On June 4th, 1989, hundreds of civilians were shot and trampled to death as a result of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

In the West, this fact is ubiquitous. Ask most Westerners what they think about when they hear “China” and chances are that they will mention this incident. And we all know that in China the truth of this event has been heavily distorted. This simple fact leads many to believe that the Chinese media is a complete farce, while conversely, the Western media is a beacon of freedom and objectivity. As an American having lived in China for the past seven months and also having personally gone to Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 2009, I can tell you that this is not the case.

Before reading, I would advise you to educate yourself about what happened there on that fateful day and, more importantly, the events leading up to the protests and subsequent attack. The main issue here is that we tend to look at this incident in isolation from a very complex society and history in which it is contained.

June 4th, 2009: After my final English lesson, I scrambled home to get my passport and camera and then headed to the Square. I felt like “something” would happen there and I had to see for myself. As I got on the number 59 bus near my apartment, my thoughts raced and my heart pounded. Will the bus be re-routed from the Square? Should I hide my camera in the secret compartment of my messenger bag, or have it out in the open to not raise suspicion in case I am stopped? As a foreigner, will I be allowed anywhere near the Square? Will I be questioned, searched, detained or worse? Will there be another protest or, God forbid, an assault? Will my life in China be in danger, both figuratively and/or literally? As soon as I arrived, however, I realized how foolish I had been.

At around 9.30pm I got off at the Qianmen stop which is three stops from my apartment. It is as close as you can get to the Square by bus. The street scene seemed normal enough: cars haphazardly parked along near the street, shoppers toting their tote bags, restaurant and store owners closing up shop. What struck me first was that I saw a group of foreigners (in China, of course, we call non-Chinese “foreigners”) walking down the street. One of them was an elderly woman. Going the same direction, my instinct was to follow close behind, as I figured any attackers would hesitate to be violent around an old woman. I am laughing at myself now.

I approached the Square. To my surprise, there were very little soldiers inside. By little, I mean like 20 at most. And it’s a BIG square. Several city blocks. 100 acres. Actually, the biggest public square in the world. I looked around for something more. Tanks? No. But there were a few buses in the center. The actual Square itself was shut down (as it is every night) but the surrounding streets and sidewalks had civilians milling about everywhere. It was a quiet evening with pleasant weather. What better place and time to take a casual walk, so it seemed.



At this point I considered taking out my camera. I got a rush of fear and adrenaline. I looked around for a good place to take a quick snapshot. Then get the hell out of there, I thought. I looked over my shoulder and saw a group of three Chinese civilians. One of them had a rather large and noticeable Canon and was taking photos left and right all fancy-free. I approached them and asked them if it was OK to take pictures. “Sure,” they replied, “it’s always OK to take pictures here.” Suddenly, a gate on the Eastern side of the Square opened and a group of soldiers started marching in our direction. My heart dropped.

I was amazed at what happened next. The man just started photographing the soldiers like he was on safari. I asked him again if it was OK and he looked at me like I was stupid. Obviously it was OK. So I started taking photos of them too. I even had the flash on. They didn’t seem to mind at all. If anything, they straightened up their posture for a better picture!



By the way, you should know something about these Chinese “soldiers”. I would say that 80% of them look younger than 21. Unless they are martial arts experts, they don’t look to be threatening at all. I would equate them to shopping mall security, except that at least these kids are in shape.



Dumbfounded, I walked further down the street. I saw two kids play kungfu fighting. I stopped to take a picture and they both turned and smiled for me. Couples holding hands. Teenagers loitering. And lots and lots of people with cameras.



Why so many cameras? Were they there too, like me, hoping to achieve some kind of amateur journalistic glory? Again, no. They were just participating in a much beloved Asian pastime: taking pictures in front of things.



It was just like any other night. People posing and flashing the “peace” sign (although here the V means “victory”). Just tourists taking pictures.



Periodically, a police van drove by. One drove towards me. Surely I had aroused suspicion with my unusual wandering and frequent photo-taking of the Square and the soldiers around and within. I held my breath as the police van drove past. Right past me. I gazed into the lightly-tinted windows into the back of the van. Bloodied and beaten dissidents? No. No one except the driver and his partner.



The only confrontation with the authorities I had was when I was going through the underpass to get from Tiananmen Square to the front gate of the Forbidden City. The tunnel to get into the Square was blocked by a very unassuming yellow rope. Two young soldiers stood guard. Feeling free by now, I took out my camera and attempted to take a picture. The soldier approached me slowly and said in clear English: “I am on duty; no picture.” OK, no problem.



Another time, I tried to photograph a group of Chinese friends reviewing a picture they had just taken of the Square. This shot would’ve been particularly interesting because a solider was standing right next to them looking at the picture as well! When I took out my camera, the solider simply stepped aside as to not obstruct my shot. Not at all my intention, but it was definitely better than what I feared might be the alternative.



I had seen enough – it was time to go home. Excited, I called my friend Vicky and told her about my experience. It was nothing like I had imagined. I have lived here for seven months and I have never personally seen anything resembling government repression or police brutality. In fact, I have actually seen less of a police presence here than I would see back in the States. Cops don’t carry guns, for example. On a side note, take a walk down the Beijing bar street Sanlitun and you may be shocked by the virtual lack of police, especially if you compare it to the police state* that is 6th Street, Austin, TX on a weekend night. But this day in Beijing was different, right? But more importantly, let me tell you more about my good friend Vicky.

Vicky (her English name) is one of my best and oldest Chinese friends here. She is very westernized. She likes the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine. As a matter of fact, we play in a rock band together. She drinks and she smokes. She curses in English more than I do. But, she is also a proud member of the Chinese Communist Party. She loves China. She has tried to justify the Tiananmen crackdown to me once in a conversation. And she was recently interviewed by CNN. Please watch this video. I will wait.



It may not be entirely obvious to you, but as someone who has lived here and knows Vicky I can tell you with confidence that her meaning was completely distorted. I will give you one flat-out lie as an example. CNN’s Emily Chang mentioned that “Many Chinese are afraid to express controversial views. CNN asked dozens of people to speak on camera for this story. Only three said ‘yes.’” Vicky told me that prior to the interview she told CNN that she has plenty of friends that would be willing to participate, but was ignored. Anyways, who are these “people” that CNN asked? Who knows how hard they tried to find people to come forward? If this is not framing then I don’t know what is.

The ironic thing is that nothing that CNN broadcast in the final cut could be seen as any subversive threat to the Chinese government, yet it was presented in a way as if Vicky and the others took a big risk being there.

What did they quote Vicky as saying? “My father said, ‘I don’t want to explain this because you’re too young.’” OK, so they equate talking about Tiananmen to the birds and the bees? Astonishing!

How dare we criticize China’s youth (from an arm’s length) for being apolitical and only concerned about making money! China still has millions who can barely afford to eat. 20 years ago, they had nothing to lose. Now, they have a lot more. Besides, if Obama was not Obama, can anyone honestly say that the vast majority of America’s youth today would be any different than their cynical and uncaring selves like they were during the Bush years? Or even before for that matter? And who cares more about money than Americans? Where else would Chinese learn about the virtues of chasing money? One only has to watch an American television channel for a brief time to understand what is worshipped there.

How dare we expect more from China’s youth? What good have protests, such as the countless ones against the Iraq war, done nowadays? Can we really blame the Chinese?

Are we really to expect that the Chinese government wouldn’t try and control the Square? Are they supposed to just let potential terrorists or demonstrators run rampant? No matter what happened 20 years ago, it is ludicurous to demand that the Chinese government not have any security there. Any government in the world would do the same. Not to prevent a “protest,” but to prevent any number of random dangerous potential things from happening. I mean, really.

What kind of banal questions did Emily Chang ask? “Do you think students these days care about politics? Do they care about freedom?” How is this considered journalism? I don’t know what is more sad, the fact that she asked these questions, or the degree that she felt like she needed to dumb down the interview in order to cater to a jarringly ignorant American audience.

I asked Vicky by email to give me more details about what took place in the interview. By the way, she got to do the interview through her connections at the magazine she works for, The Beijinger. A CNN rep had asked someone at the magazine to look for someone suitable and that person then asked Vicky. So, here are some things that she told me:

On the interview in general

“I knew what the purpose of this interview would be…I’ve heard lots of bad things about CNN, I still wanted to see how bad they could be through my own eyes.”

“I also asked the lady [CNN's Emily Chang] if they would do the cutting [editing] part just for their own good. She told me sincerely, like: ‘we always try to express people’s ideas truthfully.’”

“I felt like it wasn’t about me as an individual, it was about how Western people would perceive Chinese youth. So I was careful about all the questions they asked and tried not be fooled or misled.”

“I felt it wasn’t the right time to defend China or the Chinese government, because the Western media has a lot of misunderstanding about these things…the first thing to should do was to get rid of those misunderstandings, so I decided to just admit our [China's] mistakes and try to explain how it could happen and at the same time to compare us with other governments in order to tell them that there is no big different [sic] between Chinese and other governments.”

“I also told them China needs better PR people.”

On the Tiananmen Incident

“It was a tragedy for sure, people haven’t forgotten about it, neither has the government…I bet the government didn’t know exactly what it should do to handle that problem [the '89 protests]. The government was founded in 1949, at that time they were busy solving problems like social backwardness, poverty and starvation, foreign invasion and, of course, the people’s eager desires to live in communist country (that was the idea at the beginning, anyways).”

“After the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution…increasing pressure from the bad relationships with other countries in the world, who already considered Communism as evil…the government had no experience to deal with the internal contradictions properly. All they had was the old experience from Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai Shek, who did the same things [violent crackdowns] to student protests.”

“Also, the population has always been a big problem…when there are too many people in some places, it will always extend the influence of [controversial] issues. I’ve heard from people who were actually there, that those soldiers were smiling and shaking hands with those students at the beginning of the protest. How old do you think they were? Probably just as the same age as those students, 20 or 21. They are just human beings.”

“Like the Kent State Protest, do you think American soldiers knew how to deal with that? I really doubt it. That was quite the same thing, but just because we have more people here, more people died.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Communist or Capitalist, as long as it’s government, it will do things for their own good.” (Vicky said she mentioned this several times during the interview.)

It goes without saying that none of these ideas were expressed in the interview.

And finally:

“At the end of interview, they asked me to repeat my sentence that I had said earlier: ‘I’m a communist, but I still criticize the party. I love my country, but I don’t have to love the government.’ Of course they didn’t show it in the video.” (Italics added.)

At least the Chinese admit to censoring the media. The West so hypocritically proclaims that we have a free and honest press, a stark contrast to the propaganda disseminated by the Chinese. If this is true, how could the New York Times use the word “blanketed” when describing the police presence in the Square on that day? [UPDATE: THE NEW YORK TIMES JUST CHANGED THE HEADLINE OF THIS STORY. IT USED TO BE Police Swarm Tiananmen To Bar Protests," which is a huge exaggeration if not a direct lie.] Why was every related article only about the unknown dead, the cover-up, the lingering anger, the house arrests and the oppression, instead of showing the other side? The side that Vicky tried to express, the side that shows that the Chinese government tried to handle the situation as best as they could? The side that Westerners would never understand, that China, just at the turn of the 20th Century, was still being ripped apart by the Powers and that the inexperienced government was responsible for the stability of an extremely large, sensitive and impoverished country? The side that you would never see unless you could be here? I’m not trying to defend what was indeed a massacre. Think what you will about what happened, but what ever happened to objectivity? Why does the Western media try so hard to portray China as a scary and totalitarian place, possibly a threat, and one that is so “opposite” to us?

• How can we point the finger at China about human rights, when we ignore, justify and censor our own sins concerning torture?
• How can we chastise China for imprisoning “dissidents”, when the PATRIOT Act allows the U.S. government to detain indefintely and without trial just for being labeled a “terrorist”, as well as warrentless searches, and countless other violations or our freedoms? Tom-a-to, tom-ah-to.
• What about the U.S. involvement in the Tlatelolco Massacre of university students in Mexico City, just ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics, which has been virtually ignored by our media?
• How can we harp on a tragedy that happened 20 years ago in a foreign country, while we are still trying to fix our own deadly gaffe in Iraq?

Speaking of Iraq, Thomas Friedman, a columnist in the New York Times, recently wrote an article about he and President Obama yukking it up telling jokes and then talking seriously about the hornet’s nest that is the Middle East. The majority of the article are direct quotes from the President himself. To sum up, he was talking about Palestine and other Arab states needing to “hold up a mirror” to reflect on their past and current mistakes in foreign policy. But what about America holding up a mirror and looking at herself?

Must I quote Jesus Christ to drive the point home?

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brothers eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Jesus in Matthew 7:3, NIV).

*You may think I’m being hyperbolic, but then again you’ve probably never partied in China before.

Some other interesing links:

Ed Morrison, New York Times

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

China Law Blog post from “Dan”