By Matthew John
Every June in the United States we are subjected to a barrage of anti-China propaganda from major media outlets and prominent political pundits (on top of the regularly-scheduled China bashing). The story has changed over the years and decades, but the original went something like this: On June 4, 1989, after weeks of student-led demonstrations, a gang of ruthless, authoritarian People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers entered Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and conducted a brutal, cold-blooded massacre of unarmed, peaceful “pro-democracy” protesters, resulting in hundreds - maybe thousands - of gruesome deaths. This vicious slaughter of innocent civilians illustrates just how much those filthy commies hate freedom and democracy, and the measures they are willing to take to prevent these superior ideals from taking root in their hellish, dystopian society.
Despite being completely fictional, this popular narrative remains useful to the Western capitalist class as a method of demonizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ongoing socialist development in the midst of Washington’s new Cold War. Recognizing this geopolitical reality, I sought to play my part in dismantling what is undoubtedly one of the most cherished anti-communist atrocity fabrications in the Western world. I hoped my contribution would become one of the last nails in this counterfeit chronicle’s coffin. After some rudimentary research, I felt compelled to survey my Instagram followers - an online community of about 65,000 users - by posing a simple question:
Do you believe there was a massacre (i.e. mass, indiscriminate murder of unarmed, peaceful protesters) by Chinese soldiers in early June, 1989 in Tiananmen Square (Beijing)?
The last time I checked this post, 821 people had participated, with 15 percent responding, “Yes,” and the remaining 85 percent responding, “No.” My page is very obviously communist in its political orientation, and I have posted about this topic several times before, in addition to my consistent efforts to debunk anti-communist propaganda more broadly. For several years, the bulk of my content has been unequivocally Marxist-Leninist in character and there has been an open effort to defend socialist countries (past and present) from what I see as unfair or disingenuous bourgeois criticism. Nevertheless, more than 120 respondents still expressed a belief in the conventional Western narrative (the “Tiananmen Square massacre”). Maybe I had not purged enough liberals.
I further articulated the motivations behind this inquiry to my sizable leftist audience:
I've been reading mainstream summaries of the violence that broke out in the final days of the student protest movement and the myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre has largely already been debunked. But it's this weird Orwellian situation where, aside from a few Western journalists like Jay Mathews and Richard Roth, many mainstream sources just act like this whole "massacre" narrative never happened. Roth and Mathews have openly and explicitly acknowledged that there wasn't a massacre and that, as reporters, they have a responsibility to correct the record, as they themselves were complicit in spreading the initial lies. But other mainstream Western sources simply discuss the violence occurring in Beijing between rioters and soldiers, often correctly noting that protesters started the violence and even killed soldiers before the soldiers fought back.
There is definitely a wide range of terms, phrases, etc. that these sources use, and the massacre narrative is sometimes still heavily implied (some, like the History Channel, continue to unequivocally state that a massacre occurred in the square). Strangely, if you read the relevant Wikipedia entry, for instance, they never even imply there was a massacre in the square, and are clear that the "protesters" (rioters) initiated the deadly violence in Beijing (none of which occurred in Tiananmen Square itself). Even the Victims of Communism website is nuanced and vague regarding this topic. What's interesting is that, from what I can tell, these sources themselves have largely abandoned the massacre narrative, while the general public continues to cling to the myth.
Indeed, I felt as though the “massacre” narrative itself had been massacred and left for dead. I momentarily gaslit myself, wondering if the myth I so diligently sought to debunk had been discarded and forgotten long ago. Let me break this down in more detail so you can see what I mean. As mentioned above, a number of mainstream Western commentators have openly rejected the “massacre” narrative, including Nicholas Kristof, Jay Mathews, Richard Roth, Graham Earnshaw, Eugenio Bregolt, Gregory Clark, and James Miles. Mathews covered the 1989 Tiananmen protests as Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. In 1998, nearly a decade after the events in question, the seasoned reporter published a controversial piece in the Columbia Journalism Review entitled, “The Myth of Tiananmen.” In it, Mathews laments the fact that “many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night,” referring to June 4, 1989. After recounting several examples of prominent American newspapers embracing and proliferating the Tiananmen Square “massacre” narrative, Mathews explains, “The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”
The reporter then traces the myth to its likely origins and recalls an immediate but ineffective rebuttal:
Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. [...] Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on.
Matthews even acknowledged his own complicity in spreading the famous falsehood:
It is hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression. Rereading my own stories published after Tiananmen, I found several references to the “Tiananmen massacre.” At the time, I considered this space-saving shorthand.
This admission was comparable to that of BBC reporter James Miles, who “admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that ‘there was no massacre [in] Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops.’”
About a decade after the publication of the aforementioned piece by Jay Mathews, a CBS reporter named Richard Roth published a similar article, which was even more bluntly headlined, “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre.’” Like Mathews, Roth reported on the 1989 student protests from Beijing, where he was at one point detained by Chinese authorities. Roth described what he saw while being transported through the Square in a military vehicle:
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.
The reporter also echoed a sentiment I expressed toward the beginning of this piece; a substantial change in tone over the years can be observed from mainstream Western sources who seemed to gradually adjust the language they used to describe this history, possibly best illustrated by the shift in terminology from “massacre” to “crackdown.”
Shortly before the Roth piece, former Australian government official Gregory Clark published an op-ed in the Japan Times entitled, “The Birth of a Massacre Myth.” Clark brings up the aforementioned Jay Mathews piece, as well as three additional individuals I want to focus on briefly: Graham Ernshaw, Hou Dejian, and Eugenio Bregolat. Bregolat was Spanish ambassador who was in Beijing during the 1989 protests. Clark recalls an important point made by Bregolat, in which the ambassador observed that “Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew in the square at the time, and if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to see it and record it.” (I often ponder this aspect of the Tiananmen discourse - the complete lack of video or photographic documentation of this supposed “massacre” juxtaposed with the widespread, faith-based belief in a ghastly, yet unfounded story.) The two other prominent individuals Clark mentions, Reuters reporter Graham Ernshaw and protester Hou Dejian, were both in the Square when it was cleared and neither witnessed any violence conducted by soldiers, much less an epic, cold-blooded massacre of civilians.
In addition to these prominent, mainstream Western sources sporadically surfacing to acknowledge that there was indeed no massacre in Tiananmen Square, we also have corroboration in the form of leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing relaying an account from Chilean diplomat Carlos Gallo:
[GALLO] WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD. HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR--TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS; THEY WERE BACKED UP BY ARMED SOLDIERS. AS THE MILITARY CONSOLIDATED ITS CONTROL OF THE SQUARE'S PERIMETER, STUDENTS AND CIVILIANS GATHERED AROUND THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE'S HEROES. GALLO SAID WOUNDED, INCLUDING SOME SOLDIERS, CONTINUED TO BE BROUGHT TO THE RED CROSS STATION.
Now that the “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative has been sufficiently debunked, an elephant remains in the room: the deadly violence that did occur in Beijing, serving as the final chapter of the 1989 student protests. As political commentator and socialist organizer Brian Becker wrote in 2014, “What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.”
The reality on the ground, as Mick Kelly wrote, was that “[t]here was in fact a rebellion, which was counter-revolutionary in nature, that was eventually put down by military force.” This violent chaos included urban warfare between PLA soldiers and rioters who had commandeered military vehicles, stolen rifles, and armed themselves with Molotov cocktails and an assortment of other armaments. At the time, the Washington Post recounted that “[o]n one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles.”
Protesters killed and injured soldiers, who were often unarmed, in brutal ways, including beating them or burning them to death, and sometimes even stripping them and stringing up their lynched, charred corpses for all to see. Westerners are often surprised to learn that about two dozen soldiers and police officers (possibly more) died in these clashes. When the dust had settled, the death toll was likely around 300, which is certainly tragic and horrific, but far less jarring than the sensationally inflated Western estimates in the thousands.
After becoming acquainted with the true history of Tiananmen, it is useful to examine mainstream Western summaries of the events in question. Let’s start with Amnesty International’s “What is the Tiananmen Crackdown?”:
On 4 June 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on students and workers who had been peacefully protesting for political reforms in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of people were killed, including children and older persons. Tens of thousands more were arrested across China in the suppression that followed.
This summary, despite falsely referring to the protests as “peaceful,” does make a concerted effort to not directly place the violence in the Square (although an average Western reader would likely miss this distinction and assume the excerpt is bolstering the conventional narrative). The students and workers had been protesting in and around the Square. They weren’t necessarily there when the crackdown occurred. But as I mentioned earlier, there is no “we need to be extra clear and correct some widespread misconceptions” moment. It’s all very calculated and intentionally deceptive. The same is true of this summary from the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian:
On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the Square with tanks, crushing the protests with terrible human costs. Estimates of the numbers killed vary. The Chinese Government has asserted that injuries exceeded 3,000 and that over 200 individuals, including 36 university students, were killed that night. Western sources, however, are skeptical of the official Chinese report and most frequently cite the toll as hundreds or even thousands killed.
The above excerpt is a masterclass in implying something without actually stating it, leaving plenty of room for plausible deniability. What unequivocally occurred within the Square, according to this summary, was that the PLA “stormed” it “with tanks.” When the army “crush[ed] the protests with terrible human costs,” was that also in the Square? And is “terrible human costs” referring to deaths? Why not just say “deaths”? Why put that in a separate sentence? Why not just say the soldiers stormed the square and killed a bunch of people? And regarding this next sentence about those who were killed, are we still talking about something that occurred in the Square? This is unclear, as these elements of the story are separated by punctuation and veiled in vagueness. As I have alluded to, it is intentionally unclear.
A clear picture of what happened is not painted, because overtly admitting their cherished “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative turned out to be fictional would be profoundly embarrassing, damaging their credibility and weakening their anti-China narrative in the process. Instead, these bourgeois sources opt to incrementally chip away at the false “massacre” story with caveats and crafty language, leaving curious communist commentators like myself confused - wondering if said narrative even existed in the first place. Even the neo-fascist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has abandoned the traditional “massacre” narrative:
In the spring of 1989, Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the epicenter of massive pro-democracy demonstrations that spread to over 100 Chinese cities and involved over 100 million people. Unprecedented in scale in a communist country, these demonstrations brought keenly felt self-confidence, strength, and hope to the participants and the society at large. To hold on to its dictatorship, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized the military as well as the full force of the party and state machinery to crush the demonstrations on June 3-4, 1989. The CCP claimed that about 300 people were killed. Estimates by NGOs, news media, and foreign intelligence agencies range from 2,000 to 10,000 killed.
The History Channel is the only mainstream Western source I could find that apparently didn’t get the memo, as they continue claiming government forces indiscriminately fired on crowds in the Square and continue employing the outdated and inaccurate term “Tiananmen Square massacre”:
On June 4, 1989, […] Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. [...] In the United States, editorialists and members of Congress denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre and pressed for President George Bush to punish the Chinese government. A little more than three weeks later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against the People’s Republic of China in response to the brutal violation of human rights.
The “massacre” fantasy - a harrowing tale of bloodthirsty PLA soldiers indiscriminately mowing down unarmed, peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square with machine gun fire - isn’t the only aspect of this history the West gets wrong. I recently spoke with Qiao Collective member Sun Feiyang, whose father attended some of the 1989 protests in China, about the complexities and contradictions of this tumultuous period (listen to our discussion here). In 2019, Feiyang wrote about the nature of the Tiananmen protests, including many unsavory details that are seldom discussed in the West. For instance, student protest leaders often exhibited an elitist contempt for workers, cordoning off protest areas so no one else could join. Student leader Wang Dan explained this sentiment concisely when he said, “The movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others."
Another protest leader, Chai Ling, yearned for a massacre of protesters by government forces:
The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?
When asked if she would remain in the Square, the self-described “chief commander” replied:
No, I won’t. Because my situation is different. My name is on the government’s hit list. I’m not going to let myself be destroyed by this government. I want to live.
Liu Xiaobo, who was considered a more “moderate” protest leader, believed China needed “300 years of colonialism” and later supported George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tiananmen protests also had roots in anti-Black racism and were supported by the CIA, who smuggled activists out of China through what Newsweek described as “an underground railroad run by an odd alliance of human-rights advocates, Western diplomats, businessmen, professional smugglers and the kings of the Hong Kong underworld.”
Indeed, the Western capitalist orientation of the student protest leadership, including its desire for violent regime change, was on full display. As Becker noted, “The protest leaders erected a huge statue that resembled the United States’ Statue of Liberty in the middle of Tiananmen Square. They were signaling to the entire world that their political sympathies were with the capitalist countries and the United States in particular. They proclaimed that they would continue the protests until the government was ousted.” The lesser-known, elucidating details of this history could continue for pages, but I feel as though they are beyond the scope of this article. In lieu of a substantial tangent within this text, I’d recommend exploring Qiao Collective’s Tiananmen Protests Reading List.
Conclusion
The “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative is, in a sense, a classic example of anti-communist propaganda. It includes elaborate fabrication, exaggeration, omission, and double standards. It is repeated over and over again by solemn official sources to inspire an emotional and visceral reaction and thus shape the perspectives of millions. Important details are intentionally excluded, essentially erasing the political and historical context in order to bolster the Western bourgeois narrative revolving around the ostensibly “pro-democracy” nature of the protests. And what makes this particular atrocity myth even more persistent is the bitterness and resentment the Western capitalist class harbors towards China’s socialist project as it continues to advance, having defeated this aforementioned attempted counterrevolution 36 years ago.
In another sense, this famous fairy tale is unique. Unlike other anti-communist fables such as the “Holodomor” or the “Uyghur genocide,” both of which are fallacious yet persistent, the story of the blood-drenched Beijing square has been quietly abandoned by the Western press and its bourgeois backers. The original cartoonish sensationalism has been replaced with a measured, meticulously crafted rewrite that includes the same themes and accusations (authoritarianism, opposition to “democracy,” the crushing of dissent, state repression and brutality, etc.). Even after removing the central element (the fictional June 4th massacre), the narrative itself miraculously remains intact. China, we are told, is a totalitarian police state that viciously destroys the will of the people, regardless of whether its government committed unprovoked mass murder or defeated a violent, U.S.-backed, pro-capitalist rebellion.
Whether it’s called a “massacre” or a “crackdown,” this conventional Western narrative is part of a larger effort to demonize the PRC and its overwhelmingly successful socialist path. However, the seemingly endless negative portrayals of China’s central government we are spoon-fed in the West are completely at odds with a simple truth: The vast majority of Chinese citizens actually support their government (approval ratings were even as high as 95.5 percent in a 2016 Harvard survey). This is because, throughout its history - from the record-breaking life expectancy increases under Mao, to the complete eradication of extreme poverty (accounting for 70 percent of global poverty reduction), to the unprecedented war against COVID-19, to the highly advanced public transportation system, to the crackdown on billionaires - the PRC’s communist government actually has served the interests of its citizens and continues to do so. And it is for this reason that I feel compelled to give Chinese voices the last word on this matter:
The trope of Chinese ignorance to the history of June 4th poses Westerners as the true keepers of Chinese history and the necessary deliverers of the Chinese people from communist authoritarianism. The pervasiveness of this chauvinistic mentality is apparent in the convergence between the neoconservative right and the anti-communist left in proclaiming platitudes of “solidarity with the Chinese people” against their government.
[…]
Contrary to these infantilizing beliefs, many Chinese people—old and young—remember 1989. But the violence of June 4th is held in quiet remembrance in the Chinese psyche not as a desperate yearning for Western intervention or regime change, but as a tragic consequence of the contradictions of the reform and opening era, the legacies of the Cultural Revolution, and an overdetermined geopolitical context in which the U.S. bloc sought to exploit any and all opportunities to foreclose the persistence of actually-existing socialism. Lost in the West’s manipulative commemoration of the Tiananmen protests is the fact that two things exist at once: many Chinese people harbor pain and trauma over the bloodshed and remain supportive of the Communist Party of China and committed to China’s socialist modernization.
