The Fifth Modernization

If there’s one image that the Tiananmen protests 12 years ago have branded on the collective imagination, it’s the one of the man with the tank. While onlookers held their breath, this Chinese Everyman stepped out in front of a rumbling line of tanks. They shifted to avoid him, but he defiantly stepped out in front again, bringing them to a halt.

To the democracy movement’s sympathizers, he is a symbol of individual courage and hope in the face of state-sponsored violence and terror. To the Chinese authorities, the incident was proof of the army’s restraint in the face of provocation. The man with the tank is everyone’s to co-opt, even corporate capitalism’s (he has most recently been seen stopping those tanks again on billboard advertisements for Eveready). He has no say in the matter, for he disappeared soon after the event; we don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.

Who owns his story? Who gets to define what it means? And who owns the bigger story of Tiananmen, in both its particular details and broader meanings?

The Chinese traditionally maintain a line of very practical wisdom on the meaning and value of history. From imperial times to the Maoist era and today, history is a tool for establishing legitimacy. As the China scholar W.J.F. Jenner remarks in his brilliant book-length essay, “The Tyranny of History,” “Chinese governments have, for at least 2,000 years, taken history much too seriously to allow the future to make its own unguided judgments about them.” When a new dynasty came to power, one of the first things it did was to set about compiling the history of the preceding one. Working from the detailed chronicles left behind by the previous reign, they tweaked the story to highlight the rightfulness of their own rulers’ ascension. History belonged to the victor.

But who were the victors at Tiananmen? Was it China’s rulers, who achieved their goal of clearing the square of protesters by the morning of June 4, 1989? Was it the students, who managed to hold out there until then? The Chinese democracy movement in exile, whose ranks and influence abroad swelled as a result? Or was it the Republic of China on Taiwan, which looked particularly good by comparison?

The last corpses hadn’t even been cleared from the streets when the first shots were fired in the battle over the history of those 51 days that began with the death of ex-Party Secretary-General Hu Yaobang on April 15 and ended in the bloody denouement of June 3 and 4. China’s leaders quickly staked their claim on history in People’s Daily editorials and publications like “The True Face of the Counter-revolutionary Riot in Beijing.” The student leaders who managed to escape to the West counterclaimed with interviews in the generally sympathetic Western media and in volumes bearing such titles as “Almost a Revolution.” Chinese intellectuals abroad clocked in with books like “Tell the World: What Happened in China and Why.” It would take the space of this article to list all the works--descriptive, documentary, analytical--that have been written on the subject by scholars, participants, journalists and even martial-law soldiers. And that’s just the printed word. One of the most complex, provocative and moving takes on the events of 1989 was the documentary film “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” produced by the Long Bow Group in 1995, which opens with the enigma of the man and the tank.

So why, nearly 12 years after these events, is the publication of yet another book on this subject considered so newsworthy that both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times made it a front-page story and “60 Minutes” featured it as well? The answer appears simple. “The Tiananmen Papers” claims to be the true history, as the publisher’s line on the book’s dust jacket has it, of “the Chinese leadership’s decision to use force against their own people--in their own words.” The crucial phrase is “in their own words.”

The words in question are not just those that have been chosen for public consumption and processed by the state’s propaganda machine. These words constitute--or so we are told--the highest leaders’ version of events. They are words that traveled over telephone lines between top leader Deng Xiaoping and his old comrade Yang Shangkun, then president of the People’s Republic. These are words that spilled out at meetings of the Party’s supreme decision-making body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, as its members struggled to cope with the demonstrations taking place not just in Beijing but in cities and provincial centers all over the country.

These are angry words, conspiratorial words, guarded words, plain-spoken words and frightened words. These are words that led to the sacking of Zhao Ziyang, the party secretary-general who urged a more conciliatory approach to the protesters, and words that allowed the rise, through irregular means, to the highest levels of power of Jiang Zemin, China’s current president.

These are words culled from the minutes of confidential meetings, from intelligence reports, “internal reference” materials, party directives, summaries of foreign media reports consumed by the leadership at the time and reports to the top from the army, provincial secretaries and education officials at the front lines.

Each word is a brush stroke in a portrait of steadily increasing paranoia, frustration and fear among China’s most powerful men (and one woman) as they faced an unprecedented challenge to their authority. Unable to cope with the message of widespread mass discontent, they chose tragically to believe that the whole affair was being manipulated behind the scenes by a “small handful” of conspirators with ulterior motives.

For example, student anger over pandemic corruption in both the party and government was one of the sparks that lit the protests. Zhao Ziyang suggested the party deal directly with the problem. He even proposed they start by investigating his own family. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, according to “The Tiananmen Papers,” confided to Yang Shangkun: “When the people oppose corruption, of course we agree. Now, with operatives who have ulterior motives out there also opposing corruption, we still have to say that we agree, but of course we know that for them this is only a smoke screen. Their real aim is to topple the Communist Party and overthrow the socialist system.”

It’s a fascinating quote, colorful and enlightening. But is it genuine? We cannot begin to assess the significance of this collection until we can answer this question. And we will not be able to answer this question until we know more about the provenance of the documents and the process by which the editors convinced themselves that they were authentic.

Here’s the first problem: The compiler, a Chinese man who identifies himself as a member of the so-called reform faction of the Communist Party and goes by the pseudonym Zhang Liang, provided the editors not with original documents but with a computer printout of their contents. Here’s the second problem: Zhang Liang, who has adopted the name of an ancient Chinese political strategist, has a political agenda. He makes no bones about the fact that the publication of “The Tiananmen Papers” is intended to serve that agenda. He contends that the publication of these documents will help to bring about democratic change in China. That this may be an admirable goal does not relieve us from wondering, in the absence of the original documents, whether Zhang Liang has tinkered with the text to push his point.

Jenner has observed that even the most venerable Chinese histories were written “not from the unprocessed primary documents of the past regime in question but from the second- and even third-hand compilations, extracts and summaries of original documents compiled daily.”

Yet it is curious that some of the State Security Ministry reports on the massacre were written with such a sympathetic slant: “Each time shots rang out, the citizens hunkered down; but with each lull in the fire they stood up again. Slowly driven back by the troops, they stood their ground. . . .” There’s no doubt that many people working within the state’s security apparatus were appalled by the violence unleashed during those terrible days. At the very least, however, it seems odd that they would use the term “citizens” instead of the term “rioters” when reporting back to higher-ups.

Moreover, the conversations reported in the book appear to be heavily edited. With the notable exception of the cantankerous old soldier Wang Zhen (“Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and no burial!”), the leaders tend to speak with a studied dullness. When the Gang of Thirteen (eight “elders” and five Politburo Standing Committee members) are in full emergency mode, Deng can’t resist reminding the others at length about the value and necessity of economic reform. Isn’t he preaching to the converted by now? Didn’t he purge everyone who thought otherwise years before?

I, for one, would like to see the original documents. I want to know what proportion of the conversations were excised and why. Perhaps the conversations will make more sense in the expanded Chinese edition, to be published in April. There’s no question that “The Tiananmen Papers” is accurate in its generalities, for the story it tells conforms with what we already know to be true. But the devil is in the details.

Editor Andrew Nathan, a respected scholar of Chinese politics and foreign policy at Columbia University, writes in the book’s introduction that when Zhang Liang sought him out for help in publishing the documents, he was wary. But he writes, “Over the course of several years, through a variety of channels and methods, I have satisfied myself that the materials in this book are genuine.” He regrets that he “cannot share [his] grounds for certainty with readers for the time being at least.” That’s unfortunate.

Not all of the documents in “The Tiananmen Papers” are new. A number of them can be found or are cited in other published or archival collections, including the publicly accessible archives of “The Gate of Heavenly Peace.” During the period of the democracy movement, scarcely a day went by without one “secret” document or another making its way to the square and eventually to libraries and universities in the United States, Europe and Australia.

When I asked China scholar Geremie Barme about a quote contained in “The Tiananmen Papers,” allegedly voiced at a secret meeting of the eight “elders,” Barme interrupted to finish the quote in Chinese. “I know that one,” he said. “Saw it in a document circulating on the square. That doesn’t,” he cautioned, “mean it’s true.”

The quote was Deng’s alleged evaluation of Tianjin’s Communist Party secretary Li Ruihuan. If true, it must go down as one of the Great Moments in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. “Don’t be fooled by his carpenter background and all those model-worker hats on his head,” Deng assures the others. “This guy has a brain.”

Another revealing incident allegedly occurs when the elders meet to discuss allegations that Zhao Ziyang’s secretary Bao Tong leaked the decision on martial law to the students. Former state president Li Xiannian says, “I know the man. He’s over 50 but follows fashions like a youngster. He wears gaudy jackets and blue jeans inside Zhongnanhai--what kind of party official is that?” Referring to the fact Bao had organized a “Zhao Ziyang think tank,” Li scoffs, “Our Communist Party doesn’t have think tanks--never has.” Wang Zhen fulminates that Bao Tong should be “arrested immediately! . . . What’s the big deal about arresting a guy like this? We arrested Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four. . . . Just tell Li Peng to arrest him tomorrow and put him in Qincheng [Prison].”

Is this credible? Perhaps. Yet as the former Australian diplomat Kevin Rudd has observed, “After more than half a century of Chinese Kremlinology, we still have no clear idea of what a politbureau minute actually looks like.” Still, he noted that it took Beijing four days “to put out a statement which, while critical of the whole affair, nonetheless conspicuously stopped short of an uncategorical denial of the authenticity of Nathan’s find.”

Coincidentally, in late January, China’s highest court sanctioned the use of the death penalty for people convicted of passing state secrets and sensitive intelligence abroad. The court spokesman denied that this had anything to do with “The Tiananmen Papers.”

Even though “The Tiananmen Papers” is not immediately, demonstrably authentic, it commands our attention, even if one reviewer, Philip Cunningham, has written that reading this volume is a bit “like reading second-hand FBI reports to get a picture of Woodstock in 1969, or Stasi reports on the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Tiananmen, after all, was part Woodstock, part Berlin Wall, that except when the wall fell in China, it fell on the people. There is, it is true, none of the circus-like detail in the book that made the protests such a compelling spectacle at the time: the dancing, the singing, the activists marrying on the square, the humor, the humanity and the pathos of it all.

Perhaps one of the most valuable and noncontroversial contributions of “The Tiananmen Papers” is the way it depicts how widespread the protests were, a fact overlooked in the Beijing-centric focus of so much academic and media discussion of the movement, with the notable exception of “The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces,” edited by Jonathan Unger. Provincial centers across the country exploded in sympathetic demonstrations and civil unrest, some of it violent and resulting in tremendous disruption to both industry and transport. It’s easy to see how the authorities could conclude that if they didn’t act decisively in Beijing, the entire country could fall into chaos.

“The Tiananmen Papers” also shows the extent to which the Chinese leadership suspected that both the United States and Taiwan were involved in manipulating the protests. The U.S. ambassador to Beijing at the time, James Lilley, has said that “the reports on the CIA [in “The Tiananmen Papers”] are exaggerated and inflammatory to appeal to the paranoia of the Chinese leadership,” apparently referring to such revelations as the one that the United States considered arming China’s floating population of itinerant workers as a potential anti-government force. Granted, that allegation in particular has a decidedly lunatic ring to it. Then again, so have many of the CIA’s actual schemes. Remember the Bay of Pigs? Beijing certainly does.

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News of the publication of “The Tiananmen Papers” quickly filtered back to China via the Internet, foreign radio broadcasts and word of mouth. The dissemination of the information in the “Papers” into China from the start has been Zhang’s stated goal. His hope is that this will force a reversal of the official verdict on the protests as “counterrevolutionary turmoil” and pave the way for political reform.

Yet it might have the opposite effect. Bao Tong, Zhao Ziyang’s secretary, who was indeed arrested and spent seven years in prison, agrees that the documents will stimulate useful discussion in China but has cautioned that the authorities may react to their publication by assuming an even more conservative stance. The independent historian Dai Qing, who also served time in Qincheng, warns it could even convince Jiang Zemin and Li Peng, whose legitimacy and reputations are most challenged by “The Tiananmen Papers,” not to step down in two years as expected. “If it has an effect on political reform in China, it will be a bad one,” Dai predicts.

At a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee on May 8, 1989, Elder Bo Yibo is reported in the book as saying, “Those who rule with virtue will prosper; those who rule by force will perish.” If only it were that simple.