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The Tiananmen Papers: An Editor’s Reflections* Andrew J. Nathan The coercive repression of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in Beijing on the night of 3–4 June 1989 is one of the starkest human rights violations of recent times. For a government to kill peaceful, unarmed citizens is a violation of the “right to life” that is provided in the Universal Declar- ation of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. In addition to the immediate cost in lives – my co-editor Perry Link and I consider the death toll to be still an open question, because the only related document in the collection is the self-interested report of the Beijing Party Committee to the Politburo – Tiananmen set a repressive political course for years to follow. June Fourth marked a sharp clash between alternative futures. On that night China made a decisive turn away from liberalization and back toward an authoritarian kind of politics. The incident started as a spontaneous memorial to Hu Yaobang, the students’ favourite pro-reform politician, who died on 15 April. As the leadership responded indecisively, the demonstrators broadened their focus to demand that the Party attack corruption more vigorously, and they attacked conservative leaders for abusing power. Hoping to increase pressure on the government on the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic summit visit to Beijing, the students declared a hunger strike in Tianan- men Square on 13 May, and a large proportion of the city’s population came out to support them. The Tiananmen Papers reveal that demonstra- tions spread to 341 cities.1 The Party might have fallen from power had it not found a way to restore control. One faction, headed by General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, wanted to do so by negotiating with the demon- strators, which would have opened a path to some sort of accommodation between regime and society. A military crackdown was the hard-line course advocated by Premier Li Peng and eventually preferred by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues among the Elders. That decision brought a more conservative leadership to power in Beijing, damaged China’s relations with the West and closed the path to major political reforms for over a decade. The decision against political reform made by the leadership has not gone unchallenged in the intervening years. The Compiler’s Preface to The Tiananmen Papers shows that people inside the Party favouring political reform have repeatedly petitioned the Party to recognize that it *This essay was given as the Sir Joseph Hotung Annual Lecture on China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 1 June 2001. It has been slightly revised and updated. For comments and information, thanks to Bruce Gilley, He Pin, Kenneth Lieberthal, Jonathan Mirsky, Robin Munro, Barry Naughton and Stanley Rosen. 1. The number does not appear in the book, but the Compiler later calculated it from material in the book. The China Quarterly, 2001 An Editor’s Reflections 725 made a mistake. Only when this demand went long unanswered did some Party members take the unusual, by their own account desperate, step of bringing their case to the outside world in the hope of forcing the leadership to admit that China had been going down a wrong road. The result of this decision was the publication in January 2001 of The Tiananmen Papers in English (New York: Public Affairs), and in April 2001 of the longer Chinese manuscript on which The Tiananmen Papers was based, a book called Zhongguo liusi zhenxiang (June Fourth: The True Story) (New York: Mirror Books). The reaction of the Chinese government is the main theme to be discussed here, because I think it reveals much about the state of Chinese politics today. Why has the government responded with a strange combi- nation of silence and repression? What is at stake? What can be learned from the reaction about the political battle over China’s future? As a prior question, however, I want to review what is in the book and what is not. An understanding of the book’s impact depends in part on an understanding of what it contains. The two volumes, over 1,000 pages, of the Chinese edition quote from only some 600 or so documents, clearly too few to be a complete record of 51 days in the life of any country, let alone one as far-flung and complicated as China. Selection was inevi- table. If the selection processes were distorted or biased in favour of one faction and against another, that would affect the political response. Knowing how the book was constructed will also help readers to make more informed, critical use of its contents. Some of what follows also touches on the authenticity of the material. But I do not want to argue that point except insofar as it overlaps with the issue of selection bias. Since most specialist readers seem at least provisionally to accept the authentic- ity of the material, the less discussed issue of selectivity is more interesting. The Contents of the Book Describing the selection processes that shaped the book brings to mind my mentor, John Fairbank’s, pioneering historiographical work, Ch’ing Documents: An Introductory Syllabus.2 In his seminar based on this book, Fairbank taught generations of students about what might be called the “natural history” of archives: the processes of bureaucratic record-keep- ing, the genre conventions of different kinds of documents, the systems of document transmission and preservation, all of which determine what raw material makes it into the archives and survives for historians to look at. Only after these processes have taken place do historians have a chance to exercise whatever further principles of selection they may impose. The materials in The Tiananmen Papers are no different. They, too, have gone through a series of processes, each of which brought the final product further away from the raw material of what happened, and each 2. Two volumes, Third Edition, East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1965. 726 The China Quarterly of which did so in some systematic way. How does this affect what can be learned from the papers? How does it affect the official response? In particular, has the Compiler done anything to bias the contents of the book, so as to favour his own political faction and its programme? Or does the book tell a story that is as true as any incomplete representation can be? The processes that the materials in the book have gone through can be broken down into five steps. Some of this is common sense, but without considering it the material in the book cannot adequately be evaluated. The first process was the step from historical action to documents. Out of the flux of human behaviour, certain events were selected by certain persons working for certain bureaucracies to be recorded in certain kinds of documents which follow certain rules of form and content. Examples in this project are reports from the Ministry of State Security on events in the Square, reports from the State Education Commission on attitudes on the campuses, reports from the military on attitudes among the troops, and reports from provincial Party committees on events in the provinces. Fully to decipher these documents one needs to understand the rules that govern the creation of each of them in the Chinese communist system. There are conventions of form – for example, all such documents emphasize the correctness and legitimacy of the regime and the breadth of its popular support. On the other hand, there was also a considerable commitment to accuracy – averaging out across all the bureaucracies, one is generally impressed with the honesty of the reports the central author- ities received. That said, the reporting agencies display a bias toward reporting signs of threats to the regime and thus tend to select for information that focuses on criticisms of the regime, overseas involve- ment or other disturbing signs of potential trouble. Another example of how documentary conventions affect content are the minutes of Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee, and Elders’ meetings, which provide some of the most dramatic passages in the book. As described in Orville Schell’s Afterword, such minutes are created by professional minute takers, who employ a certain writing style which is not the same as the spoken language that presumably was used during the actual meetings. I am told that somewhat stilted, unnatural language is characteristic of minutes in many governments, and for similar reasons. No one wants government minutes which reflect the way that leaders actually speak. Some information gets into the document flow, and some does not. For example, certain private conversations got into the record when they were recalled in depositions for the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Com- mittee that met in June 1989, or in certain other ways (for more details, see the Introduction to the Papers). Since senior Elders Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian were not required to make such depositions, conversations among the three of them do not (so far as I know) form part of the documentary record. The second step in the transition from raw events to our book was the selection, from all the documents created day by day in the vast Chinese An Editor’s Reflections 727 bureaucracy, of the relatively few to be transmitted up the various chains of communication to Zhongnanhai. For, as stated in the Introduction, the documents in the book were selected from those that found their way into Zhongnanhai – which means, to be more specific, documents sent to the State Council or Party Central, which are the two agencies located in that compound.

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