The Tiananmen Papers : The Chinese Leadership's Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People - In Their Own Words - Hardcover

Schell, Orville

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158648012X ISBN 13: 9781586480127

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2001

Synopsis

Compiles internal government and Communist Party documents to chronicle the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in China, revealing the decisions that led to the use of military force against the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew J. Nathan is a professor of political science and former director of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of China's Transition and coauthor of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security.

Perry Link is a professor of Chinese at Princeton University and the author of The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System.

Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of numerous articles and books on Chinese affairs, the most recent of which is Virtual Tibet.

Reviews

Nathan, director of Columbia's East Asian Institute, terms this collection, "the richest record I have ever seen of political life in China at the top." Zhang Liang, a pseudonym, has provided Nathan and Link (a professor of Chinese at Princeton) with a voluminous number of transcripts of original materials, a portion of which appear in this volume (the entire collection of documents will be published in Chinese in the spring). They follow the deliberations and day-to-day conversations of China's most powerful leaders as they try to decide what to do about the increasingly vociferous and, to their minds, dangerous student-led demonstrations taking place in the spring of 1989, not only in Beijing but across the country. The major players here are the Politburo Standing Committee, a handful of officials at the top of the Party; a group of eight termed the "Elders," mostly retired officials of high standing to whom the Committee defers; and most importantly Deng Xiaoping, the now deceased "paramount leader" of China to whom all deferred. It is Deng who makes the final decision to use the military to clear Beijing's Tiananmen Square of demonstrators. We hear discussions in formal meetings, informal conversations, even telephone calls. We are also provided with documents from national and provincial security operations in China, as well as from the foreign press, which the leaders relied on to understand the situation with which they were dealing. The violent end of events was not a foregone conclusion--there were those who wished to placate the demonstrators, and we listen in on the factional struggle in which they lost out to more intolerant hard-liners. None seem to relish the prospect of violence, but that is what happens, and from this unique revelation of the use of power in China--one of the most significant works of scholarship on China in decades--we understand the road to the bloody d‚nouement of June 4, 1989. (Jan. 15)Forecast: As the importance of its contents deserves, this book, which is being released in a 30,000-copy first printing, is scheduled to receive major media attention: a front-page story in the New York Times and a segment on 60 Minutes (and first serialzation in Foreign Affairs). Still, despite the editors' efforts to make this material readable by adding a narrative context for the documents, it remains dry and dense, and is probably not for the general reader but for those with a deep interest in China or in human rights

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158648012X
• ISBN 13: 9781586480127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Liang Zhang