Much Else Besides

Brendan O'Neill writes:

The liberal blogosphere got its undies in a bunch yesterday in response to some old comments of George Galloway’s on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Galloway had allegedly said: “It is a remarkable thing, that something we’ve been told for 20 years was a massacre, that not a single photograph of a single dead person has been adduced.” Yet many of those attacking Galloway have been complicit in a far more insidious and successful whitewashing of what occurred in Beijing in June 1989. Their promotion of the mainstream Amnesty/Human Rights Watch narrative – namely that students and intellectuals were massacred in Beijing’s main square – has nurtured a profound lack of understanding across the West about what really happened in China 22 years ago.

Mention the words “Tiananmen Square massacre” to the average person and they will tell you that what happened is that rebellious students and some of their professors bravely set up a camp in the middle of Beijing demanding political reform, only to be beaten and finally crushed by the regime. And it’s true – that did happen. But so did much else besides, but it has been airbrushed from the official Western version of what occurred, presumably because it doesn’t neatly fit into the students-vs-soldiers narrative. In 1989 there were uprising across Beijing, and in other parts of China, and the key victims of the authorities’ wanton violence were not actually students but workers. But they have now largely been forgotten thanks in part to the politicking of certain human rights activists.

In their fascinating book Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro write: “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 point out that, as a consequence of Premier Deng Xiaoping’s often crude market reforms, protesting Chinese workers “had much more to be angry about than the students” and the Chinese Communist Party’s aim was to “crush them”. Former Observer editor Jonathan Fenby has argued that there was a “far bigger massacre of non-students” in 1989, which is why some Chinese dissidents refer to the events as “the Beijing massacre” rather than the “Tiananmen Square massacre”. Jay Matthews, the former Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post, is one of very few reporters to have accused the mainstream Western media of spreading inaccurate accounts of what took place in Beijing. “Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night”, he says, “but in a different place [to the square] and under different circumstances”.

In short, the massacres in Beijing in 1989 were more widespread and more terrible than we have been led to believe by the Tiananmen Square-focused accounts constantly fed to us by human rights groups and liberal commentators. For them, it is far neater to present the events of June 1989 as a straightforward case of students and intellectuals – people like *us* – standing up to an evil regime, since that reinforces their message that it is up to small groups of well-educated human-rights promoters to sort out the problems of the world. The other brave people who rose up in 1989 – workers, ordinary residents of Beijing – have been subtly expunged from history.

Ironically, for very different reasons, both the Chinese regime and its Western critics insist on presenting the events of June 1989 as a straightforward stand-off in a square – China does it in order to show, falsely, that this was just a minority protest by troublemaking students, and its Western critics do it in order to boost their own campaigns.