Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement (review)

78 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 lenge, I believe that Bond has succeeded in doing this in Aie last chapter by identifying the common Aiemes and issues Aiat unite Aie various areas covered in the book. He has done Alis with an admirable balance, recognizing the simplicity of Aie challenge and the complexity of me answer. Frederick Leong Ohio State University $ $ Timothy Brook. Quelling the People: The Military Suppression ofthe Beijing Democracy Movement. NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. xiv, 265 pp. Hardcover $27.50. This book springs from the combination ofTimothy Brook's skills as a professional historian and his sense of outrage at Aie Tiananmen massacre. He was not in Beijing when the massacre happened, but traveled there four months later to listen, interview, and read. Then he sifted, cross-checked, and double-checked; he hypothesized, tested, and rehypofhesized. Originally intending a "report," he ended up with a full-length book that covers the military suppression and related events meticulously. Indeed, the detail is presented so methodically Aiat parts of the book will seem tiresome to readers who do not share Brook's passion for establishing the best possible record of events. For these readers, the book will be valuable more as a reference work than as a narrative. As a reference work it is probably as good as an outsider can do for now, but that leaves it still fairly incomplete. There are major questions that Brook probes and reasons at considerable length, but he still falls far short of firm answers: Why did the army open fire? How many died? Was civil war really a possibility in the immediate aftermath? Some day, perhaps after the "verdict is reversed" on the protest movement, the answers to these questions may emerge from classified records and the memories of key participants. Brook is excellent in handling the mendacity of the regime. When one side says black and the other white on a point of fact, he resists the easy and morally timid conclusion that "fairness" requires a conclusion of grey. He evaluates his evidence and shows the reader where it points. His credibility is enhanced when he© 1994 by University applies the same critical method to hyperbolic statements by student protestors. 0/ awai ? ress^ ·£WOTT[e¿ Jj1^ J1J5 D00k maybe too narrowly focused, and that he may have been too harsh on China's rulers, Brook tries in Aie last chapter to fill in a Reviews 79 much broader context and at least to understand, ifnot to condone, the sending oftroops against civilians. He interprets China as a third-world country that has had to respond to Western imperialism and whose leaders might have been put in positions where violence seems the only way out. But in this argument Brook does not give himself the space for the rigorous step-by-step logic that characterizes the rest of Aie book, and Aie conclusions seem a bit wobbly, even to Aie author himself. On the whole this book stands, at least until history gives us better data, as by far the most thorough and analytical public account of the military suppression of the 1989 protests in Beijing. Perry Link Princeton University F Jo-shui Chen. Liu Tsung-yüan and Intellectual Change in T'ang China, 773-819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii, 221 pp. It is a pleasure to welcome a new book on Liu Tsung-yüan, one of the great poets and prose writers of the T'ang period, who was also an important figure in the revival ofinterest in the thought of Aie pre-Han period as a source ofideas for the salvation of the country after the An Lu-shan rebellion in 755. It is a thorough and scholarly study and a valuable addition to the small body of material that is available on Aie subject in English. I want to emphasize this at the outset because much Aiat I shall have to say about Aie book will be critical, not of Dr. Chen's scholarship, but of the way in which he has approached the subject and of the picture of Liu Tsung-yüan that he ends...