Appealing the Tiananmen Verdict: New Documents from China's Highest Leaders

Excerpts from this extraordinary compilation of documents first appeared in the previous issue of this journal ("The Tiananmen Papers," January/February 2001). The papers detail the deliberations of the Chinese leadership in the spring of 1989, leading up to the Tiananmen Square tragedy on June 4. In so doing, The Tiananmen Papers grants the reader access to the innermost decision-making processes of one of the world's most secretive governments during an infamous moment in its history. The documents contain the minutes of meetings of the Politburo and its five-person Standing Committee, the highest body of formal political power in China. Even more astonishing are the intimate communications among the top leaders: the gatherings of the eight "elders," the extralegal group of senior communist revolutionaries who at the time constituted ultimate authority in China; some private meetings in the home of Deng Xiaoping, the most influential elder and the chair of the Central Military Commission; and even some of his phone conversations. The various conversations and meetings all dealt with one subject: what to do about the student demonstrators who had taken possession of Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989.

The huge collection of documents was secretly compiled by a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member (known to readers only by the pseudonym Zhang Liang) and some fellow collaborators, then handed over to Andrew Nathan of Columbia University; Nathan in turn sought the editorial help of Perry Link of Princeton University and Orville Schell of the University of California at Berkeley. The motive of the compilers was to advance political reform in China by forcing open discussion of a subject that has long been taboo. They hoped that the revelations in the documents would shock the CCP into reversing its official line -- that the Tiananmen demonstrations were the work of a "small group of counterrevolutionaries." A reversed verdict would acknowledge that the students were patriotic Chinese who sought to advance the modernization of their country through political reform.

The compilers believe that exiled dissidents alone will never change China. Instead, reform must come from within the CCP. It is for this reason that the compilers have bravely chosen to remain in China with their families. They hope that the revelations in these papers -- how some stubborn old men were fully informed about the ongoing events but fatally misjudged both the demonstrators and their own power to control them -- will convince fair-minded Chinese

that the government acted improperly, and that China should now match its economic reforms with serious political reforms. In his introduction, Nathan notes that the publication of The Tiananmen Papers will damage the political fortunes of China's current president, Jiang Zemin, and the hard-liner Li Peng, and could benefit a group of more liberal senior leaders, including in particular Zhu Rongji, Li Ruihuan, and six others. Could it be that some in this latter group are now providing shelter for the compilers?

AUTHENTICITY

Nathan and Link worked for years with a number of translators to produce the English-language text, which is just a third the size of the forthcoming Chinese version. Schell added a thorough examination of the critical question of the authenticity of the documents. He begins with a reminder of the long history of forgeries of official Chinese documents and insiders' reports, but he firmly concludes that the contents of The Tiananmen Papers are nonetheless genuine. Unfortunately, neither he nor Nathan can share with readers all the evidence they have to support this conclusion. To do so would endanger the compilers.

The appearance of The Tiananmen Papers sent a shiver of anticipation and speculation through the Western community of China specialists. What new revelations might they hold? Academic decorum called for a degree of cautious skepticism about such an unexpected mass of new information. Quickly, however, skepticism gave way to acceptance; the papers contained no smoking gun, nothing that contradicted the prevailing interpretation of the events of June 4. If forgery was involved, wouldn't the perpetrators have come up with something new and sensational? Accepting the documents, meanwhile, also called for constraint in publicizing them. The prospect of publishing the papers in the United States raised anxieties that their revelation would set back relations with Beijing.

The initial reaction of the Chinese authorities, however, seemed only to validate the authenticity of the documents. Beijing's assertion that the papers were fake was half-hearted at best, in contrast with the standard official Chinese response to any foreign-inspired insult or criticism, which has always been to let loose hyperbolic wails -- proclaiming, in one standard phrase, that the action had "hurt the feelings of one billion Chinese." The casual, almost offhand declaration that the documents were forgeries suggested that Beijing hoped to dismiss the whole episode as a tempest in a teapot, something the Chinese people should ignore. Or perhaps it was that the top authorities had not yet decided how the CCP should react. Nonetheless, in preparation for the 2002 16th Party Congress, questions about the verdict on Tiananmen may be raised by those favoring political reforms.