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THE TIANANMEN PAPERS, which contains documents unearthed from the guarded core of the Chinese Politburo, is the most important book on China published in decades. It reveals the highest-level processes of decision-making during the tumultuous events surrounding the terrible massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. Drawn from about 2,000 documents, THE TIANANMEN PAPERS have been compiled and edited as part of an extraordinary collaboration between America's most prominent China scholars and a handful of Chinese people who have risked their lives to obtain them. The Chinese pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 were the longest lasting and most influential in the world. THE TIANANMEN PAPERS exposes the desperate conflict during the period among a few strong leaders, whose personalities emerge with unprecedented vividness. Its revelations of the most important event in modern Chinese history will have a profound impact not only in China, but in every country in the world that deals with China.… (more)
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While the book does not add on to what we already know about the Tienanmen massacre, it does give us a feel for how decision-making works at the very lop leadership. It clearly indicates that the turmoil split the top leadership into opposing fractions. The documents confirm the fact that dismissal of Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who was pro-reform in the Communist Party, was not a coincidence. He was removed from office upon his firm refusal to declare martial law and send in troops to drive students out of Tienanmen.
The leaders already had an idea of how to suppress any democratic sit-ins and riots as soon as students walked out from the classrooms and made their ways into Tienanmen square. A general who wanted to remain anonymous from a memoir commented, "Army is the Army. Power is what is most important to the rulers of this country. They don't care what foreigners think. They don't care what the students want. The demonstrators are threatening their power. That is what they are thinking about. So the students will die." Decisions had long been made. They just had to get rid of any opposing efforts and those who opposed. Outsiders (foreigners and Chinese who live in remote parts of the country) often think what they could not see and could not hear wasn't there. And Tienanmen Paper has filled this gap. Every gesture, voice, meeting, decision made by the leaders is laid bare.
We saw gunfire, screaming, and fighting. We saw students falling, laying in blood. We saw tear gas and rubber bullets. We saw trucks and tankers sitting bumper to bumper. We saw the officers in cars racing up and down the line supervising the caravan. We saw common people demanding the soldiers turn around and leave the city. We saw other people shaking their fists and denouncing the soldiers. We saw buses and vehicles burning at intersections, windows of apartment buildings flickering. But one thing we miss: the troops called into Beijing by Yang Sheungkun, or the 38th company of the PLA, has no clue of the democratic movement started by students. The troops were brought in from some remote province of the country and they knew they had to listen to the order from above. As one bystander recalled, "The soldiers made no eye contact with the street crowd. They looked absolutely clueless and blank." This confirms the invaluable contribution by The Tienanmen Paper, a book that gives us idea of how top leaders monopolize decision-making.