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During the 1989 Protest Movement the Chinese authorities were collecting information to create their sanitized version of what happened when millions of people in Beijing and cities throughout China openly rebelled against the government in support of student protests. That version of reality was later presented as the "true story" ( zhenxiang ) by the Chinese authorities in the print and electronic media. It is a story, one that wildly distorts the facts, that the government sticks to doggedly even today. It is a story that forces the authorities to denounce works like THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE which attempt to make sense of what happened in 1989 outside the narrow confines of partisan political debate. The diverse popular groups and intellectuals
involved in 1989 were also collecting information and
analyzing the situation to write their versions of history.
Some of these have appeared in scholarly works, the media
and other sources over the years. Among the students, those
who spoke passable English, or were relatively photogenic,
or both, made the news and, by default, were perceived by
both the overseas Chinese and Western media as having made
history. Some of them, and here one thinks of individuals
like Chai Ling and Li Lu, having been thrust into the
public eye during the movement, still claim an absolute
moral authority in saying what happened and what it meant.
Unfortunately, their accounts of history are, in essence
not all that different from those thrown together by the
Chinese authorities.
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