Beijing — When it was published in 2001, The Tiananmen Papers was a media sensation, hailed on television and the front page of The New York Times as a treasure trove of top-secret documents on China's dramatic leadership struggle during the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The book was edited and authenticated by two of America's most respected China scholars. Its mysterious source was a high-level Communist official who disguised his identity when he appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes to promote the book.
But now a Canadian scholar has challenged its authenticity, stirring up a hornets' nest of controversy by arguing that many of the "documents" were reconstructed from fictional books, memoirs and other public accounts. And a new revelation by an early participant in The Tiananmen Papers has confirmed rumours that its mysterious source is the same man who used a different pseudonym to become the main source for another sensational book of "dossiers" on China's ruling elite a year later. The revelation appears to raise fresh doubts about the two books, whose pseudonymous sources had been presented as two different people.
The Tiananmen Papers purported to reveal the inner workings of the highest levels of China's leadership during the student demonstrations on Tiananmen Square that were brutally crushed by the Chinese military on June 4, 1989. Among its most spectacular assertions was the claim that the leadership was badly split by the protests and nearly came down on the side of political reform, a development that could have averted violence and sparked a move toward democracy.
Alfred Chan argues that the 2001 book The Tiananmen Papers relies on a source who has ‘utter disregard for factual accuracy.’ (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)
The debate on the authenticity of both books has raged behind the scenes for months — on the Internet, among Chinese dissidents and in U.S. academic circles. The battle is being spearheaded by Alfred Chan, a 54-year-old political scientist at the University of Western Ontario's Huron College. He calls it a David-and-Goliath conflict, pitting a Canadian academic against some of the giants of the U.S. scholarly community, but he has refused to give up his dogged pursuit of his case against the two books.
"I just want to get to the truth of the matter," Prof. Chan said in an interview. "It's important to set the record straight. There has been a conspiracy of silence about it. The publishers are misleading their readers. As a social scientist, I'm trying to be as objective as possible."
His main adversary is Andrew Nathan, a famed China expert at Columbia University who is widely respected for his many books on the country and his work on behalf of Chinese human-rights and democracy groups.
As the co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers and the second book, China's New Rulers, it was Prof. Nathan who helped decide in each case to accept the authenticity of the information provided by the Chinese source — although he acknowledges he never saw the documents the source was quoting. Editors were given only a printout of a computer transcript of "material" from the documents.
In The Tiananmen Papers (published by PublicAffairsv Books), the editors said the documents were "compiled" by a man with the pseudonym Zhang Liang. In the second book (first published by the New York Review of Books), the main source was given the pseudonym Zong Hairen. No identifying details about them were disclosed on the grounds that their safety could be jeopardized, presumably because they were members of the official Communist hierarchy in Beijing.
An article this month in the Hong Kong magazine Kaifang, however, reveals that the two sources are actually the same person. The article was written by the magazine's editor, Jin Zhong, who was one of the first publishers to look at the materials that formed the basis of The Tiananmen Papers. After examining the materials in 1998, he refused to publish them because he found them to be uninteresting, commonplace and largely a "cut and paste" job.
In a response circulated on the Internet this month, Prof. Nathan accuses Mr. Jin of breaching an agreement that he would not reveal his 1998 meetings with the man known as Zhang Liang. He also says that Mr. Jin has accepted the authenticity of "the bulk" of the material in The Tiananmen Papers.
In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, Prof. Nathan refused to confirm or deny that the two pseudonymous sources for the two books are actually the same person. For "reasons of safety" of the sources and their families, it is still too early to say anything about their identities, he said.
Prof. Chan, in a peer-reviewed critique of The Tiananmen Papers in the respected academic journal China Quarterly and in an unpublished follow-up article, does not dispute that some of the cited documents might be authentic. But he argues that Zhang Liang has "stitched together the alleged transcripts of top-level meetings by drawing freely from existing memoirs, fictions, public document collections, histories of the events, etc., and has incorporated his own embellishments and dramatizations with utter disregard for factual accuracy."
Prof. Chan cites many passages in The Tiananmen Papers as evidence. One is a description of the collapse of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party reformist leader whose death in April, 1989, sparked the student demonstrations on Tiananmen Square. The book says the passage is based on "participants' notes" of oral reports given by two high-ranking Communist officials. Yet the passage is remarkably similar to a fictionalized account of Hu Yaobang's death, published in 1989 by Chinese author Pang Pang. Both passages contain lengthy sections of purportedly verbatim dialogue, including an urgent request for nitroglycerine, as Mr. Hu collapsed of a heart attack.
Elsewhere, The Tiananmen Papers describes a private conversation between Communist Party secretary Zhao Yiyang and Prime Minister Li Peng in May, 1989, citing a later speech by Mr. Zhao as the main source for the passage. But while the book presents it as a conversation between the two men, complete with verbatim dialogue, the actual source is merely a monologue by Mr. Zhao.
This passage shows how Zhang Liang took a "free hand" in "transforming a documentary source into a script by taking liberties with the details with scant regard for accuracy," Prof. Chan says. "Why the editors found it necessary to turn text [from a testimony of one person ...] into dialogue [involving several persons] to recreate an 'historical document' is incomprehensible."
Both books are "essentially secondary sources that have undergone extensive processing, editing, reconstruction and interpreting, so that it is pointless to authenticate them," Prof. Chan says. He calls it "misguided and misleading" for the editors and publishers to present the material as top-secret historical documents.
Prof. Nathan, in his responses in China Quarterly and on the Internet, continues to maintain that the material is authentic.
"Parallels of texts can by logic prove nothing, as Prof. Chan acknowledges, unless one of the texts is known to be a forgery," he says in his e-mail to The Globe and Mail. "Parallels or perceived or alleged parallels of texts can be found throughout the Tiananmen literature and cannot tell us much. These are all texts concerning the same events."
Publicly, most China scholars in the West have remained silent on the controversy. But privately, a growing number are questioning the authenticity of The Tiananmen Papers. One scholar, speaking on condition he not be named, said he is inclined to think that the editors "were taken advantage of by a very shrewd political entrepreneur whose 'original documents' were not entirely original, and who 'sexed up' at least some of these documents."
Wenran Jiang, a political scientist at the University of Alberta who specializes in China, is one of the few academics who have spoken openly on the issue.
"I think Chan's critique is extremely valuable," he said. "It raises a lot of very legitimate questions about whether these documents are authentic. Very few people have pored over this material in as much detail as he has."
Even if only a small fraction of the material is plagiarized or fabricated, it is enough to discredit the rest of the material, Prof. Jiang said.
"Can you trust that it's all authentic when they are copying and pasting? The authors know this but the readers don't. The books are sold as a faithful reproduction of historical documents."
