Vetting the "Tiananmen Papers"

Have you heard reports about whether the "Tiananmen Papers" have had an impact inside Beijing and Zhongnanhai? Have China's leaders taken note?

There are two levels of impact. One is that there's no doubt about it that it has generated an enormous amount of discussion both outside of China and inside. There's lots of e-mail, lots of things flying around the Internet. Those who care are becoming aware inside China. The issue has been raised in a very public way in the rest of the world. China is no longer discreetly separated from the rest of the world.

The second level, of course, is within the government itself. There's been relatively little response. So how do we read that? Well, maybe the response is yet to come in a more detailed refutation or in a condemnation. But if it doesn't happen, and we're already a couple of weeks into this now, that might suggest, and I think it's the case, that there are a very large number of people within the government who agree that the issue of 1989 has to be put on the table. The question of political reform must simply be reopened at some time in the near future. It cannot be suffocated perpetually.

Why is the Chinese government calling the book a fabrication?

Well, you know, their denial was very weak, it was very flabby. They said that no fabrications and distortions would be tolerated. The headline said they called it a fake, but they didn't really. They just used the words fabrication and distortion in a kind of vague imputation.

It was such an offhanded statement made by the foreign ministry's information officer; I think it was at a regular press briefing made by a guy whose job is to flack for whatever the government line is at the moment. It's hard to read too much into it. What I read was that they're in a holding pattern on it. They hadn't read it and they don't know what to say about it. They just sort of throw something out, which keeps the prospect open that they can react in the future.

Writer Dai Qing spent 10 months in a Chinese jail for her role in the Tiananmen uprising. In a Hong Kong interview, she told the Boston Globe that she believes Zhang Liang did get some of the documents from the government, but she also asserts that he may have created some of them for political purposes. She says, "All of my friends in Beijing can't believe these papers are 100 percent true"; some of the details are wrong.

I'm curious to know if she's read them. How could she have? She made these statements early on as I recall. I know her. Then again, she may be right. That's the tricky part about dealing with documents on closed governments. You do your best to authenticate them.

Specifically, Dai Qing criticized a point in the book where the son of General Xu Haidong refused to deploy troops into Tiananmen Square as martial law was ordered. She said that she played with Xu's kids when she was growing up, and that she didn't recall any of them becoming military officers.

I do recall something about that one person. You have to remember that it's perfectly plausible that even though the documents might be authentic, that they, too, have things that are wrong. Then there's the second line of possible error that we got something wrong, particularly in translation. When you're dealing with thousands of pages in a foreign language with many translators and a laborious editing process, it's perfectly possible that something slipped. She could be right, but it still wouldn't necessarily impugn all of the documents.

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