The Tiananmen Papers

In The Tiananmen Papers, the story of the 1989 demonstrations is told for the first time in the words of the leaders who made the decision to crush them.".

An NPR correspondent explains how the Tiananmen Square massacre changed China, and how China changed the events of that day by rewriting its own history.

In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown. Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, Zhao carries out a penetrating analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, Zhao argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.

'I recall being woken by the sound of tanks moving down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. It was 5 o'clock on the morning of 4 June. Tanks, APCs and troop trucks were sweeping down the avenue. Citizens ran for cover. Helicopters hovered above. Foreign media claimed that Chinese troops had fired into the crowds with several hundred casualties.' More than three decades later, the Tiananmen Square incident refuses to be forgotten. The events that occurred in the summer of 1989 would not only set the course for China's politics but would also re-define its relationship with the world. China's message was clear: it remained committed to market-oriented reform, but it would not tolerate any challenge to the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party. In return for economic prosperity, the Chinese have surrendered some rights to the state. A democratic future seems far away. Vijay Gokhale, then a young diplomat serving in Beijing, was a witness to the drama that unfolded in Tiananmen Square. This unique account brings an Indian perspective on an event in China's history that the Chinese government has been eager to have the world forget.

Who can forget the images, telecast worldwide, of brave Chinese students facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square as they took on their Communist government? After a two-week standoff in 1989, military forces suppressed the revolt, killing many students and issuing arrest warrants for top student leaders, including Zhang Boli. After two years as a fugitive, Zhang -- the only leader to elude capture -- knew that he must bid his beloved country, as well as his wife and baby daughter, farewell. Traveling across the frozen terrain of the former Soviet Union, where peasants rescued him, and through the deserted lands of China's precarious borders, Zhang had only his extraordinary will to propel him toward freedom. As told in Escape from China -- a work of great historical resonance -- his story will renew your faith in the human spirit.

Prisoner of the Stateis the story of the man who brought liberal change to China and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts. When China's army moved in, killing hundreds of students and other demonstrators, Zhao was placed under house arrest at his home in Beijing. The Premier spent the last 16 years of his life, up until his death in 2005, in seclusion. China scholars often lamented that Zhao never had his final say. As it turns out, Zhao did produce a memoir, in complete secrecy. He methodically recorded his thoughts and recollections on what had happened behind the scenes during many of modern China's most critical moments. The tapes he produced were smuggled out of the country and form the basis for Prisoner of the State. Although Zhao now speaks from beyond the grave, his voice has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.

Seventeen-year-old Alex Jackson comes home from school to find that his father, a CBC news cameraman, wants to take him to China's capital, Beijing. Once there, Alex finds himself on his own in Tian An Men Square as desperate students fight the Chinese army for their freedom. Separated from his father and carrying illegal videotapes, Alex must trust the students to help him escape. Closely based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre in Beijing, Forbidden City is a powerful and frightening story.

In this vivid new social history of the Tiananmen protests, Beijing massacre, and nationwide crackdown of 1989, Jeremy Brown explores the key turning points of the crisis in China and shows how the massacre and its aftermath were far from inevitable.