Jonathan Fenby puts it, there was a "far bigger massacre of non-students". Hundreds of workers were gunned down in the streets,
which is why some people, including many Chinese dissidents, refer to the events as "the Beijing massacre" rather than the "Tiananmen Square massacre".
Indeed, just as the CPC's use of the term "4 June Incident" gives the impression that this was a minor event, so the Western-created name of "Tiananmen Square massacre" depicts a serious city-wide uprising as a small-scale, one-square clash.
Jay Mathews, former Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post, says Western journalists have spread irresponsible stories about a square-based massacre: "Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night", he says, "but in a different place [to the square] and under different circumstances".
Yet if you question Western representations of June 1989, says Mathews, you'll be looked upon as a pedant or Tiananmen denier. Tell journalists they have given misleading accounts and they will say: "So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place?"
In China, debate about June 1989 is curtailed by censorship - in the West it is discouraged by those who have propagated the simplistic Square story.
Perhaps feeling they have more in common with the students in the square - who, unlike many of the rioting workers, were peaceful and erudite - Western observers have made the students the central focus of
the June 1989 story. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they have pushed from public view the key victims of the Beijing Massacre.
They have also, in a terrible irony, done the Chinese authorities a favour, helping to represent what was a state-shaking uprising by thousands of workers, residents and students in Beijing and
beyond as a relatively small, polite, Amnesty-style protest for "reform". 
About the author
Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. He has written for The Spectator, New Statesman, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, Slate and... MORE
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well this is all normal for the socialist media reporting on socialist atrocities. the USSR was a great place to be except for the gulags and the starvation and the KGB, but the socialist media never yet have told the truth about it all, the writers and poets and bourgois capitalist economists have done a thousand times more truth-telling on this than the reality-denying socialist BBC and the Guardianistas.
Posted by michael jose at 11:01am on June 4, 2009
As soon as I mentioned the name of Han Suyin I was cut off. Was this accidental or is there indeed a blanket ban on this highly respected authoress who was in Beijing during these events? Try finding her on the internet! She alleges that the whole events were a put-up job paid for by a certain well-known Hungarian billionaire who flew out as soon as things turned ugly. You agree with her in saying that the students were mere pawns in these events. The main instigators of violence were paid hoodlums who were described at the time as "strikers", in spite of the fact that there was no known strike taking place. They were responsible for killing the first soldiers to arrive and who were armed with broomhandles, thereby escalating events. As I said before, try to find Han Suyin about this business on the web and you will find that she has been "disappeared". Free press indeed!
Posted by dennis parkes at 7:51pm on June 4, 2009
Dear me, two nutcases with deranged claims already... michael jose, only ludicrously challenged American neofascists call the BBC socialist, and the Guardian is a wooly liberal paper, never has been left wing, although they do attempt to get to the truth. Dennis parkes, cut off from where? you appear to be paid by the Chinese government to spread disinformation. This article nowhere says the students were pawns, but in your fevered imagination I suppose saying 'many students set up camp in Tiananmen, where they demanded democratic and economic reforms' looks like it to you though. Soldiers armed with broomhandles... my oh my! On the subject of the article however, perhaps the West did distort, but perhaps it was due to the difficulty of getting information about what was happening out of a closed police state, rather than deliberate distortion, as the Chinese state was clearly doing, and still does.
Posted by Peter Simmons at 11:22am on July 14, 2009
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