Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth

By Deirdre Griswold
WikiLeaks confirms it
Published Jun 29, 2011 2:53 PM
How many times have we been told that the U.S. is an “open” society and the media are “free”?
 
Usually such claims are made when criticizing other countries for not being “open,” especially countries that don’t follow Washington’s agenda.
 
If you live in the United States and depend on the supposedly “free” and “open” commercial media for information, you would without a doubt believe that the Chinese government massacred “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of students in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. That phrase has been repeated tens of thousands of times by the media of this country.
 
But it’s a myth. Furthermore, the U.S. government knows it’s a myth. And all the major media know it too. But they refuse to correct the record because of the basic hostility of the U.S. imperialist ruling class to China.
 
On what do we base this assertion? Several sources.
 
The most recent is a WikiLeaks release of cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to the State Department in June 1989, a few days after the events in China.
 
Second is an assertion in November 1989 by the Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times, an assertion that has never again been referred to by that newspaper.
 
And third is the account of what happened by the Chinese government itself, which is corroborated by the first two.
 
Only one major Western newspaper has published the WikiLeaks cables. That was the Telegraph of London on June 4 of this year, exactly 22 years after the Chinese government called out the troops in Beijing….
 
They knew the truth in 1989
 
The New York Times knows it’s credible. Their own Beijing bureau chief at the time, Nicholas Kristof, confirmed it in an extensive article entitled “China Update: How the Hardliners Won,” published in the Sunday Times magazine on Nov. 12, 1989, five months after the supposed massacre in the square.
 
At the very end of this long article, which purported to give an inside view of a debate within the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Kristof stated categorically: “Based on my observations in the streets, neither the official account nor many of the foreign versions are quite correct. There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”…
 
The full article can be found at : http://www.workers.org/2011/world/tiananmen_0707/

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