Communist Crowd Control.

• Author: Walden, George
• Position: Review

Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, eds., The Tiananmen Papers (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 510 pp., $30.

IN THE MIDST of the Cultural Revolution I once drafted a telegram from the British Mission in Peking, or what remained after the Red Guards burned it, suggesting that Deng Xiaoping was dead. It seemed a reasonable conjecture. The no-neck monster, as we diplomatic juveniles called him, had not been seen in public for some time, was portrayed in the wall posters we read as a leading capitalist-roader, and had begun featuring in caricatures at the wrong end of a rope. Plus we had procured a Red Guard newspaper containing a celebratory account of his actual death by hara-kiri. Getting hold of those newspapers was an operation in itself, so there was a tendency to overplay what was inside them. I suppose I was infected by a scoop mentality, and there were scarcely any pressmen left in Peking to confirm or contradict my words. Meeting Deng some years later, as principal assistant to British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, I inspected him for signs of simulation, but he seemed the genuine thing. No one else coul d smoke that much, or hawk and spit with such vigor.

Are The Tiananmen Papers genuine? With China, you never know. Even the endorsement of some of America's most respected sinologists is not conclusive. Van Meegeren's forgeries of Vermeer were accepted by the leading art historians of his day because they were designed to fill gaps in their knowledge, despite the fact that the women in them bore a curious resemblance to Marlene Dietrich.

Like those art historians, we want this material to be genuine, in our case for moral reasons. Moralism infects our behavior toward China more than toward the erstwhile Soviet Union, in Britain to compensate for our colonialist misdemeanors, in the United States because the history of American attitudes toward China is one of recurring evangelical hope followed by disillusion. This account of the Tiananmen massacre shows the hard men of Peking in a poor light, and when it is republished in Chinese and makes its way to the mainland, it could do much to strengthen the reformers' hands. That is why the anonymous leaker leaked it in excerpts designed to tell a story rather than as entire original documents. We must be especially wary of good intentions.

Enough caveats: if this is a forgery it is brilliantly done. To me, as to the editors, the voices in these extraordinary documents ring true. As I read the records of Chinese Politburo meetings and secret police reports, mentally I was comparing them with the documents now available from the Soviet period, notably in The Road to Terror (1999) covering the Moscow trials, but also later. For all the grim similarity of the Russian and Chinese official press, in private all communists do not speak alike. The Russian voice is a compound of ideology and gangster inflections, of Marxism-Leninism and mafia-speak, whereas the Chinese voice, while retaining a certain formality; is less intellectual, more pragmatic. If the subject were not the life or death of millions one might sometimes call it homespun. That is the timbre...