Volume 48, Number 2 · February 8, 2001
The Truth About Tiananmen
By Jonathan Mirsky
The Tiananmen Papers
compiled by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, and with an afterword by Orville Schell
Public Affairs, 513 pp., $30.00
Within six months of the Tiananmen killings of June 3–4, 1989, a recently dismissed Chinese vice-minister told me on the record (and soon denied that he had done so) that 'the man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China.' If evidence comes to light showing how China's supreme leaders planned and directed the Beijing crackdown, the results, once the ritual denials are over, would be an embarrassment within the Communist Party and possibly even a change in the official verdict that what happened throughout China in the spring of 1989 was 'a counterrevolutionary rebellion.'
Review, 4985 words
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