The Tiananmen Papers

The Tiananmen file is a collection of secret documents that should have been written by the Chinese government on the occasion of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. By Zhang Liang nominal border informants they have reached the Sinologist Perry Link, and Andrew J. Nathan, which she published in 2001. The reliability of the documents is controversial.

Content

The book of Nathan Link and includes minutes of meetings, internal memoranda, meeting notes and intelligence reports; each annotated by the editors and accompanied by background information. Zhang Liang gave the editors about 600 documents as printouts of digital text documents, one of which translated these into English and about one-third - usually shortened - recordings in her book. The texts cover the period from the death of Hu Yaobang, the trigger of the conflict, to the request to the People's Liberation Army Congratulations Deng Xiaoping at the successful suppression of the uprising. The confrontation of the party leadership to the type of action to be pursued as

The documents contain few surprises and show the people involved as they already knew before: Zhao Ziyang as progressive, Li Peng as a hardliner, Deng Xiaoping as undecided. So no doubt came to the authenticity of the documents. Even the elaborate language style appeared suspicious, which was considered by the editors but as a result of post-processing by Chinese archivists. Also, errors were discovered: Sun, Deng Xiaoping called in a conversation with Yang Shankun from late May Xu Qinxian, incorrectly, as the son of Xu Haidongs. For Timothy Brook which documents some dubious numbers and gaps, as well as passages containing the events describe the way they have represented the view of the protesters, not the reporting of soldiers.

In the preface, the editors emphasize the consistency, wealth and human credibility, which is almost impossible to fake. In the epilogue is spoken by a relationship of trust between publishers and Zhang Liang that she had convinced of the authenticity of the documents. Zhu Bangzao, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called the documents, however false and manipulative. Alfred L. Chan sees the Tiananmen acts as a compilation of real ( but only partly new ) documents and constructed by embellishments and mixing of Zhang Liang texts.