The following excerpt about the Western news
media's account of the night of June 3-4, 1989 is taken from
George Black and Robin Munro
Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy
Movement
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993), pp. 246-248.
The belief in a "Tiananmen Square massacre" is, at root, tied up
in the problem of television news. At the best of times, the
medium has a wretched relationship to historical truth,
saturating its audience with powerful, instantaneous images that
are not easily revised. But television, paradoxically, is never
more powerful than when the screen goes blank.
There were, perhaps, a dozen foreign journalists in the vicinity
of the Monument that night [June 3, 1989] as dawn approached. The
footage shot by a crew from Televisión Española and
by a Hong Kong film crew perched on top of the public toilets on
the west side of the square was not widely seen outside their
home countries. The last American crew on the scene was from CBS
News. The network's correspondent, Richard Roth, had time to file
one final report before he was arrested and frog-marched into the
Great Hall of the People. As the camera lurched skyward and the
picture went black, the voice-over was dramatic: "Soldiers have
spotted [cameraman Derek Williams] and myself and are angrily
dragging us away. And a moment later it begins: powerful bursts
of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that
lasts as long as a nightmare. And we see no more."
The impression of a student massacre without witnesses is
stronger still in the reports of John Simpson of the BBC. Simpson
was one of the media stars of the Beijing spring, and his team
won several awards for its reporting. He was filled with remorse
at having left the square so early. "Someone should have been
there when the massacre took place," he wrote later in
Granta.
Simpson remembered that from a safe vantage point on an upper
floor of the Beijing Hotel, "We filmed as the lights in the
square were switched off at four A.M. They were switched on again
forty minutes later, when the troops and the tanks moved forward
to the Monument itself, shooting first in the air and then,
again, directly at the students themselves, so that the steps of
the Monument and the heroic reliefs which decorated it were
smashed by bullets." The problem with this report is that the
Monument and the entire lower half of Tiananmen Square are hidden
from view from the Beijing Hotel, half a mile away. (9)
The gunfire that Roth and Simpson heard was not directed at the
students at all. By 5:05 A.M., the top level of the Monument
swarmed with commandos. The writer Lao Gui saw the whole thing.
"A small detachment of soldiers dressed in camouflage uniform
rushed up to the Monument, occupied the top of it, and fired
incessantly into the air.... Soon, there was no more sound from
the broadcast station. The soldiers had shot the loudspeakers
apart." The Spanish television crew was also on the spot; they
saw no killing. (10)
For the next twenty-five minutes, the students filed out of the
square. They moved back at the same pace as the advancing APCs,
extracting every last ounce of moral victory from their retreat.
Many in the ten-deep column, each contingent under the banner of
its college, had tears rolling down their cheeks. All looked
shaken; many were trembling or unsteady on their feet. "Down with
the Communist Party!" one group shouted. In the east, the sun was
just rising in a red sky.
ENDNOTES
(9) On a visit to Beijing in July 1991, the authors were able
to verify that only the upper portion of the Monument - namely,
the bare central column and not the ornamented lower levels that
were occupied by the students - is visible from the top-floor
balcony of the Beijing Hotel.
(10) Claudia Rosett of the
Asian
Wall Street Journal and John Pomfret of the Associated Press were also present at
the Monument at this time.
Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy
Movement
Excerpted by permission of publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright ©1993 by George Black and Robin Munro. All Rights Reserved.
To order a copy of this book, please call 1-800-225-5945, or
visit your local bookstore.
