This Day in 1989: May 9, Young Reporters have their Own Petition

The early days of May, 1989, would later be described as the "low tide" days during the student movement. After the excitements of the earlier waves of demonstrations, students were at a loss of what they should do next. Class strike continued only at Peking University and Beijing Normal University. The Dialogue Delegation was waiting for a response from the government to their request. The newly formed independent student organizations were either engaged in infighting or drifting without a clear agenda. To the students at large, the movement appeared to be over.

It was the young reporters in the official media organizations who took some concrete action on May 9, 1989. After joining the students during the demonstration five days ago, 200 reporters organized themselves and published an open letter of their own. Led by Li Datong of the China Youth Daily, they demanded for press freedom and a reevaluation of the decision to shutdown the Shanghai newspaper World Economics Herald. The petition was eventually signed by over a thousand reporters and editors.

The reporters' action put some signs of life in campuses as well. Students announced that they would launch a bicycle march the next morning to support the reporters, as well as to show the city that they had not given up themselves.


Days of 1989

Tiananmen Picture Appeared in Beijing Newspaper, and then Censored

It was one thing to mistake a Hong Kong vigil for Tiananmen Massacre victims for a fund-raising event for earthquake victims. It was entirely another to actually publish a picture depicting a scene, albeit a subtle one, of the massacre in the newspaper.

But after nineteen years of tight control in the official media blackout, something is bound to slip through the cracks. It happened last week. A popular Beijing newspaper, The Beijing News (新京报), inadvertently included a photo of the massacre as one of the remarkable news pictures taken throughout the career of a photo journalist.

The photo, seen below in the lower-right corner of a scanned image of the paper, was discreet and simply labeled as "the wounded". Yet the imagery is unmistakable. It was a familiar scene during the massacre, when residents carried dead and wounded to hospitals in flatbed tricycles.

In an Associated Press story, the journalist Li Datong was quoted for his reaction:

Li Datong, a veteran state newspaper journalist who was forced from a top editing job for reporting on sensitive subjects, said the photograph was likely put in the paper by a young editor who was unaware of its background.

"A lot of editors now are really young. News about June 4 has been off-limits. They don't have any memory of it, so they'll think it's just a regular wounded person," Li said.

Editors at Beijing News would definitely be punished for the slip-up, he said. "They'll be lucky if they don't get fired. This is a major political error."

The paper is being recalled off the streets of Beijing and its web site censored.

NYT Archive 1989: Journalists Speak Up

In a clear sign that the student movement had appeared to run its cause, New York Times did not have any news on the movement for the two days of May 8 and 9, 1989. On May 10, NYT resumed reporting from Beijing, but it was about journalists' call for press freedom:

In the strongest appeal so far for freedom of the press in China, more than 1,000 journalists from official news organizations signed a petition that was presented to the Government today calling for talks with China's leaders.

The goal of the talks would be to discuss independence of the press, broader coverage of major events like the recent student demonstrations, and the dismissal of the editor in chief of a Shanghai newspaper.

''The reason we are calling for such a dialogue is that our press coverage has attracted criticism at home and abroad,'' said Li Datong, an editor at the China Youth News. ''We think that the press in Beijing has failed to be comprehensive and fair in its coverage. And we think this is the direct result of our current press system.''

The petition, which was presented to the All-China Journalists Association by about 100 journalists, criticized press censorship in coverage of the recent student demonstrations and demanded a change in the Communist Party's role in press coverage.

Among the non-students, journalists were the first group who had organized their protests, joining the demonstration on May 4, 1989. It was no coincidence. Journalists had been witnessing the movement first-hand, yet they could not faithfully report any of it until several days ago. The banning of the World Economic Herald in Shanghai touched them in the core.

Li Datong (李大同), the leader of this journalist petition, was later persecuted and suspended from his editor job for five years. In 1995, he was allowed back to his job and established Freezing Point (冰点), a regular supplementary issue within the China Youth News. It became very popular for its daring commentary on issues of China's history and culture.

In 2005, Freezing Point was sharply criticized by the Party Propaganda Department and shut down. Li Datong was also fired. Today, Li Datong appeared to a free-lance writer, writing columns for newspapers in Hong Kong. He also managed to publish a couple of memoirs about Freezing Point in China.