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The Tiananmen Papers: An Editor's Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2001

Andrew J. Nathan
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Extract

The coercive repression of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in Beijing on the night of 3–4 June 1989 is one of the starkest human rights violations of recent times. For a government to kill peaceful, unarmed citizens is a violation of the “right to life” that is provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. In addition to the immediate cost in lives – my co-editor Perry Link and I consider the death toll to be still an open question, because the only related document in the collection is the self-interested report of the Beijing Party Committee to the Politburo – Tiananmen set a repressive political course for years to follow. June fourth marked a sharp clash between alternative futures. On that night China made a decisive turn away from liberalization and back toward an authoritarian kind of politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 167 , September 2001 , pp. 724 - 737
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2001

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Footnotes

This essay was given as the Sir Joseph Hotung Annual Lecture on China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 1 June 2001. It has been slightly revised and updated. For comments and information, thanks to Bruce Gilley, He Pin, Kenneth Lieberthal, Jonathan Mirsky, Robin Munro, Barry Naughton and Stanley Rosen.