Chris Kanthan
Sott.net
"As far as can be determined from the available evidence, NO ONE DIED that night in Tiananmen Square."
If after reading that you're thinking: 'nonsense! that's just a blatant propagandist claim by China's communist party!', you'd be wrong. It was, in fact, Jay Mathews, the Washington Post's Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989. He wrote this article on the topic of the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen square protests for Columbia Journalism Review.
Many western papers have, in fact, occasionally admitted that this report and other similar reports exist, only to go back to the "massacre" narrative, for some unknown reason. For example, in June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristoff - who was in Beijing at the time - wrote: "State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered." In that article, he also debunked a sensational article's claim that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.
A Wikileaks cable from July 1989 also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: "They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students ... until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument."
It is true, of course, that about 200-300 people died in clashes in various parts of Beijing around June 4th 1989 - but about half of those who died were soldiers and police officers.
But what about the iconic "tank man"? Well, if you watch the whole video, you can see that the tanks stopped and let the man jump on the tank. He eventually walks away unharmed. In fact, there are almost no pictures or videos of soldiers actually shooting at or killing people (which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it's a point to keep in mind).
Propaganda involves not only exaggeration, but also omission. Western media now rarely show pictures of tanks and military vehicles burned down or Chinese soldiers brutally killed by the Beijing protesters.
In an article from June 5, 1989, the Wall Street Journal described some of this violence: "Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus."
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