DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / June 4, 2014 / Daily Tribune
It was June 1989. I was in the US for meetings with refugee program officials in my capacity as administrator of the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, as well as to visit a sister at the University of Pennsylvania. The bloody turmoil in Beijing was all over the media, and a rally was to be held at a university park. I attended and listened to a speech in broken English about liberty, freedom, and China. It seemed that Deng Xiaoping’s crackdown was widely condemned.
Chinese-British writer Han Suyin, however, had a different take. Renowned for her novel A Many Splendored Thing, which was made into a movie that won three Oscars, Han Suyin (who died in 2012 at age 95) defended the crackdown, arguing that China had to keep order and prevent chaos. As a celebrated cultural icon, her words carried weight.
For 25 years now, the Tiananmen events of June 1989 have been invariably described as a “massacre” (specifically, a massacre of “students”). Chinese government reports the number of casualties at around 300 while Western accounts place the casualties between 400 and 800 civilians (Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times) or up to 1,000 (Amnesty International) and 2,600 (Time magazine in 1990 — since retracted). More often than not, the casualties on the government side (soldiers and police) — no matter how important, if one had to have a complete picture — aren’t ever mentioned. There are pictures of rows of Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) burnt out and of police burnt to a crisp in their vehicles.
With 25 years of hindsight and new information available on the Tiananmen or June 4 Incident, we are given a chance to evaluate the events better. One crucial source that is now available (thanks to Julian Assange) is WikiLeaks, which showed secret US cables reported in The Telegraph on June 4, 2011 by Malcolm Moore (“WikiLeaks: No bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim”) that said, “Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square... Instead, …Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the center of Beijing, as they fought their way toward the square from the west of the city.”
It added: “Inside the square itself, a Chilean diplomat was on hand to give his US counterparts an eyewitness account of the final hours of the pro-democracy movement… In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that ‘there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops…’ Instead, the fiercest fighting took place at Muxidi, around three miles west of the square, where thousands of people had gathered spontaneously on the night of June 3 to halt the advance of the army.”
The Web site nsnbc.me (not MSNBC) by Chritoff Lehmann has a 2,000 word piece by Dr. Long Xinming entitled, “Let’s Talk About Tiananmen Square, 1989: My Hearsay is Better Than Your Hearsay,” which says, “There were two events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989. They were not related. One was a student protest that involved a sit-in in Tiananmen Square… The other was a worker protest… (where) a group of workers had barricaded streets in several locations leading to Central Beijing, several kilometers… from the Square… (And) there was a third group present… which consisted of neither students nor workers. ‘Thugs’ or ‘anarchists’ might be an appropriate adjective… The violence began when this third group decided to attack the soldiers… with Molotov cocktails, and torched several dozen buses —with the soldiers still inside.”
The Voice of America (VoA) played its role broadcasting 24/7 its version of the events at Tiananmen: “And all university students of that day… tell of listening to the VoA in their dorms, late into the night, building in their imaginations a happy world of freedom and light… offering comfort and encouragement, provoking, giving advice on strategy and tactics.” And what about the US government? “There were five or six primary leaders of the Tiananmen Square sit-in… They were spirited out of China, first to Hong Kong, then to Taiwan. And very shortly thereafter were in the US.”
One of the Tiananmen student leaders, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize years later despite (or because of) his support for the US attack on Iraq.
There is no question that China in 1989 was a country dealing with many challenges and problems. It had not yet become the Dragon Economy that it now is. Would it have progressed to its present enviable state as the top economy of the world if it had not restored order by some degree of force 25 years ago?
(Join me and Chito Sta. Romana, Benito Lim, and others on our GNN Talk News TV program on June 14, Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; and visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)
It was June 1989. I was in the US for meetings with refugee program officials in my capacity as administrator of the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, as well as to visit a sister at the University of Pennsylvania. The bloody turmoil in Beijing was all over the media, and a rally was to be held at a university park. I attended and listened to a speech in broken English about liberty, freedom, and China. It seemed that Deng Xiaoping’s crackdown was widely condemned.
Chinese-British writer Han Suyin, however, had a different take. Renowned for her novel A Many Splendored Thing, which was made into a movie that won three Oscars, Han Suyin (who died in 2012 at age 95) defended the crackdown, arguing that China had to keep order and prevent chaos. As a celebrated cultural icon, her words carried weight.
For 25 years now, the Tiananmen events of June 1989 have been invariably described as a “massacre” (specifically, a massacre of “students”). Chinese government reports the number of casualties at around 300 while Western accounts place the casualties between 400 and 800 civilians (Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times) or up to 1,000 (Amnesty International) and 2,600 (Time magazine in 1990 — since retracted). More often than not, the casualties on the government side (soldiers and police) — no matter how important, if one had to have a complete picture — aren’t ever mentioned. There are pictures of rows of Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) burnt out and of police burnt to a crisp in their vehicles.
With 25 years of hindsight and new information available on the Tiananmen or June 4 Incident, we are given a chance to evaluate the events better. One crucial source that is now available (thanks to Julian Assange) is WikiLeaks, which showed secret US cables reported in The Telegraph on June 4, 2011 by Malcolm Moore (“WikiLeaks: No bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim”) that said, “Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square... Instead, …Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the center of Beijing, as they fought their way toward the square from the west of the city.”
It added: “Inside the square itself, a Chilean diplomat was on hand to give his US counterparts an eyewitness account of the final hours of the pro-democracy movement… In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that ‘there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops…’ Instead, the fiercest fighting took place at Muxidi, around three miles west of the square, where thousands of people had gathered spontaneously on the night of June 3 to halt the advance of the army.”
The Web site nsnbc.me (not MSNBC) by Chritoff Lehmann has a 2,000 word piece by Dr. Long Xinming entitled, “Let’s Talk About Tiananmen Square, 1989: My Hearsay is Better Than Your Hearsay,” which says, “There were two events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989. They were not related. One was a student protest that involved a sit-in in Tiananmen Square… The other was a worker protest… (where) a group of workers had barricaded streets in several locations leading to Central Beijing, several kilometers… from the Square… (And) there was a third group present… which consisted of neither students nor workers. ‘Thugs’ or ‘anarchists’ might be an appropriate adjective… The violence began when this third group decided to attack the soldiers… with Molotov cocktails, and torched several dozen buses —with the soldiers still inside.”
The Voice of America (VoA) played its role broadcasting 24/7 its version of the events at Tiananmen: “And all university students of that day… tell of listening to the VoA in their dorms, late into the night, building in their imaginations a happy world of freedom and light… offering comfort and encouragement, provoking, giving advice on strategy and tactics.” And what about the US government? “There were five or six primary leaders of the Tiananmen Square sit-in… They were spirited out of China, first to Hong Kong, then to Taiwan. And very shortly thereafter were in the US.”
One of the Tiananmen student leaders, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize years later despite (or because of) his support for the US attack on Iraq.
There is no question that China in 1989 was a country dealing with many challenges and problems. It had not yet become the Dragon Economy that it now is. Would it have progressed to its present enviable state as the top economy of the world if it had not restored order by some degree of force 25 years ago?
(Join me and Chito Sta. Romana, Benito Lim, and others on our GNN Talk News TV program on June 14, Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; and visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)
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