Screening of "Assignment: China - Tiananmen Square"

Please join the USC U.S.-China Institute for the premiere public screening of the latest episode in our Assignment:China series on American media coverage of China. This episode focuses on the work of journalists covering the massive demonstrations that rocked Beijing in spring 1989.

Click here to watch a video of the discussion.

Please join us for the premiere public screening of the latest episode in our Assignment:China series on American media coverage of China. This episode focuses on the work of journalists covering the massive demonstrations that rocked Beijing in spring 1989. Through interviews with those journalists as well as officials and demonstration leaders as well as archival photos and video, the documentary shows how the demonstrations and the violence that ended them drew unprecedented and sustained coverage. That coverage did much to shape perceptions of China and its government and helped influence the response of the US and other governments to the bloody crackdown.

Assignment:China is produced by the USC U.S.-China Institute. Senior fellow Mike Chinoy, CNN's Beijing bureau chief 1987-95, wrote and narrates the episode. This episode will also be screened at George Washington University on April 23 and elsewhere in the U.S. and Asia. 

The screening will be followed by a discussion which will include comments from Wang Chaohua, one of the student leaders, and Terril Jones, one of those reporting from Beijing that spring. USCI's Clayton Dube will moderate the discussion. Additional information about Wang, Jones, and an outline of what happened in 1989 is below.

 

Seating is limited and rsvps are necessary. Save your seat by writing to uschina@usc.edu.

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Twenty-five years ago, in April 1989, students in Beijing seized upon the death of Hu Yaobang, a deposed leader of the Communist Party, to criticize their government and to call for political change. They chose Tiananmen Square, the symbolic political center of China, to memorialize Hu, who had been replaced in  January 1987 for being insufficiently firm and effective in suppressing earlier demonstrations in the square. Their demonstrations were emulated in other cities. Non-students joined the protests as the students added condemnation of official corruption and rampant inflation to their list of grievances.
 
The demonstrations were condemned as counter-revolutionary in the Communist Party's People's Daily. The authorities mobilized troops. But protestors held onto the square and the center of the city. Eventually, martial law was declared.
 
Party leaders were divided on how to end the demonstrations. They were committed to ending them, in part because it was not the backdrop they wanted for the planned May visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing. The visit, in some respects, was expected to be as dramatic as Richard Nixon's meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1972. The top leaders of the two largest Communist states had not met for thirty years. Reformers Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev were anxious to put ideological and other differences behind them. Top news names descended on Beijing to cover the summit.
 
The world watched, read and listened to the protests and, later, to their violent suppression. It was one of the first global media moments. Many were moved and some inspired by the words and images transmitted from the Square. Some of those who led and participated in the smashing of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet domination over Eastern Europe said they were influenced by the people power they saw exhibited in Beijing. Czech dissident turned president Vaclav Havel was one such person.  
 
And there was great condemnation when China's leaders resolved their division and moved to crush the demonstrations. Petitions were circulated. Remembrances were held. Governments imposed sanctions. In China, the government stepped up propaganda efforts, vilifying the demonstration leaders and arguing that foreign governments were instigating and benefiting from the unrest.
 
Join us, please, as we examine media coverage of what happened in Beijing 25 years ago.

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About the Speakers:

Wang Chaohua was a graduate student and a participant of the 1989 student-led protest in Beijing's central Tiananmen Square. She became an exile based in Los Angeles after the military crackdown 25 years ago. She then enrolled in Chinese studies program at UCLA, earning her MA and Ph.D degrees in modern Chinese culture and literature. She is now an independent scholar and a visiting lecturer in UCLA's Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She edited a collection of translated texts by leading Chinese intellectuals, published with her own introduction under the title One China, Many Paths (Verso, 2003). The book won a Choice's Best Academic Title recognition. She has published in both English and Chinese essays on contemporary Chinese intellectual life and political analyses.

Terril Jones is a longtime foreign and business correspondent. He covered Japan, France, north Africa and the United Nations for 15 years with The Associated Press, was a founding editor of Forbes Global magazine, was the Detroit-based automotive correspondent for Forbes and the Los Angeles Times, and was a Silicon Valley correspondent for the L.A. Times. In September he completed a three-year assignment in Beijing with Reuters covering Chinese businesses, domestic politics and foreign policy. He spent his 8th grade year at a Chinese school in Taiwan, and had numerous extended reporting assignments in China in the 1980s. He studied Chinese leadership studies at the University of Michigan for a year as a Knight-Wallace Fellow, and digital media for six months at Ohio State University as a Kiplinger Fellow. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and French.  

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