Washington Post Looking For Traces of Tiananmen Massacre

Washington Post reports today that "In Tiananmen of Games, No Trace of '89 Massacre". It interviewed or reported the stories of Liu Xiaobo, Wang Dan, Ding Zilin, and Fang Zheng. The report mentioned that Liu Xiaobo has never returned to the Tiananmen Square since the night of the massacre, although he lives in the city of Beijing.

Neither Liu Xiaobo nor Wang Dan sees any hope for an open discussion of the events of the 1989 any time soon. Wang Dan was quoted saying that "The government lacks the confidence. It's very clear a crime was committed against the people. They're afraid of being blamed."

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.

Tiananmen Crackdown, Was it a Suppression or Liberalization?

The blog Anti-Dismal carried an interesting video clip by Cato Institute's Johan Norberg, commenting on Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine.

Apparently, Naomi Klein argued that the Tiananmen movement was a protest against liberalization and market reform and its crackdown opened up the new era in China's reform. Johan Norberg argued, correctly, that the opposite is true.

Media Coverage of the Tiananmen Anniversary

Andrew at One Man's Revolution compiled a list of media coverage of the 19th anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre, based on LexisNexis News Search. He found nothing in the major TV news network in the US and only scant mentions in the printed media.

This has been a very eventful year for China so far. The Tibet riot and Olympic torch relay had received tremendous media coverage, only to be surpassed by the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. The Olympics is just around the corner. There should be more attention towards China in the coming months.

CCTV Reports Hong Kong Vigil For Tiananmen

Each year at the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, thousands of people in Hong Kong stage a candlelight vigil commemorating the death. The annual ritual survived the Chinese take-over of Hong Kong in 1997, although the number of participants is dwindling as time passes.

This year's version was held in the evening of June 4th and somewhere between 15,700 (police estimate) and 48,000 (organizer estimate) turned out.

What must be a surprising twist for everyone is that the event made it to CCTV, the official television station. Of course, anything related to the Massacre is still taboo in mainland China. But CCTV reported this commemoration in Hong Kong as 40,000 Hong Kong residences holding candlelight vigil commemorating victims of earthquake.

The donations collected during the Hong Kong vigil was indeed allocated to earthquake victims this year.

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.

Outspoken Columnist Fired

Chang Ping (长平), a columnist who had ignited a raging internet battle over freedom of speech in China, had been fired from his job as deputy editor and lead writer at the magazine Southern Metropolis Weekly.

Since the start of the most recent riot in Tibet, Chang Ping had been writing about the fair coverage, or the lack thereof, of the event in China. His blog posts, provocatively titled as How To Find The Truth About Lhasa, I Am Not Your Enemy, and the latest, My Cowardice And Incompetence, were regular targets of internet attack. He was even publicly denounced in the Beijing Evening News.

NYT Archive 1989: Press Freedom in May

Back in April, 1989, when the emerging student movement was showing its unprecedented strength, Party General Zhao Ziyang inexplicably left Beijing, and indeed the country, for a previously scheduled but long state visit to North Korea. The Premier Li Peng was left in charge of handling the trouble. By all indication, however, Zhao Ziyang had personally approved the publication of the infamous People's Daily editorial on April 26, which had poured fuel into the raging fire.

Zhao Ziyang did not get back to Beijing until early May. But he got a window of opportunity to showcase a more moderate approach towards the movement. First, he gave a speech at the Asian Development Bank meeting that was oscillatory to the students, markedly different in tone from the editorial. Somehow this important speech was not covered by New York Times at the time.

Next, Zhao Ziyang made his boldest move yet: opening the press. With his instruction, pretty much all restrictions on news reporting were lifted overnight. On May 6, 1989, NYT noticed this sea change in Beijing's newspapers:

After studiously ignoring pro-democracy protests for the last two weeks, China's official newspapers seemed today to display a new openness in their reports of a mass demonstration held here on Thursday.

Photographs of streets filled with students waving banners as far as the eye could see ran on the front pages of most newspapers. The newspapers also reported details of demonstrations not only in the capital but in many other cities. Some of those demonstrations had not previously been reported.

and

'Several hundred thousand spectators watched the students marching along the streets, and many of them donated cold drinks and food,'' read part of an article from the official People's Daily. ''As long as there is corruption, this country will never be stable,'' the article quoted a banner as saying.

Such articles were unusual only given the Government's previous determination to avoid references to the demonstrations. It is not clear if today's articles and photos in the official press mark a permanent step toward openness that will let Chinese people learn about events as they happen.

Today's newspapers also quoted the Communist Party General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, as saying that corruption occurs partly because there is a ''lack of openness in the system of work.'' That seemed to be another call for more openness in Chinese society, one of the major student demands.

This unprecedented and unusual practice of press freedom in China would last the month of May, through the thick and thin of the upcoming drama. It would then become a thing of past, never to be seen again.

Official Media Remembering Hu Yaobang

The great student movement of 1989 was triggered by the untimely death of former General Secretary Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦). Ever since then, it was a rare occasion that Hu's name would be mentioned in China's official media. One notable exception was that, in 2005, a moderate ceremony was held to commensurate the 90th anniversary of his birth. But perhaps due to the fact that the date of his death is so closely connected to the movement itself, there has been no activities on the anniversary of his death, on April 15th, 1989.

Maybe until now. It is still two months away from that anniversary but a very unusual essay praising Hu is being published in the official Xinhua Net. The article, originated from the News of the Communist Party of China, is titled "Hu Yaobang's Character as a Public Servant: Not Worrying about the Level of his Position, but Worrying about the Lack of Morality" (胡耀邦的公仆品质：不患位之不尊，而患德之不崇). It's a pretty lengthy appraisal of Hu's characters: modesty, open-mindedness, tolerance, and intelligence. It illustrates each of the character with some small stories of Hu's political life. The personal stories are interesting, but however not very revealing.

The beginning paragraph of the article is pretty telling:

Hu Yaobang has passed away for 19 years. But his voice and expression, his marvelous achievements, and his characters as a public servant are still deeply etched in people's memory. His virtues, noble character, integrity, and charisma, is still being widely praised.

胡耀邦辞世19年了，但他的音容笑貌，他的丰功伟绩，他的公仆品质，仍然深深铭刻在人们的记忆深处；他的良操美德，他的高风亮节，他的人格魅力，仍然被人们广为传颂。

In the coming months, will there be more to come?

A Portrait of Hu Jia

Melinda Liu of Newsweek just published a nice portrait of activist Hu Jia. It is interesting to note that "Hu's moment of awakening was the carnage of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on prodemocracy protesters", according to the article.