This one was sparked by an item in the Global Times debunking a recent ‘report‘ from the former UK ambassador to China. This ambassador claims that more than 10,000 people were killed. But there is one catch: his ‘source’. It turns out to be a person who ‘was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council‘. Hmmm … anonymous third hand information is hardly reliable.
But then I went searching, since I had earlier come across a piece that systematically debunked the whole account as what would now be called ‘fake news’. Let’s stay away from Chinese sources, for the sake of argument and see what turned up in corporate press locations traditionally hostile to China and the CPC.
To begin with, Jay Matthews, who was a reporter for the Washington Post covering the events in 1989. In September/October of that year he penned a piece that already debunked the story. This was followed up by a CBS reporter, who indicates that by the time the army entered the square most students and protestors had already left, with the remainder leaving after a period of negotiations. The only gunfire was a burst that silenced the loudspeaker system. Then there were the wikileaks cables that showed yet again that there was no bloodshed in the square itself, although some deaths in other parts of Beijing. This one adds that most soldiers who entered the square did not actually carry guns.
Perhaps the sharpest piece comes from Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat and Japanese resident. His article appeared first in the Japan Times (see also here), where he points out the first acts of violence were by protesters setting alight buses full of soldiers, with some charred corpses strung up from overpasses (he cites the suppression of photos of burning buses and of a charred corpse). And the famous image of ‘Tankman’ – well, this one was actually taken a day after the events as the tanks were moving away. The conclusion: not only did the troops and government act with considerable restraint, even without adequate training in crowd control at the time, but the very idea of a ‘massacre’ was the result of UK and US ‘black information’. Or what many would now call fake news.
Fuentes: