strike became prolonged and took a dark turn as students started to drop from exhaustion and lack of food, I was more disposed to treat them as heroes than to advise them to stop, though I began to have intimations of it leading nowhere good.
It’s hard to disagree in a crowd of thousands, and it’s hard to keep one’s contrarian views intact in the face of group pressure. I was quick to see through government lies and shifts in the party line, but slow to see through shifts and twists in the student line, which I tended to echo, though not always knowingly.
For example many of the people I interviewed on the street used suspiciously identical terminology to describe their involvement in the “spontaneous and patriotic political movement” and this is what I believed, though I couldn’t help but wonder why they all seemed to hold the same cue cards.

The balancing act of being a participant/observer culminated in a lengthy, and still-controversial, confessional interview with hunger strike commander-in-chief Chai Ling a few days before the crackdown that was featured in The Gate of Heavenly Peace and other documentaries.
Fair to say I got more involved than I intended to, but getting involved also gave me a frightening glimpse of how the media does not just inform a narrative but creates it, sustains it and sometimes inflames it. Multiple copies of the interview were made before the crackdown to be hand-carried out of China, but some were confiscated at airport customs. The police searched for me at ABC News, but journalists there protected my identity.
It is hard for an earnest observer not to have feelings for the underdog, or fall under the influence of that which they observe, especially in the face of danger, especially with lives on the line. The result was me getting so involved in the student cause that I too was beginning to influence that which was being observed.
By consenting to Chai Ling’s personal request to record a last will and testament as a video interview, which I did on my own time, taking the precaution to travel with her across town in a taxi to conduct the interview in a friend’s apartment, I boosted the fortunes of her faction within the clash of wills that was the student movement. The teary-eyed interview was quickly optioned by ABC, NHK, Asahi and others, and it helped extend Chai Ling’s reach and prestige within the movement by introducing her passionate rambling confession to the world.
Chai Ling and her supporters, despite the drama, the indecisiveness, the histrionics and narcissistic posturing, showed considerable courage, and not a small amount of recklessness, by keeping their vow to stay on the Square to the bitter end,
Calmer voices, such as Wuerkaixi, Wang Dan and later Liu Xiaobo called for a pre-emptive withdrawal to avoid confrontation. Liu also demonstrated the strength of his convictions by remaining there and talking to soldiers on June 4 to arrange a peaceful exit from the Square.
For an American graduate student in Chinese history to be a close witness to the rise and fall of a people’s uprising was exciting and frightening, edifying and deeply transformative. When I reluctantly consented to march on Tiananmen on May 4 with my closest student friends, I was drawn into a roiling sea of thousands of demonstrators, a mass of people on the move, traveling on the crest of unseen currents. I got caught up in the moment, riding the waves of change in the midst of a friendly and cooperative crowd.
I was moved by the cries for justice, the pleas for peace, the dream for a better tomorrow and the plain fun of it. It was a magnificent few weeks, marching from campus to the Square, circling town on banner-bedecked bicycles, gathering with friends under the stars, finding new words for old anthems and songs. I was probably one of the few in the crowd for whom Woodstock was a meaningful reference, but it was a peace, love and joy fest while it lasted.
Even after the dream was smashed to bits in a nightmarish crackdown, a crackdown as gratuitously cruel as it was unnecessary, it was impossible to forget the beautiful light of the movement at its brightest. Something new had blossomed during the weeks and days leading up to June Four, an alternative vision of China animated by a passion so potent, creative, ebullient and bright, that the spirit of it haunts China’s dour leadership still.
Under police investigation for my involvement with the student leadership, I narrowly escaped, taking up the generous offer of the BBC, who never did see me as one of them (for the double whammy of being both American and freelance) to evacuate with John Simpson and crew.
And therein lies the difference with the Chinese students I marched with in the heady days of early May under the bright sun and cool nights of early spring. My friends remained in Beijing with nowhere to go and no means to get away. I’ve kept in close touch with a number of them, and even years later, none of them emerge as great supporters of the movement, though there’s a certain nostalgia about it.
Each of those who were there and had to stay there needed to adapt and adjust to the unpalatable political realities of a country in prolonged crackdown mode, a fate I escaped by moving to Hong Kong and then Japan. Chinese in China were offered little choice other than to play along, or at least pretend to comply with the powers that be. Confessions were concocted and stringent rules were imposed, especially on Beijing college campuses, where many of my friends and acquaintances sat out the dark days in which traces of what had just happened began to be erased.
I have written a short piece of fiction to wrestle with some of these issues—the difference between going and staying, the difference between being a gung-ho foreign journalist fired up by the breaking story and a vulnerable local who quietly supports the cause but must pretend not to in order to stay out of trouble, the difference between lovers brought into the open by outside events.
A Room With Her View is my attempt to address these and other questions inadequately examined in my journalism commentary and non-fictional accounts. Much of the focus of the fiction is on things trivial, the little realities that reflect growing tensions and are in a dialectic with the larger story but are easy to overlook. Far from featuring heroes and villains, it’s about two ordinary people rocked by circumstances beyond their ken and control.
When winding back the clock, it’s important to remember that no one knew how things would turn out back then, although certain troubling indications seem clear in retrospect. To time travel from 1989 back to the present, it’s unlikely that anyone in those long gone days would dare to imagine that even now, three and a half decades into the future, what happened in plain sight in and around Tiananmen in those days remains taboo and still cannot be talked about openly in China.
Many supporting details about what really went on remain unknown, and as more time passes and more memories fade, certain critical aspects of the truth may be never fully known or understood.
The story of Tiananmen, to this day is largely a “Western” concoction written by outsiders, built upon a first draft collectively put together by English-speaking foreign journalists, an account later greatly enriched with the help of escaped Chinese activists, but for the most part it remains a tale told after the fact from the outside looking in.
The inside China side to the story remains poorly understood, suppressed and incomplete.
Thus the foreign media own Tiananmen, and will continue to own Tiananmen until the day that the tragically unnecessary crackdown and the uplifting peaceful uprising that preceded it can be openly researched, honestly reviewed and discussed without fear in the place where it actually happened.
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