June 20, 1989
Excerpts from the "Los Angeles Times"
Photograph on the top of Page One from he Associated Press; caption:
"The Great Wall of China at Mutianyu, normally an area choked with tourists, was deserted Monday [June 18, 1989]. In Beijing, convoys of trucks full of troops rumbled out of the city, further reducing the military presence."
Page 10, article:
"China's Underground Presses Seized as Crackdown on Media Continues"
"Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood." - Lu Xun, Chinese writer, 1926
quoted at the top of the article
By Daniel Williams, Times Staff Writer
BEIJING - Along with the pageant of arrests, interrogations, confessions and handcuffings shown night after night on state television, there have also appeared scenes of raids on printing presses in Beijing.
The machinery is shown being pulled out of dark rooms in monotonous housing projects and loaded on army trucks - another example of the relentless pursuit of "counterrevolutionaries" by security forces.
The raids are basically an effort to monopolize the spread of information. The government is trying to ensure that its version of violence during the June 3-4 assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tian An Men Square is the only one.
The state-run press is also being brought into line in a clampdown of a different sort.
For many Chinese, the literary link to the past is as important as possession of the square itself: It is the difference between viewing the deaths of hundred of demonstrators and their supporters as an isolated incident or seeing it as part of a temporarily frustrated but still vital tide.
However, getting rid of the printing presses will at least narrow the chances that essays, poems, and stories will circulate freely inside China.
In the past, especially after the Democracy Wall movement of 1979, writings published abroad kept the literature alive. Dissident words from the spring are already seeping from China into Hong Kong.
Chai Ling, a Beijing Teachers University student, who was one of the leaders of the movement, sent a recording of her thoughts to Hong Kong before she went into hiding.
"What can we do to bring back those students who were sacrificed?" she wondered. "Their souls will always remain on Changan Avenue. They'll never come back. Some of them were very, very young. They'll never come back."
Her words, too, also recalled protest literature past. Compare, for example, a poem by writer Wen Yiduo written after the deaths of students at Tian An Men in 1926:
"See there, whose children are those?
They're hardly adolescents, are they?
What's going on?
Aren't those bayonet wounds on their heads?
By tomorrow, the city of Beijing will be full of ghosts."
The government seems acutely aware of the significance of such allusions and has tried to separate Tian An Men, 1989, from repressions of the past. Officials insist that no one was killed on Tian An Men Square during a night of bloodshed that ended at dawn June 4. That someone might have been killed elsewhere seems not to matter. By government admission, people were killed along the length of Changan Avenue, the boulevard that cuts across the north end of the square - although the official account distinguishes between "the people," who were killed by accident, and "thugs" and "counterrevolutionary rioters" who were gunned down in self-defense.
Any rival account is blasted as "rumor-mongering."
Whether the Chinese believe this account may not be the point: it puts them on notice about what they are supposed to believe. Already in Beijing, people willing to discuss the Tian An Men massacre sometimes begin their replies with, "I have heard a lot of rumors." It is one way to avoid taking a stand.
Excerpts from the "Los Angeles Times"
Photograph on the top of Page One from he Associated Press; caption:
"The Great Wall of China at Mutianyu, normally an area choked with tourists, was deserted Monday [June 18, 1989]. In Beijing, convoys of trucks full of troops rumbled out of the city, further reducing the military presence."
Page 10, article:
"China's Underground Presses Seized as Crackdown on Media Continues"
"Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood." - Lu Xun, Chinese writer, 1926
quoted at the top of the article
By Daniel Williams, Times Staff Writer
BEIJING - Along with the pageant of arrests, interrogations, confessions and handcuffings shown night after night on state television, there have also appeared scenes of raids on printing presses in Beijing.
The machinery is shown being pulled out of dark rooms in monotonous housing projects and loaded on army trucks - another example of the relentless pursuit of "counterrevolutionaries" by security forces.
The raids are basically an effort to monopolize the spread of information. The government is trying to ensure that its version of violence during the June 3-4 assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tian An Men Square is the only one.
The state-run press is also being brought into line in a clampdown of a different sort.
For many Chinese, the literary link to the past is as important as possession of the square itself: It is the difference between viewing the deaths of hundred of demonstrators and their supporters as an isolated incident or seeing it as part of a temporarily frustrated but still vital tide.
However, getting rid of the printing presses will at least narrow the chances that essays, poems, and stories will circulate freely inside China.
In the past, especially after the Democracy Wall movement of 1979, writings published abroad kept the literature alive. Dissident words from the spring are already seeping from China into Hong Kong.
Chai Ling, a Beijing Teachers University student, who was one of the leaders of the movement, sent a recording of her thoughts to Hong Kong before she went into hiding.
"What can we do to bring back those students who were sacrificed?" she wondered. "Their souls will always remain on Changan Avenue. They'll never come back. Some of them were very, very young. They'll never come back."
Her words, too, also recalled protest literature past. Compare, for example, a poem by writer Wen Yiduo written after the deaths of students at Tian An Men in 1926:
"See there, whose children are those?
They're hardly adolescents, are they?
What's going on?
Aren't those bayonet wounds on their heads?
By tomorrow, the city of Beijing will be full of ghosts."
The government seems acutely aware of the significance of such allusions and has tried to separate Tian An Men, 1989, from repressions of the past. Officials insist that no one was killed on Tian An Men Square during a night of bloodshed that ended at dawn June 4. That someone might have been killed elsewhere seems not to matter. By government admission, people were killed along the length of Changan Avenue, the boulevard that cuts across the north end of the square - although the official account distinguishes between "the people," who were killed by accident, and "thugs" and "counterrevolutionary rioters" who were gunned down in self-defense.
Any rival account is blasted as "rumor-mongering."
Whether the Chinese believe this account may not be the point: it puts them on notice about what they are supposed to believe. Already in Beijing, people willing to discuss the Tian An Men massacre sometimes begin their replies with, "I have heard a lot of rumors." It is one way to avoid taking a stand.
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