A crack in the wall

The publication of "The Tiananmen Papers," the first look behind the scenes at how the Communist Party leadership decided to crush the democracy movement, is a historic event -- and may have far-reaching consequences for China.

By Daryl Lindsey

Feb 2, 2001 | Modern revolutions aren't always clad in velvet -- and they don't always win. That's what we learned when the Chinese government ordered the People's Liberation Army to use its tanks to clear the student protesters from Tiananmen Square in 1989, killing hundreds if not thousands of people. The tragedy that unfolded in Tiananmen Square remains the defining political event, with the Cultural Revolution, of contemporary Chinese history. But no one, aside from those involved, has ever known exactly how the Chinese leadership arrived at its fateful decision to crush the budding democracy movement. What happened inside the fortified walls of Zhongnanhai, China's leadership compound, has remained a mystery.

Until now. Maybe.

"The Tiananmen Papers," published in January by Public Affairs and edited and vetted by three prominent American Sinologists, purports to be the official record of the Chinese government's struggle in deciding how to respond to the student uprising. Its appearance in Chinese this spring could have profound consequences, both social and political.

If authentic, these papers have their provenance in the highest levels of government in Zhongnanhai. Columbia University political science professor Andrew Nathan and Princeton University professor of Chinese Perry Link edited the papers with the help of U.C.-Berkeley journalism school dean Orville Schell, who helped vet the papers and wrote the book's afterword. (Full disclosure: Schell is a Salon contributor.) The papers were compiled by the pseudonymous Zhang Liang, whose anonymity was a condition of publishing the documents.

Not surprisingly, "The Tiananmen Papers" is highly addictive reading: You want to believe every word of a publication that sheds more light on the inner workings of Chinese government than any document released in the past quarter-century. It's also one of the best-edited sets of government documents this writer has ever seen. The editors have strung together transcripts, intelligence reports, meeting minutes and editor's notes to form a riveting narrative -- and one that seems highly plausible.

But this extraordinary document requires its readers to take a leap of faith. Zhang and his editors ask the reader to accept, without decisive corroborating evidence, the authenticity of documents that answer just about every question one could possibly have about the role of the Beijing government in the student crackdown.

The paucity of biographical details about Zhang leaves a presumably unavoidable, but undeniable, cloud of uncertainty over the whole book. Zhang is either the greatest whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post, or the most elaborate forger of documents since German Konrad Kujau swindled $4.8 million from Stern magazine for his bogus "Hitler Diaries."

All we know about Zhang, who was almost certainly an official in Zhongnanhai, is that he didn't jump ship after unfurling his load of classified documents -- he stuck around for the entire process, offering corroborating evidence to give his editors enough faith in the project and his motives to attach their names to it. The presumption is that Zhang leaked the papers to light a flame under reformers who were quieted after the crackdown but are still active in the Chinese government. In his preface Zhang writes, "Reversal of the verdict on June Fourth is another historical inevitability, as well as the wish of most Chinese people. June Fourth weighs on the spirits of every Chinese patriot, and almost every Chinese knows that official reevaluation is just a matter of time. The Party's top leadership has been divided about the event ever since it occurred. By now many of those responsible for the decision to crack down -- notably Deng and others serving as 'elders' -- have passed away."

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