Vetting the "Tiananmen Papers"

It may also be a question of interpretation.

I want to say very clearly that we can't say with absolute certainty that these documents are absolutely authentic, that they are not in some way edited within the text or that some documents are left out or that some could conceivably have been altered. This is possible. But we did the best we could and we were finally confronted with two possibilities: not doing them or concluding that we thought they seemed to be authentic and had merit and, with those cautionary and very honestly declared ambiguities, proceed [with publication].

You justify that action in your afterword by writing that it would be an act of "passive suppression" if you didn't publish the "Tiananmen Papers."

There's nothing in it for the three of us. There's no reason we would ever want to become involved with these. We're not going to make any money. All we have to lose is our reputations if we don't do a forthright and honest job. As we perceived it, our job was to append a cautionary word to these documents to explain what we had done to satisfy ourselves that they probably were with merit, and to put them out there.

This was Liang's project. In a way, we were just the facilitators for the English-language edition. We were not and are not on a crusade.

What steps were taken to vet the documents?

First, we read them and compared them with what else is known, for inconsistencies. We looked at documentary collections, scholarly work, memoirs and stuff that appeared in the press. I was involved in making "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," which was a three-hour documentary about these events. Perry Link and I were in China at the time [leading up to the Tiananmen uprising]; and Andrew Nathan has written a great deal about the subject. We then sent early versions of the manuscript to a number of other scholars and people who were involved in intelligence work in other governments around the world.

The most reassuring aspect of our due diligence was that we had the chance to speak with, get to know and literally grill the compiler. This is the missing link in most documents that are leaked from such [closed] governments. If they have no provenance in the form of a transmitter who sticks with the project, it makes it impossible to find out if the transmitter had a legitimate position, if he understands the context.

Did you have a familiarity with Chinese government documents and the protocol that is used to create them? And did that knowledge help you to vet the "Tiananmen Papers"?

There are some that have leaked out, but this was really quite a milestone in documents from China. There have been other internal studies, documents or one thing or another than have come out, but nothing like this. We learned a tremendous amount about how documents are circulated throughout the country from the provinces, how minutes and transcripts are kept, what is the organizational structure for maintaining them. We also learned how the archives work. Who gets to take things out. How they sign them out. What kind of protection the government requires. This was a whole education in its own right. And the fact that we could learn about it from a variety of sources was quite a revelation.

Much of your vetting came from direct contact with Zhang Liang, who delivered the documents to you, and becoming comfortable with him. You're a journalism professor. Stephen Glass was masterful at making up stories and convincing his editors and fact-checkers that his reporting was real. How did you make the publication of the "Tiananmen Papers" bulletproof?

I came into this project about a year ago with great skepticism. I still retain a certain amount of skepticism, and I think we're quite honest about that. But I did have a chance, again, to discuss everything with this compiler. He may be a master forger, but that's not our impression. But the fact is that he's hung around, made himself available to discuss all sorts of peripheral issues. Had he not been around, had this document collection just been dumped as they often are, then you would have entered a real shadowland that makes it instantly more difficult to derive any final sense of confidence.

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