Screening of "Assignment: China - Tiananmen Square" at Harvard University

Fairbanks Center at Harvard University is hosting a screening of the latest episode in the Assignment:China series on American media coverage of China.

Assignment: China is a multi-part documentary film series on the history of American correspondents in China being produced by the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. The lead reporter is Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the Institute and former CNN Beijing bureau chief and senior Asia correspondent. Former U.S. ambassador to China Winston Lord described the series as an “essential and invaluable” resource for understanding the role the U.S. media has played in shaping American and international perceptions of the country.

Please join us for a 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.

Among the interviewees are: Dan Southerland of the Washington Post, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn of the New York Times, John Pomfret of the AP, Jeff Widener, the AP photographer who took the picture of the man in front of the tank, Al Pessin of VOA, Dan Rather, John Sheahan and Richard Roth of CBS News, Bernard Shaw, Alec Miran, Johnathan Schaer (who shot the CNN tank man video) and Mike Chinoy from CNN, Jim Laurie of ABC, Jaime FlorCruz of Time, Adi Ignatius of the Wall St. Journal, Dorinda Elliot of Newsweek, plus many others. Non-media interviewees include former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, former American ambassadors to China Winston Lord and James Lilley, Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan, and others. Assignment: China is produced by the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California. Institute senior fellow Mike Chinoy, CNN's Beijing bureau chief 1987-95, wrote and narrates the episode.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

Roderick MacFarquhar (chair), Leroy B. Williams Research Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard University

Carma Hinton, Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies, George Mason University, and co-producer of many documentary films including The Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Catherine Yeh, Associate Professor of Chinese, Boston University

Cosponsored by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

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.