A crack in the wall

Even Schell is quick to admit that there may be errors in the publication. But he stands by the document's legitimacy as a whole, saying that the revelations about how senior officials were swayed to crack down on the student movement are the closest to an accurate record we're going to get without more transparency in China's notoriously walled government.

Recently, there has been a steady drumbeat of support for the authenticity of "The Tiananmen Papers." Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, asked about the papers by a journalist from Singapore's Sunday Times in Davos, Switzerland, last weekend, replied: "They are too detailed and too extensive. You can't have a team drawing these up." The comments of Lee, who helped create modern Singapore, have considerable credibility since he also supported the Chinese government's hard-line stance on the student movement. "There are more than 300 cities in China. When you have that kind of wildfire, you either stump it out quickly or you are burnt out yourself," Lee told the paper.

Immediately after the documents' publication, former American ambassador James Lilley, who served in Beijing during the time of the crackdown, vouched, conditionally, for their legitimacy. "I believe that the documents are authentic," he told the New York Times. "But I don't rule out the possibility that people might have played with the language to score certain points. In addition, the documents themselves contain material that is not true. For example, the reports on the C.I.A. are exaggerated and inflammatory to appeal to the paranoia of the Chinese leadership."

While it may be too soon to tell what kind of impact "The Tiananmen Papers" will have inside Zhongnanhai, some predict the reverberations will be enormous. Journalist Mirsky, who reported from Tiananmen Square in 1989, writes in his New York Review of Books essay of a recent interview he conducted with a former Chinese vice minister. He quotes the deposed bureaucrat as saying, "The man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China." Mirsky continues, "If evidence comes to light showing how China's supreme leaders planned and directed the Beijing crackdown, the results, once the ritual denials are over, would be an embarrassment within the Communist Party and possibly even a change in the official verdict that what happened throughout China in the spring of 1989 was a 'counterrevolutionary rebellion.'"

Indeed, much of the ferocity of the students involved in the protests seemed to have been fueled by an April 26, 1989, editorial in the People's Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, published just one day after a fateful meeting of the elders at Deng's home in which he laid out the framework for the essay. "We've got to be explicit and clear in opposing this turmoil," Deng said. His comments were a de facto condemnation of the protesters, since "turmoil" was a derogatory term. The editorial forced the students into the corner. They had nothing to gain by backing off, since they would likely face reprisals from the government regardless of the outcome. The best they could do was fight to restore their honor, which they believed had been smeared by the editorial. And so started the inevitable countdown to the massacre.

A broader assessment of "The Tiananmen Papers" is expected after a Chinese-language version containing the original documents is published in April. Sinologists like Berkeley's Schell expect that the book will quickly find its way into mainland China through the dierqu dao or "second channel" -- the black market book peddlers who sell tomes on everything from Falun Gong to voodoo spiritualism and provide an important outlet for books and literature banned by Beijing. And though Beijing has proven effective at filtering Internet content, savvy communicators will still find ways to pierce the firewall to send copies of the documents by e-mail or to serve Web pages by untraceable proxy.

With the pressure that will bring, decision makers in Zhongnanhai may be forced to revisit the events of 1989 -- and perhaps this time they will tell the truth. In the end, whether or not "The Tiananmen Papers" is completely accurate may be less important than whether it can force the hand of China's leaders to be more candid about the most tragically defining moment of Chinese Communism since the Cultural Revolution.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and the top Sinologists in the Bush administration are sure to give close scrutiny to "The Tiananmen Papers," not only to understand how close the student movement came to succeeding before it was mercilessly crushed, but to plumb it for potential new diplomatic channels. The document may bring to light Beijing politicians who are interested in pursuing the democratic reforms that have stagnated for the past decade under Jiang, even as China has transformed itself into an economic giant.

Powell has already taken what appears to be a hard line on China's creative definition of human rights. In less than two weeks in office, the secretary of state has banged heads with Beijing, issuing a stinging criticism of its oppression of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. The Foreign Ministry spokesman slapped Powell back with an acrimonious rebuke: "China demands the U.S. government respect the stand of the Chinese government on the Falun Gong issue and stop interfering in China's internal affairs."

If the publication of "The Tiananmen Papers" leads to a crack in the wall of China's hidebound leadership, and that crack becomes a breach, relations between the two nations may someday be far different.

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