Communists Behaving Badly

The Tiananmen Papers. Compiled by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001). 513 pp. $30.

Featuring excerpts from thousands of pages of material purportedly transcribed from highly classified Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government documents, the Tiananmen Papers has generated more media attention than any other book on China published in recent memory. ¹ The Tiananmen Papers provides a day-by-day, and occasionally hour-by-hour, account of the Chinese leadership's deliberations throughout the 1989 pro-democracy movement, from its spark, the April 15 death (now believed to be of natural causes) of Hu Yaobang, a popular pro-reform CCP leader ousted in 1987 for failing to suppress student protests in 1986-87, to its bloody conclusion in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, when martial law troops clashed with Beijing residents in an effort to clear the remaining protesters from Tiananmen Square, the symbolic political heart of China.

Drawing on minutes of meetings of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest governing body, memoranda of conversations between paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and other key decision-makers, and reports submitted to the central leadership by provincial officials and the security and intelligence ministries, the Tiananmen Papers retells a familiar story from an unfamiliar viewpoint: that of the handful of high-ranking party leaders who held authority in name, and of the ostensibly retired party elders who held ultimate power. The Tiananmen Papers sheds new light on the dispute between politically orthodox and comparatively moderate members of the Politburo Standing Committee, which was resolved only when the elderly patriarch Deng Xiaoping and a handful of other retired revolutionaries stepped in. The broad outlines of the struggle within the CCP leadership were clear at the time, but the details of the debate, and of the manner in which it was carried out, remained opaque. ² The publication of the Tiananmen Papers thus enhances but does not dramatically alter the historical record.

As with any collection of reputedly secret materials, questions of authenticity are difficult to resolve definitively. The editors Andrew Nathan and Perry Link are respected scholars of Chinese politics who are resident at Columbia University and Princeton respectively, and who have close ties to the Chinese exile pro-democracy community. They argue that the papers "possess an internal richness, coherence, and human believability that it would be almost impossible to fake," but caution that they "have no basis for proclaiming their authenticity with absolute authority." The pseudonymous compiler, Zhang Liang, did not provide the editors with original documents or photocopies, but with what is ostensibly a computer printout of his transcription of the documents.

The Tiananmen Papers provides insight into the leadership's mindset as it faced mounting public dissent and calls for change. Few party leaders were willing to acknowledge publicly that frustration with rampant official corruption and the desire for greater popular participation in politics were among the root causes of the protests. Instead, they claimed that a cabal of domestic and foreign plotters bent on destabilizing China and overthrowing the CCP was manipulating the students--a charge frequently reiterated as the protests grew in size and spread from the capital to other major cities. ³ The materials also reveal much about the attitudes of Chinese leaders, both past and present, toward popular political participation. In one illustrative instance, a conservative leader declared, "we're the ruling party, so it's our prerogative to accept opinion when it's good and reject it out of hand when it's bad."

In addition, the inclusion of numerous reports from local officials and China's public security and intelligence services not only enhances the narrative, but also sheds light on how information was transmitted, and often manipulated, in the Chinese bureaucracy. As the Tiananmen Papers documents, some of the intelligence provided to senior leaders was clearly biased and perhaps even deliberately misleading. ⁴

The 1989 Tiananmen Movement, as Viewed from Zhongnanhai ⁵

The death of a...