Tiananmen Square: 30 Years of Propaganda
How the West Created the Myth of a Massacre That Never Really Happened
--
There are some things concerning history that we simply know to be true without having to research them or look any deeper into their validity. They are established and popular facts. Things that have always been true and always will be correct. One such thing that we all know to be certain is the “fact” that the Chinese military slaughtered thousands of innocent and peaceful student protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June of 1989… Only they didn’t.
“As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”
Jay Mathews, Columbia Journalism Review
The myth of the slaughter at Tiananmen Square should be immediately familiar to anyone who has been following events in North Korea. Recent reports that originated in the South Korean media suggested that Kim Jong-Un had died. Twice. The source for the claims was Japanese media and the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo. Chosun Ilbo has a track record of printing fake news about North Korea in conjunction with campaigns by South Korean intelligence.
In 2013, the newspaper printed an allegation from an “unnamed source” in China that 12 people had been executed by firing squad, including Hyon Song Wol, the ex-girlfriend of Kim Jong Un. The reasoning behind the executions was said to Hyon making a sex tape that was then sold and spread into China. Apparently, she was machine-gunned. The news was again repeated throughout western media without question. The problem with this, of course, is that Hyon Song Wol is alive and well and, far from being shamed and out of favour, was elected to the Workers Party’s Central Committee in 2017.
In 2016, it was General Ri Yong-gil who had allegedly been executed on charges of “factionalism, abuse of power and corruption”, the execution claiming to be more “evidence” of a “reign of terror” by Kim Jong Un. Yet again the news was repeated through the mainstream western media without question. Of course, General Ri Yong-gil had not been executed at all. Again, just like Hyon Song Wol, he was quite alive and serving as a member of the Workers Party’s Central Military Commission. In 2018 he returned as the army’s chief of general staff with Reuters saying he was “known for [his] unquestioning support of leader Kim Jong Un”.
Just last year, it was the turn of Kim Yong-chol to be “executed” by the North. The propaganda collapsed after he was seen in pictures released by North Korean state television that showed him attending a musical performance held by the wives of Korean People’s Army officers in Pyongyang. Again, Western media sources had wasted no time in reprinting these allegations without fact-checking. The long history of South Korea and the West claiming the North has had people executed on a whim are beginning to be exposed for the propaganda that they are.
Unfortunately the biggest lie of all persists.
As with North Korea, China is an insular and closed culture, making the dismantling of propaganda all the more difficult. China didn’t have the benefit of social media in 1989 to quickly pick apart the narrative that would dominate popular perception for China for a generation. As with North Korea today, the campaign of disinformation has been immensely successful in souring the public perception of a Western ideological rival.
The fact that nobody actually died at Tiananmen Square is not debatable or open to interpretation, it is a known fact amongst the political establishment and the mainstream media in the West.
Sparked by the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang in April of 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests were a reaction to the changing nature of China, moving from the age of Mao into the international economic superpower that we see today. The relaxation of financial rules allowed for corruption to re-enter Chinese society and create a wealth gap between newly affluent citizens and the working poor. Like most protest movements, those making up the bulk of the protestors had no single ideology. While there was indeed an undercurrent of calls for democracy, the thrust of the protests was not a people “yearning to be free”, but rather an anti-capitalist stance against corruption and the new direction of the state.
The United States has a tried and tested methodology of undermining governments and arranging coups. There are uncanny pre-echoes of events 25 years later during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kyiv and, equally, more recent events in Hong Kong.
As with both these examples, there have always been claims that events at Tiananmen Square had been influenced and encouraged by the CIA. In just one example, rationing of petrol was in effect in China during 1989, only being available to embassies, government ministries and for the small number of the public who owned cars. Yet arson was rampant during the protests, with a considerable amount of Molotov cocktails being used against security forces. Many of the protestors were armed with automatic weapons.
Enflamed by passionate but angry agitators, the initially peaceful protests turned increasingly violent, and the unprepared authorities lost control of the situation, leading to widespread insurrection throughout Beijing. Despite attempts by the police to negotiate with the protestors, Premier Li Peng even meeting protest leaders on national TV, firebrand radicals refused all possibility of negotiation and seemed to be intent in spilling the blood of the state.
Since the beginning of the protests, Tiananmen Square had been surrounded by soldiers armed with little more than truncheons. Once protestors began burning vehicles containing soldiers and even lynching and mutilating state forces, there was little choice but to move against the protests.
Images of these atrocities by protesters are freely available online and are not posted here due to their graphic nature. The images, which serve as primary evidence against the Western narrative, can be viewed here. Once again, readers are advised that these images are extremely graphic and depict mutilation and burning of human beings through mob violence.
The bulk of the protestors were not actually students, but workers. It was the workers who had created and occupied the barricades that the Chinese tanks so famously smashed through, it was the workers who were responsible for the killing of Chinese soldiers and it was the workers who continued to resist the army once they had entered the square. The real students in Tiananmen Square were allowed to leave in peace while the agitators continued the battle throughout the evening, leading to the majority of the deaths.
On June 13, 1989, The New York Times issued a correction after it has published claims first reported in the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po and then the San Francisco Examiner that protestors had been shot at Tiananmen Square. The NYT clarified that while people had been shot, it wasn’t at Tiananmen Square.
“The article does not correspond with accounts of other witnesses on important points… State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered.”
New York Times, June 13, 1989
These claims are responsible for many of the falsehoods about Tiananmen Square that have been told ever since. They originated with a Qinghua University student who alleged students were machine-gunned in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square. The issue of bias was never raised. However, the accounts that nobody died at the square were further confirmed on July 12, 1989, when a Latin American diplomat provided an eyewitness account of events in Beijing via a cable later released by Wikileaks.
Chilean Second Secretary Carlos Gallo stated that he witnessed the military enter the square “and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds”. He added that “most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear–truncheons and wooden clubs.”
“Although gunfire could be heard, Gallo said that apart from some beating of students, there was no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument. When poloff mentioned some reportedly eyewitness accounts of massacres at the monument with automatic weapons, Gallo said that there was no such slaughter.”
Diplomatic Cable, 1989, released by Wikileaks
People indeed died during the six weeks of protests that swept China, but it was a number far lower than the absurdist 10,000 figure such as the British government suggested, one that was spread by the BBC in 2017. China has long accused Britain of being behind much of the propaganda campaign that was constructed after the non-incident at Tiananmen Square, suggesting that it was an attempt by Britain to avoid the return of Hong Kong to Chinese authorities in 1997.
The video below shows the level of propaganda that was being disseminated. Containing claims of shooting and slaughter at Tiananmen Square that was widely debunked by those on the scene, it ignores the fact that many of the burning vehicles highlighted early in the video contained members of the Chinese forces. These vehicles were seen in the disturbing images referenced earlier.
Interestingly, an unnamed BBC journalist is said to have played more than their fair share of creating the fake news cloud around Tiananmen Square. This journalist stated that he had seen Chinese forces shooting students in the centre of the square while situated on a high floor at a Beijing Hotel. Tiananmen Square was not visible from that hotel.
The New York Times again gives an early answer to the actual death toll, writing on June 21, 1989, that “it seems plausible that about a dozen soldiers and policemen were killed, along with 400 to 800 civilians.” Numbers in this area predominate early discussions surrounding the 1989 protests, with the then United States ambassador to China James Lilley saying that after visiting hospitals around Beijing the number of dead was likely a minimum of several hundred. A declassified NSA cable says that between 180 and 500 were killed.
Once the value of the disturbances was realised amongst Chinese international opponents, the death toll began to rise, as did the official narrative around the nature of the protests. Despite common claims, the majority of those who died were not students and were not peaceful protestors, many being described as “thugs with lethal weapons”.
The propaganda campaign even created a “relatable hero”, a single man who held back an army, the defiance of a man who craves the freedoms of the West… yet it actually shows that the Chinese were willing to hold up an entire column of tanks rather than simply run him down. What they also never tell you is that the tanks are leaving, not entering.
Half of those killed were said to be police and security forces, many trapped in their vehicles when they were set ablaze by insurrectionists. Others were lynched and mutilated. What must also be noted here is that neither the military nor the police had sufficient anti-riot gear and armed with nothing more than truncheons and wooden clubs.
All verified accounts from Tiananmen Square say that protestors were allowed to leave peacefully when troops arrived, there is no video or photo footage of slaughter and no documented evidence from the aftermath that suggests the massacre of thousands. In fact, journalists at the scene, diplomats and even the NSA agree that there was no slaughter in the square and any killing took place elsewhere with the dead numbering around 300–500, including a large number of the military.
Of the 21 protest leaders on China’s most-wanted list, 15 were spirited out of China to Hong Kong, many first moving to France and then to the United States where they attended Ivy League colleges. The extraction missions were aided by MI6 and the CIA under what was known as Operation Yellowbird.
The propaganda machine not only changed the entire purpose of the protests to suit imperialistic “they want democracy” narrative, they willfully ignored the fact that many of the protests were violent and not peaceful, ignoring the hundreds of police and military dead and creating an entire massacre that never happened.
The claims that China had massacred thousands of peace-loving students turned China into a near international pariah, setting back reform and global investment. As a piece of propaganda, it worked. The myth of the event is regularly repeated by those wishing to demonise either Chinese “human rights abuses” or the “evils of communism”. The methodology has been repeated with North Korea, Hong Kong, and beyond. While there is little doubt that the events of 1989 carried a heavy death toll and innocent people certainly were caught in the carnage on both sides, the official narrative does not tell either the whole story or the entire truth. The genuinely innocent deserved better.
I am a freelance long-form writer who writes on true crime, politics, history and more. I am entirely self-funded and if you liked this article, please consider a donation via Patreon as a token of appreciation or directly via PayPal. You can join my mailing list for the latest articles and also like my Facebook page. I’m also active on Twitter. I can be contacted for projects through my website MichaelEastWriter.com where you’ll also find lots more content.
