Remembrance:Tiananmen Square Anniversary
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GR!FF!N
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from BBC....
BBC News - China media 'largely quiet' on Tiananmen anniversary
Global Times,China.......
BBC News - China media 'largely quiet' on Tiananmen anniversary
Global Times,China.......
55100864
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How comes china that lead by bunch of naive teenager can be successful? it was just an US organized color revolution, nothing more. we encourage the independent democratic evolution，but any movement that pushed by invisible US hands should be crashed again and again.
GR!FF!N
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@Nihonjin1051
don't deviate from the topic..I urge you to delete your post as soon,it'll become all about WW-II,not Tiananmen Square.
don't deviate from the topic..I urge you to delete your post as soon,it'll become all about WW-II,not Tiananmen Square.
GR!FF!N
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meanwhile...there is still lot of discussion and speculation going on about students who were participated,Tank man and how many people died....
USA asking to release the detainees...
US Calls for Release of Detainees on Tiananmen Anniversary
http://www.news1130.com/2014/06/02/tiananmen-square-25-years-later-u-s-congress-hosts-witnesses-for-anniversary/
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/04/tiananmen-square-china-censorship_n_5444792.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
USA asking to release the detainees...
US Calls for Release of Detainees on Tiananmen Anniversary
http://www.news1130.com/2014/06/02/tiananmen-square-25-years-later-u-s-congress-hosts-witnesses-for-anniversary/
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/04/tiananmen-square-china-censorship_n_5444792.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
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pigtaker
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This is one of the best decision our government ever made. without it, there is no today's China, which could challange the dominance of western nations, whose fortune came from looting the world through colonization and slavery traficking.
We are happy we don't take the decocracy poison the westerns prescribe for us, otherwise we could become a pathetic shithole country like India, or Egypt, Lybia whatever. That is what the western want us to be.
Western and its brainwashed pawns could enjoy their criticism as much as they can, while we stride well into our further progress.
We are happy we don't take the decocracy poison the westerns prescribe for us, otherwise we could become a pathetic shithole country like India, or Egypt, Lybia whatever. That is what the western want us to be.
Western and its brainwashed pawns could enjoy their criticism as much as they can, while we stride well into our further progress.
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I Do Not Forget
Australian artist Wang Xu's self-portrait 'I Do Not Forget' shows him with people fleeing the Tiananmen Square massacre, and attests to his determination to remember those days in 1989 when his life changed.
Australian artist Wang Xu s self-portrait I Do Not Forget commemorates Tiananmen Square massacre - Yahoo!7
Australian artist Wang Xu's self-portrait 'I Do Not Forget' shows him with people fleeing the Tiananmen Square massacre, and attests to his determination to remember those days in 1989 when his life changed.
Australian artist Wang Xu s self-portrait I Do Not Forget commemorates Tiananmen Square massacre - Yahoo!7
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The Tiananmen Square Massacre Myth (slightly expanded version of my Japan Times article of 7/21/07)
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.
Birth of Tianamen
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.
Birth of Tianamen
Pangu
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Black info and media gullibility: creation of the Tiananmen myth
by Gregory Clark
But how did that myth come to exist in the first place?
After all, those embassy cables have long been available, at the Tiananmen site on Google, provided courtesy of the U.S. government. As well, several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any alleged massacre.
Recently the massacre believers have begun to tell us that while maybe the “massacre” did not occur in the square, it certainly did occur in the streets and alleys leading to the square. But here, too, the Embassy cables tell a very different story. Relevant details include:
• Beijing sent in unarmed troops in its bid to clear the square of remaining students as the demonstrations wound down. When those troops were mocked and blocked by protesting crowds, Beijing hurriedly decided to send in armed troops, whose vehicles were also blocked.
The vehicles were also fire-bombed with their crews incinerated inside. (Reuters has yet to release a photo of an incinerated soldier being strung up under an overhead bridge.)
• Wild shooting then broke out, mainly from an out-of-control unit, which other units sought to restrain sometimes by force. Chaos reigned and casualties, on both sides, were heavy in the streets leading to the square.
• There were also disturbances near the square entrance, after students attacked and killed a soldier trying to enter.
• The remaining 3,000 students in the square left peacefully when requested by the troop commander early on the morning of June 4.
So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre?
A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square.
The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled “The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press.” Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media’s pack instinct not only created the false massacre story; it also led those media to miss the far more important story that night, namely a popular uprising against the regime in its own Beijing streets. (A summary of the report can be found at www.alternativeinsight.com/Tiananmen.html)
Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed he was at the square when troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds.
Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted — one of the many black information operations organized by British intelligence over the years.
U.K. black information efforts are much more pervasive than most realize. They began in the Cold War years with the creation of an International Research Department within the Foreign Office whose job was to provide gray and black information propaganda for use from unattributed sources.
Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, “the strategic placement of lies and false rumors,” while gray propaganda was “the production of slanted, but not fictitious, nonattributable information.”
According to Henry, it played a key role in helping to justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965.
Its Forum World Features was also active in planting seemingly impartial articles endorsing the Saigon version of the Vietnam War.
Ironically, after seeking to cover up real massacres by pro-Western regimes in Asia, the U.K. operation then seems to have excelled itself by inventing a phony massacre by a Chinese regime.
The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing regime had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption and loss of face to the regime. Some regime leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected.
When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could.
Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres of protesting students in Mexico in 1968 and Thailand in 1976 (no hint of negotiations for compromises there as the killings were immediate and brutal), still goes out of its way to paint a false picture of a brutal Chinese regime willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands.
This is not to deny that the regime can be highly insensitive, even brutal, at times. I was once a minor victim, back in the bad old Cultural Revolution days. Despite having organized single-handedly a visit by an Australian team to join the all-important 1971 ping-pong diplomacy, I was first threatened with expulsion and then formally reprimanded by the Chinese Foreign Ministry for the sin of having tried to help non-Chinese-speaking Australian journalists cover the visit.
I could sense, even then, the simmering anti-regime hostility that would erupt on Beijing streets in 1989. And diplomatic sources tell me that there was a real massacre of protesting students back in 1976 following anti-regime protests after former Premier Zhou Enlai died.
That was China then — when more media coverage of regime excesses would have been better than gushing reports of ping-pong friendship. But that is no excuse for the later media excesses over Tiananmen.
True, the regime does itself no service by its continuing crackdown on some of the 1989 student leaders. But an April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham’s book, “Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising,” — a book whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre — provides a clue.
It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, saying that creating a “sea of blood” might be the only way to shake the regime. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops (in those days protesting citizens did not use petrol bombs), then the anger of the regime becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that.
Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.
Gregory Clark is a former Australian diplomat who specialized in Chinese affairs. A Japanese language translation of this article will appear at www.gregoryclark.net
Black info and media gullibility: creation of the Tiananmen myth | The Japan Times
by Gregory Clark
- Jul 1, 2011
Article history - SHARE
But how did that myth come to exist in the first place?
After all, those embassy cables have long been available, at the Tiananmen site on Google, provided courtesy of the U.S. government. As well, several impartial Western observers in the square at the time, including a Reuters correspondent and a Spanish TV crew, have long insisted, and written, that they saw no sign of any alleged massacre.
Recently the massacre believers have begun to tell us that while maybe the “massacre” did not occur in the square, it certainly did occur in the streets and alleys leading to the square. But here, too, the Embassy cables tell a very different story. Relevant details include:
• Beijing sent in unarmed troops in its bid to clear the square of remaining students as the demonstrations wound down. When those troops were mocked and blocked by protesting crowds, Beijing hurriedly decided to send in armed troops, whose vehicles were also blocked.
The vehicles were also fire-bombed with their crews incinerated inside. (Reuters has yet to release a photo of an incinerated soldier being strung up under an overhead bridge.)
• Wild shooting then broke out, mainly from an out-of-control unit, which other units sought to restrain sometimes by force. Chaos reigned and casualties, on both sides, were heavy in the streets leading to the square.
• There were also disturbances near the square entrance, after students attacked and killed a soldier trying to enter.
• The remaining 3,000 students in the square left peacefully when requested by the troop commander early on the morning of June 4.
So whence the story of a Tiananmen Square massacre?
A lurid BBC report at the time was one important source. Other reporters may then have felt compelled to chime in even though none of them, including the BBC, had actually been in the square.
The best expose of what happened can be found in a detailed 1998 report from the Columbia University School of Journalism titled “The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press.” Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media’s pack instinct not only created the false massacre story; it also led those media to miss the far more important story that night, namely a popular uprising against the regime in its own Beijing streets. (A summary of the report can be found at www.alternativeinsight.com/Tiananmen.html)
Mathews traces much of the problem to a Hong Kong newspaper that immediately, after the 1989 disturbance, ran a long story under the name of an alleged student protester. He claimed he was at the square when troops arrived with machine guns to mow down students in the hundreds.
Distributed around the globe, the article was seen as final proof that the original BBC and other massacre reports were accurate. But the alleged author of that report was never located, and for good reason: The article was almost certainly planted — one of the many black information operations organized by British intelligence over the years.
U.K. black information efforts are much more pervasive than most realize. They began in the Cold War years with the creation of an International Research Department within the Foreign Office whose job was to provide gray and black information propaganda for use from unattributed sources.
Black propaganda was, according to an Australian researcher into the topic, Adam Henry, “the strategic placement of lies and false rumors,” while gray propaganda was “the production of slanted, but not fictitious, nonattributable information.”
According to Henry, it played a key role in helping to justify or downplay one truly dreadful postwar massacre in Asia, namely the slaughter of up to a half a million leftwing Indonesians in 1965.
Its Forum World Features was also active in planting seemingly impartial articles endorsing the Saigon version of the Vietnam War.
Ironically, after seeking to cover up real massacres by pro-Western regimes in Asia, the U.K. operation then seems to have excelled itself by inventing a phony massacre by a Chinese regime.
The fact is that for seven weeks the Beijing regime had tolerated a student protest occupation of its iconic central square despite the disruption and loss of face to the regime. Some regime leaders even tried to negotiate compromises, which some of the student leaders later regretted having rejected.
When eventually troops were sent in to clear the square, the demonstrations were already ending. But by this time the Western media were there in force, keen to grab any story they could.
Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres of protesting students in Mexico in 1968 and Thailand in 1976 (no hint of negotiations for compromises there as the killings were immediate and brutal), still goes out of its way to paint a false picture of a brutal Chinese regime willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands.
This is not to deny that the regime can be highly insensitive, even brutal, at times. I was once a minor victim, back in the bad old Cultural Revolution days. Despite having organized single-handedly a visit by an Australian team to join the all-important 1971 ping-pong diplomacy, I was first threatened with expulsion and then formally reprimanded by the Chinese Foreign Ministry for the sin of having tried to help non-Chinese-speaking Australian journalists cover the visit.
I could sense, even then, the simmering anti-regime hostility that would erupt on Beijing streets in 1989. And diplomatic sources tell me that there was a real massacre of protesting students back in 1976 following anti-regime protests after former Premier Zhou Enlai died.
That was China then — when more media coverage of regime excesses would have been better than gushing reports of ping-pong friendship. But that is no excuse for the later media excesses over Tiananmen.
True, the regime does itself no service by its continuing crackdown on some of the 1989 student leaders. But an April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham’s book, “Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising,” — a book whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre — provides a clue.
It quotes one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, saying that creating a “sea of blood” might be the only way to shake the regime. If frustrated students leaving the square carried out those petrol bomb attacks on troops (in those days protesting citizens did not use petrol bombs), then the anger of the regime becomes a lot more understandable. But I doubt whether any of those responsible for the original phony story will get round to details like that.
Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense.
Gregory Clark is a former Australian diplomat who specialized in Chinese affairs. A Japanese language translation of this article will appear at www.gregoryclark.net
Black info and media gullibility: creation of the Tiananmen myth | The Japan Times
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Genesis
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I can honestly say, today's Chinese are more concerned with projecting power abroad than doing something at home. No Chinese today feels that they must rise up, because the success speaks for itself.
I'm not insulting the Indians or Philippines in this particular post, but you guys really set a terrible example, I mean if you had failed less than maybe there be more discontent, but the government don't even have to say look at them, the average Chinese disregards these countries much as the US does to us, except more so.
China isn't really distracting the public, it's more like the outside world is constantly proving us right rather than showing us how it's done.
I'm not insulting the Indians or Philippines in this particular post, but you guys really set a terrible example, I mean if you had failed less than maybe there be more discontent, but the government don't even have to say look at them, the average Chinese disregards these countries much as the US does to us, except more so.
China isn't really distracting the public, it's more like the outside world is constantly proving us right rather than showing us how it's done.
Pangu
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ByRichard RothCBS NewsJune 4, 2009, 8:59 AM
There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre"
(AP (file))
For years now (certainly by the time of the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen) scholars — and many journalists — have been describing it as a weekend massacre, a massacre in Beijing, the "Beijing massacre" or the "crackdown" in Tiananmen, but not a "Tiananmen Square massacre."
"Tiananmen massacre" is a phrase that still has currency, but it does tend to be used a lot less now in careful accounts of what happened there.
Behind this is the weight of eyewitness accounts, de-classified Western government reports, and historians' work that supports the story of a brief period of negotiation between the army and some student hold-outs (there weren't all that many left in the square by then) when troops began entering the square in force just before dawn -- silencing the public address system loudspeakers with a volley of gunfire. The last group of protestors filed out of the square to the south soon after.
I was being held captive by Chinese army troops on the south portico of the Great Hall of the People (which forms one of the borders of the Square) when that round of gunfire occurred.
I could hear it but I could not see into the Square. Around forty minutes later, Derek Williams and I were driven in a pair of army jeeps right through the square, almost along its full length, and into the Forbidden City.
Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a "massacre" had recently occurred in that place.
Later, being debriefed on-air by Dan Rather, I recall making an effort to avoid using the word "massacre." I referred to an "assault" and an "attack."
I reported what I saw; I said I hadn't seen any bodies. Admittedly, I've never made a point of trying to contradict a colleague on the air; I've simply stuck to my own story, because I've believed it's true.
Some have found it uncomfortable that all this conforms with what the Chinese government has always claimed, perhaps with a bit of sophistry: that there was no "massacre in Tiananmen Square."
But there's no question many people were killed by the army that night around Tiananmen Square, and on the way to it — mostly in the western part of Beijing. Maybe, for some, comfort can be taken in the fact that the government denies that, too.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre" - CBS News
There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre"
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(AP (file))
For years now (certainly by the time of the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen) scholars — and many journalists — have been describing it as a weekend massacre, a massacre in Beijing, the "Beijing massacre" or the "crackdown" in Tiananmen, but not a "Tiananmen Square massacre."
"Tiananmen massacre" is a phrase that still has currency, but it does tend to be used a lot less now in careful accounts of what happened there.
Behind this is the weight of eyewitness accounts, de-classified Western government reports, and historians' work that supports the story of a brief period of negotiation between the army and some student hold-outs (there weren't all that many left in the square by then) when troops began entering the square in force just before dawn -- silencing the public address system loudspeakers with a volley of gunfire. The last group of protestors filed out of the square to the south soon after.
I was being held captive by Chinese army troops on the south portico of the Great Hall of the People (which forms one of the borders of the Square) when that round of gunfire occurred.
I could hear it but I could not see into the Square. Around forty minutes later, Derek Williams and I were driven in a pair of army jeeps right through the square, almost along its full length, and into the Forbidden City.
Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a "massacre" had recently occurred in that place.
Later, being debriefed on-air by Dan Rather, I recall making an effort to avoid using the word "massacre." I referred to an "assault" and an "attack."
I reported what I saw; I said I hadn't seen any bodies. Admittedly, I've never made a point of trying to contradict a colleague on the air; I've simply stuck to my own story, because I've believed it's true.
Some have found it uncomfortable that all this conforms with what the Chinese government has always claimed, perhaps with a bit of sophistry: that there was no "massacre in Tiananmen Square."
But there's no question many people were killed by the army that night around Tiananmen Square, and on the way to it — mostly in the western part of Beijing. Maybe, for some, comfort can be taken in the fact that the government denies that, too.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre" - CBS News
