Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Berkeley professor Orville Schell discusses his role in the publication of papers that shed new light on the Chinese government's crackdown on the 1989 student uprising.
Feb 2, 2001 | The "Tiananmen Papers" may not be quite as explosive as the "Pentagon Papers." They won't help stop a war, because the battle has already been won by China's Communist government. But they do provide an important missing piece in the puzzling history of the bloody 1989 crackdown on the student movement.
For 12 years, the most complete history of the uprising has come from foreign media reports and the accounts of students who had either fled China or dared to speak out in defiance of the party. Now, with the publication of the "Tiananmen Papers," we have access to what purports to be the naked record of the decision-making that led to the crackdown from the highest levels of the Chinese government.
But critics have questioned how authoritative the "Tiananmen Papers" should be considered, given how difficult it is to prove their authenticity. The documents have been compiled by the pseudonymous Zhang Liang, who has refused to disclose his real identity or that of the individuals he worked with to obtain the documents.
Orville Schell, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism and respected Sinologist, was one of three professors who helped compile and publish the English edition of the "Tiananmen Papers." Salon recently spoke to Schell about his role in vetting the documents.
What are the most important revelations and lessons to take away from the "Tiananmen Papers"?
What we see are people struggling to make decisions that will keep China together. We also see conservatives, led by Li Peng, fighting against the reformers. Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that we see that the government, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, really did not have the prerogative to make decisions on how the government should deal with major problems. It sort of broke down two for [dialogue with the students and democratic reforms], two against and an abstention. But who really made the decisions was Deng Xiaoping and the Council of Elders, who had no formal decision-making prerogative. But there had been a 1987 secret agreement that Xiaoping would have veto power and oversight.
The Elders always had people at the Standing Committee meetings. This government never had a very confirmed, at least legally binding decision-making structure. And what it did have was violated again and again by these marauding Elders, and the Standing Committee of the Politburo deferred to them, except for Zhao Ziyang, who quit.
Was the publication of the "Tiananmen Papers" the first time this relationship was exposed?
It was revealed at one point when [Mikhail] Gorbachev arrived and party chief Zhao Ziyang spoke with him. Then he went on television and made a bold revelation that Deng Xiaoping was really making the decisions. He got very sternly criticized by the Chinese for revealing this in public.
The international press corps thought it was interesting, but no one quite put it all together to look at how the decisions had been made because we didn't know. Gorbachev had just blurted out that Comrade Deng Xiaoping is still in control. This gives us a clear idea how this nonsystem overruled the already shaky system. The other revelation is that there was no process in selecting Jiang Zemin as the current party chief and president [after deposing Zhao Ziyang]. The Elders just said, "What about him?" They catapulted him up from Shanghai and stuck him at the head of the government.
The documents portray former Premier Li Peng as a conservative hard-liner who conspired against the reformers.
I must say that my reading is that he is a person trying to do what any good Leninist would do to live up to his principles, to maintain party discipline. I felt he was a much more honorable person as a result of reading this book.
What was the cost to those who pushed for dialogue?
Most of them were defrocked. Some of them have come back in less grand ways into government. But they're there, sort of like recessive genes waiting to express themselves. That's what I think these documents suggest if they're real -- they won't go away in a hurry.
Motive is always an important component in vetting a story or set of documents. What was Zhang Liang's motive for coming to you with the "Tiananmen Papers"?
There were aspects of this project which were much murkier than his motives -- which were self-confessed, in a very articulate fashion, without any ambiguity. They were simple: to try to break the logjam on political reform in China and to do that by reinvigorating the process.
Does he stand to gain politically from the book's release?
[Zhang] definitely aspires to be able to work in China and to work in the government at some time in the future. His motive is not to flee and be done with it. But I think he sees himself very much as a part of the ongoing political process in China.
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