Weeb Rev. bookclub did chapter 3 of Atrocity Fabrication—the one on the Tiananmen Square protests. This post is more for them since I’m recapping what we covered.
I suggest you read the chapter yourself, but if you want to read this post in full go ahead. PDF here.
The chapter is split into four distinct sections.
Background: Subversion and the Sino-U.S. Cold War
This one goes into history beginning with the Chinese civil war.
In terms of US involvement during this period the first few pargraphs offer very eye opening examples:
Washington’s hostility towards China’s communist movement had long predated 1949, and the United States had actively intervened in China’s civil war in the preceding four years against communist forces and on the side of the staunchly pro-Western Guomindang government. From August 1945 American air and naval assets were used to facilitate a massive and rapid redeployment of 400,000–500,000 Guomindang personnel and of U.S. Marines to prevent the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from taking key positions across the country. Among their targets were Beijing, Shanghai, and important railway lines, coal mines, ports and bridges.
By 1946 100,000 American military personnel, including 50,000 Marines, were deployed to China, with PLA reports indicating that they actively took to the offensive against communist-held areas. Regular reconnaissance flights by U.S. aircraft provided vital intelligence to the Guomindang, with multiple reports indicating that American aircraft strafed and bombed PLA positions and massacred the populations of communist-held towns. As communist forces enjoyed widespread support particularly from rural communities, entire population centres were often perceived as adversaries and targeted indiscriminately. One U.S. Marine recalled to this effect that his unit had “unmercifully” blasted a Chinese village without knowing “how many innocent people were slaughtered.”
To fight alongside Guomindang forces and their own Marine Corps the U.S. had before the end of 1945 already begun rearming surrendered Imperial Japanese personnel in China – what President Truman referred to as “using the Japanese to hold off the communists.” From 1947 the CIA’s first ever air unit the Flying Tigers deployed to China to help counter communist forces, and by 1949 the U.S. had provided almost $2 billion in funds and a further $1 billion worth of military hardware as aid to the Guomindang and trained a full 39 of its divisions. The lengths to which the U.S. went to defeat China’s communist movement reflected the importance it attached to ensuring the country remained in the Western sphere of influence, and ensured that America and the new People’s Republic were effectively at war from the moment the latter came into existence when the Guomindang lost the civil war.
This one part is a little funny in terms of U.S.Americans coping about popular support for the CPC.
Following the communist victory British journalist and China scholar Felix Greene noted: “Americans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the Chinese, however rotten their leadership, could have preferred a communist government.” Largely as a result Washington’s position towards China was unremittingly hostile, with a very wide range of measures pursued to isolate and destabilise it with the goal of restoring a Western client government to power. Although Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made repeated overtures to Washington seeking improved relations after 1949, these were flatly rejected and the U.S. instead made several attempts to assassinate him.
After this part it focuses on destabilization attempts against People’s China. CIA supported Tibetan separatism is touched upon briefly—do see Ettinger’s book Battleground Tibet for a more full narrative on Tibet.
However I will quote some parts from pages 122 and 123.
Footnote i: A 1964 memorandum showed allocation of funds as follows: $500,000 to support 2,100 fighters based in Nepal, $400,000 in expenses for a covert training site in Colorado and $185,000 for black air transportation of trainees from Colorado in India, for later infiltration into China. The Dalai Lama was also given a personal subsidy of $180,000 annually.
Footnote ii: Under Operation St Bailey, the U.S. also oversaw propaganda to foster separatist thinking among Tibetan communities, and according to the State Department: “objectives are aimed toward lessening the influence and capabilities of the Chinese regime through support, among Tibetans and among foreign nations, of the concept of an autonomous Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama; toward the creation of a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Tibet; and the containment of Chinese Communist expansion – in pursuance of U.S. policy objectives.
And this part from the main body of the text:
Efforts escalated from the mid-1950s, and a four-day conference between U.S. intelligence and the Tibetan separatist leadership in 1955 saw a ten-year joint plan laid out to balkanise China and establish Tibet as a separate state aligned with Western interests. The CIA invested heavily in training and arming separatist guerrillas from 1956, which were tasked with sabotaging infrastructure, mining roads, cutting communications lines and ambushing PLA forces.
Both the Chinese state and its Tibetan minority suffered as a result of U.S. intervention, with the fourteenth Dalai Lama being among those to highlight that separatist cooperation with the CIA to undermine China “only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.” According to him, Western support was provided “not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilise all communist governments.”
After this the book briefly mentions the strategic rapprochement between China and the U.S:
The U.S. was moved to pursue détente and normalisation of diplomatic relations with China in the mid-1970s, largely due to setbacks in the Vietnam War, economic stagnation at home, and a perceived rise in Soviet power. With Beijing itself perceiving the USSR as an imminent threat to its security following the SinoSoviet split of 1960, China’s rapprochement with the U.S. ended its political isolation and facilitated an expansion of economic ties with the Western world. This compensated for the decline in ties with the Soviet Bloc which had previously been key to bolstering its war-ravaged economy. Détente would be short lived, however, and just a decade later the end of the Cold War, a relative decline in Soviet power, and improving Sino-Soviet ties meant China was no longer seen in the U.S. as a vital asset to Western goals of containing Moscow. The result was a resumption of efforts to target China for destabilisation, which first materialised in the summer of 1989.
Unrest in June 1989: The West Claims Mass Slaughter in Beijing
This section is relatively brief. It explains the economic situation prior to June 1989. Corruption and inequality as a consequence of Refrorm and Opening Up created discontent among youth and part of the population. Zhao Ziyang, GenSec of the Communist Parry at the time, pushed for accelerated price reforms which contributed to inflation shocks—hitting urban areas hard. Coupled with economic over heating and the aforementioned corruption it drew the ire of protest groups that were for the most part composed of students.
The author, Abrams, personally interviewed a former student protester for the book. His interviewee noted that portraying all of the student protesters as calling for political westernization was inaccurate—a good number of them were worried about corruption and bourgeoise liberalization.
While this is true, I think a good additional read is Torkil Lauesen’s The Long Transition Towards Socialism And The End Of Capitalism (see chapter: The Chinese Encounter With Neoliberal Globalization). The book does many things, but offering an educational Marxist narrative of the Chinese revolution from before 1949 to today is one major aspect of it. Abrams meanwhile is a liberal author who, although sympathetic to the Global South countries targeted by the U.S. in this book, focuses more on the specifics of imperialist interference in China and elsewhere. I think reading both Lauesen and Abrams’ writings on the Tiananmen protests will give you a more full comprehension of it than if you had just read one.
Anyway, Abrams then connects Tiananmen to modern day color revolutions:
Hijacking any form of public discontent to portray it as a call for political westernisation was a common practice in the West particularly after the Cold War. Whether Egyptian protestors calling for “bread, freedom and administrative correctness” in 2011 or those in neighbouring Sudan in 2019 demonstrating against the rise in prices, protests over living conditions or government misconduct were very consistently spun to be portrayed as calling for Western-style liberal democracy. Western-trained professional activists would often then move in to seize leadership positions and divert public discontent in this direction – presenting political and economic westernisation as both a solution and a historical inevitability. Such portrayals were consistent with the post-Cold War Western worldview of an ‘end of history,’ which presented the West’s systems of governance as an ultimate truth and the inevitable outcome of political development across the world. The Western narrative of a Chinese protest which “drew upon Western-inspired ideals” and was led by “pro-democracy dissidents” had little real grounding in reality, however, and while there were minority elements in Tiananmen Square in 1989 who did aspire for westernisation, they did not reflect the purpose of the movement. The deeply rooted Western perceptions of its own political and economic systems as ones universally aspired to, however, made it very easy for Western populations to believe that any discontent was a result of lack of westernising ‘pro-democracy’ reforms.
Although a leading critic of Beijing, the London-based Guardian conceded that events at Tiananmen more generally “have been distorted – continually and wildly – by the Western human rights lobby,” slamming “the selective remembering of influential reporters and human rights activists. . . . They have abused the memory of June 1989, turning it into a weapon to be used as part of their human rights agenda for China.”
Following the clearing out of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, a Western narrative quickly emerged portraying authorities as having responded to the sit-in by dispatching soldiers to open fire into crowds and massacre peacefully protesting students without provocation. This was presented as a reflection of the party and military’s lack of respect for the lives of their people, and quickly became the overarching theme in Western portrayals of both the event and of China more broadly that would influence the metanarrative surrounding the country for decades […] Essentially, the West pushed a narrative of good against evil – the former being the Chinese youth calling for westernisation of their country’s political system who were suppressed by the ‘brutal’ and ‘totalitarian’ government holding China back. While this narrative is the most spectacular and memorable for a Western public relations effort, available evidence very strongly contradicts it.
What Happened in Beijing in June 1989
This is the main meat and potatoes of the chapter. As said above it’s best to read the chapter yourself and note the first hand accounts that contradict the typical narrative of Tiananmen Square. One important aspect to note is the way imperialist countries’ covert intelligence agencies tried to manipulate the event to overthrow the government.
As the Vancouver Sun was among the publications to report in 1992, citing officials, for several months preceding the clearing of Tiananmen Square on June 4: “the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.” The involvement of Western intelligence agencies had been widely suspected, with the speed at which they were able to later locate and extract key pro-Western protest leaders further indicating that contacts had been established for some time.
As for the actual clearing of the square:
Cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing published by Wikileaks in 2016 provided some of the most valuable insights into the events in Tiananmen Square. Written for government officials as a report of the events that happened, the cables contrasted sharply with the sensationalised reports in Western media written for public consumption. According to the embassy a Chilean diplomat and his wife were present when Chinese soldiers moved into Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. They were able to enter and leave many times, and faced no harassment. Citing the diplomat, the embassy reported: “He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers.” Crucially, and entirely contrary to Western claims, the diplomat witnessed “no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument.” The students then agreed to leave the square, and there were no incidences of lethal force being used by authorities. “Once [an] agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner,” it concluded, adding in reference to prevailing Western portrayals at the time that “there was no such slaughter.” Chile was politically closely aligned with the U.S. at the time, and its diplomats’ accounts were considered reliable.
Former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, similarly conceded in 1998 that: “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” He referred to the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ as a myth, stressing that it was “hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression.”
Spanish ambassador in Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, noted in his own book which covered the subject that Spain’s TVE state media outlet had a television crew in the Tiananmen Square on June 4, and that if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to record it. He stressed that most of the reports claiming a massacre were made by Western journalists in the Beijing Hotel some distance from the square and out of sight.
The real fighting happened in the areas outside the square further out in Beijing, and contrary to the Western narrative the PLA were actually attacked by violent factions rioters.
Contrasting to Western claims of tens of thousands of innocent students killed in Tiananmen, street battles far from the square between soldiers and anti-government insurgents saw hundreds killed. Unlike the fabricated massacre of students which had no photographic evidence to support it, footage fully confirmed reports of attacks by unknown militants on PLA personnel and that many were burned alive and tortured in the streets. Coverage and publication of related images were conspicuous by their almost total absence from Western reporting, however.
Gregory Clark alleged that soldiers were victims of attacks by petrol bombs, and that many were trapped in busses, strung up and burned. He questioned the suspicious circumstances under which radical anti-government elements had managed to gain access to such weapons and learned to use them. By contrast the PLA personnel in Beijing, according to U.S. State Department reports, had carried no firearms when facing civilians up to June 3 which limited their ability to respond to armed attacks.
This next one is quite disturbing but I think it’s good to quote here.
Accompanying Cunningham was a student from the Central Academy of Drama, a former hunger striking peaceful protestor named Meng, who was himself shocked at the extreme violence of the rioters. Cunningham recalled Meng shouted:
“Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother f*cker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!” “He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice. . . . At least one surrendering soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but the ambulance itself was attacked, the back door almost ripped off. . . . The blood thirst made me nauseous.
Cunningham stressed the difference between the minority militants and the majority of peaceful protestors, with the former “deliberately instigating violence, putting them at odds with conscientious demonstrators who had no intention of hurting anyone.” The goal of the violent minority appeared to be to provoke a military response against both themselves, but also against the peaceful majority, which in turn would provide grounds to vilify the government and swell the ranks of radical anti-government factions. Militants mingling among peaceful protestors and launching attacks from within their ranks, as alluded to by Cunningham and other observers, may have been what Deng Xiaoping referred to when he lamented on June 9: “because bad people mingled with the good, which made it difficult to take the drastic measures we should take.”
Pictures of dead, burned and mutilated Chinese soldiers provide important evidence of the actions of the armed militants. A photograph of one was published in Granta, but never appeared elsewhere in the British press and made few appearances elsewhere in the West. “Perhaps because it challenges the myth of a peaceful student protest inside Tiananmen Square,” one analyst speculated regarding why these images of actual killings were scarcely shown or even known of, while misrepresentations of the ‘tank man’ image were propagated widely. Gregory Clark, for one, noted as an example of what he claimed was an intentional effort led by Britain to distort public perceptions of the events: “Reuters, the British new agency, refused to publish a photo of a charred [soldier’s] corpse strung up under an overpass – a photo that would have done much to explain what had happened.”
One last thing before I move to the next section:
Western involvement in the unrest in China in 1989 extended to information warfare operations targeting the government, the military and the general public. Voice of America (VOA) targeted the People’s Liberation Army by broadcasting to its satellites, and falsely reported several times that military units were turning on each other and the country was collapsing into civil war. The goal appeared to be to sow confusion and panic in the military and government. Shortly after attacks on soldiers began in Beijing, VOA reported that Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and Deng Xiaoping was nearing death. It increased Chinese language broadcasts to 11 hours daily. VOA’s focus on events in Tiananmen Square were extreme, growing from 20 percent of airtime between May 4 and May 15 to over 80 percent after June 4. Such tactics were hardly unique to operations against China. Two years later during Operation Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. accessed Iraqi military communications to transmit contradictory orders and excessively ludicrous propaganda statements pretending to be the Iraqi leadership in order to disrupt and demoralise the country’s armed forces. Later that year when the USSR disintegrated the U.S. was able to access Soviet military communications to ensure that any attempt to stop pro-Western elements from seizing power could be pre-empted.
Western intelligence operations in China continued after protests disbanded on June 4, the most notable being Operation Yellowbird which was carried out by the CIA and by British agencies. The operation sought to extract the Western assets who had led the radical wing of the protests from China. The close connections many of these figures already had to Western intelligence played an important role in facilitating their extraction, with 15 of the 21 most important assets successfully retrieved and taken to the British colony of Hong Kong.
That’s a brief overview of this section. Again. Go read it yourself because he has many more firsthand accounts of the protests and eventual riot.
China and the West After Tiananmen Square
This one is short and the section title is self-explanatory. Something to note: this section sets the tone for later in the book when it covers China again in chapter 10—specifically with Xinjiang in the late 2010s being the propaganda target.
Also, despite the CPC not being overthrown in 1989 Tiananmen was still a huge propaganda victory for the West. So much Sinophobic sentiment stems from portraying this event as a one-sided massacre. This is why people will believe anything about China from allegations of mistreatment in Tibet or Xinjiang, to the “social credit system”, or whatever else. It’s dangerous because it creates public approval for aggression against the country, and it also just smears every accomplishment by China as needing to be qualified by “AT WHAT COST?”
Note the final paragraphs here. Sino-US cooperation in the 90s could have been imperiled by the “rollback” faction of empire wanting to destroy the country. One should really appreciate the careful tightrope Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders at the time had to walk to avoid being issolated further and destroyed:
With PLA units launching only modest reprisals in response to the militants attacking them from among the protestors, and the military avoiding a fall into disorder, Western intervention to destabilise China fell far short of success. As a result, the country would continue its path towards economic growth, and the ruling party would eventually crack down harder on corruption while raising living standards considerably. China emerged as the world’s largest economy in 2014 [by Purchasing Power Parity], and by the end of 2020 had a GDP one sixth larger than that of the United States. Its industries by then were poised to gain dominance in many key areas of high tech ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G.
In contrast the Soviet Union, which in 1989 had been several decades ahead of China in its high tech and economic development, was successfully destabilised two years later leading to its balkanisation, a 45 percent contraction in the post-Soviet Russian economy, the loss of much its industrial base, a crash in life expectancy and skyrocketing poverty rates. The result was millions of deaths and the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women into slavery in Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1990s. In the Cold War’s immediate aftermath, the possibility of a balkanisation of China into smaller states was being openly discussed in the West as such a process was underway in the Soviet Union. In the USSR’s case this led to Soviet successor states devoting much of their energies over the next three decades to fighting one another after having formerly been united as a single superpower, which left Western hegemony unchallenged.
The unrest of 1989 thus marked a decisive turning point in China’s history in which the country avoided a very dark fate, and resulted in the deposition of Zhao Ziyang who was accused of having openly sided with pro-Western elements in the protest movement. Some analysts, such as international relations scholar Hal Brands, interpreted June 1989 as the beginning of a new phase in China’s relations with the West – a Cold War which would intensify with time as Western rhetoric towards Beijing changed drastically. Brands claimed in 2019 that 1989 highlighted “fundamental political differences at the heart of today’s U.S.-China competition,” and served as an “early notice” that China was not going to westernise its political system as Soviet Bloc communist states had. Indeed, three decades later when China had comfortably surpassed the U.S. in GDP, in spending on military acquisitions, and in scientific publications, among several other key metrics, hardliners in Washington such as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo lamented Western complacency in 1989. Using the fabricated Tiananmen massacre as a pretext, many contended the West should have taken much more aggressive actions to snuff China out as a challenger to Western power when it was much weaker.
The Tiananmen incident closely coincided with multiple Western interventions across the communist world targeting states in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, which in most cases relied not on military action but rather on new information warfare capabilities and on cultivation and support for pro-Western paramilitary units. When China remained stable, however, the West managed to salvage a public relations victory by referring to a purported one-sided massacre of student protestors which never happened to vilify Beijing – an atrocity fabrication for propaganda purposes. The alleged massacre would continue to be used as a pretext to pursue limited hostile policies against China including economic sanctions, arms embargoes, the suspension of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, and cancellation of many investment projects. Beijing was nevertheless able to leverage Western private sector interests, which in contrast to Western nations’ geopolitical interests were leading major firms to push for a normalisation of ties, to quickly resume trade and have most sanctions lifted. The ludicrous potential of access to Chinese markets and to its workforce provided this leverage. Canada, which took the hardest line on the issue, maintained sanctions for four years but was eventually forced to relax them as it remained an outlier even among Western countries. Chinese sources also perceived that Britain used claims of a massacre in Tiananmen Square as a pretext to renege on bilateral understandings relating to the return of the colony of Hong Kong to Beijing.
