More Chinese lies

Press, 19 July 1989, Page 18

More Chinese lies

IF THE Big Lie does not work, try smaller ones. The Big Lie, announced a month ago'to worldwide derision, was that there was no massacre in Peking on the night of June 3-4, and that most of those who died were soldiers heroically battling a bunch of well organised "counter-revolu-tionaries.” It did not work because Western television cameras had captured the real story and beamed it directly into the world’s living rooms. In an attempt to limit the damage done by the Big Lie, on July 1 China’s Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng, came up with a new version of the Peking massacre: that live ammunition had to be used against demonstrators because the troops were unprepared for crowd control and did not have enough tear gas and other riot-control equipment. A smaller lie, perhaps, but a lie. China’s' leaders had several weeks to prepare for the assault

of Tiananmen Square. Tear gas had been used against the students outside the party highups’ compound hear the square. And Mr Li’s lame explanation for the slaughter fails to explain not only why the soldiers did not use rubber bullets, but why some of them neglected to use even the ordinary bullet, preferring the armour-piercing kind: and that, in some cases, they were used against Pekingers doing nothing .. more “counter-revolu-tionary” than bicycling to work. The second smaller lie now being spread is that, yes, some students were killed on June 4 (36, says the Government) but that none died on the square. Reports from student leaders who have fled China and from other eye-witnesses agree that most students were allowed to leave the square, but that those who remained were fired on by troops. ■ Western estimates of perhaps

as many as 5000 civilians killed now seem high. But the original official insistence that most of the casualties were soldiers is false. According to the Xinhua news agency, on June 30, the Central Military Commission conferred the title of “Guardian of the People’s Republic of China” on “the ten officers and soldiers who were killed or burned to death by hooligans during the counter-revolutionary rebellion.” So it would seem that either the original reports of “scores,” even hundreds, of soldiers killed were untrue, or most of the army’s deaths occurred when soldiers fired on fellow-soldiers. Before martial law was imposed some Chinese journalists had taken part in the demos. ’’Don’t believe what we tell you, we print lies,” one of their placards said. Quite so. t Copyright—The Economist