Published: June 4, 2024
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How and why the story of a massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was made up.
To this day, most Western media and political commentators claim that on June 4, 1989, Chinese security forces killed hundreds or even thousands of peaceful student protestors in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. In reality, though, nobody at all was killed in Tiananmen Square.
The Tiananmen Square protests began in April 1989 as genuine student protests to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a political reformer and former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. However, the protests were quickly leveraged by British and American intelligence and transformed into a prototypical “color revolution” aimed at overthrowing the Chinese Communist government.
The operation was supported by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED); US radio station Voice of America; a local NGO for the “reform and opening of China” funded by US billionaire George Soros; and US color revolution expert Gene Sharp, who visited Beijing during the protests. Moreover, in early May 1989 former CIA officer James R. Lilley was appointed as US Ambassador to China.
In 1992 the Vancouver Sun revealed that the CIA had indeed supported the Tiananmen protests. Yet unlike the CIA-supported Romanian Revolution in December 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests ultimately failed. In response, a newspaper in British-controlled Hong Kong launched the bogus Tiananmen Square “massacre” story which was then amplified globally by the New York Times.
Protest leader Chai Ling previously stated in an interview that she was “hoping for bloodshed” as “only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes.” After the failed revolution, protest leaders were evacuated to the United States (Operation Yellowbird), where Chai Ling received an honorary degree from Princeton university and became an NGO director.
While Tiananmen Square was cleared peacefully on June 4, clashes at several street blockades in central Beijing did kill around 250 civilians and soldiers. Western media hardly ever mention these clashes because photographs and video footage clearly show that deadly violence was initiated not by security forces but by protestors armed with guns, paving stones and petrol bombs.
China at the time did not yet have a modern riot police force, which is why Chinese authorities first sent in unarmed PLA soldiers to clear the street blockades. It was only when some of these soldiers were attacked, burned and killed that armed soldiers were sent in (see images below).
The most iconic photograph of the Tiananmen Square protests shows the famous but anonymous “tank man” (pictured above). Western media usually present a zoomed-in photograph and a shortened video of “tank man”, both of which seem to imply that he was trying to stop the tanks from entering Tiananmen Square and that he may ultimately have been arrested or killed.
In reality, “tank man” blocked the tanks from leaving Tiananmen Square the next morning, talked to some of the soldiers and eventually was whisked away unharmed by bystanders. Nevertheless, American TIME magazine selected “tank man” as “one of the most important people of the 20th century” and a photograph of him as “one of the most influential images of all time”.
Yet to this day it remains unknown who he was, what he wanted, what became of him, and why this brief episode happened to be filmed and photographed by several US journalists located in a nearby hotel. Intriguingly, though, the famous “tank man” scene was included in a remarkable 2022 recruiting video produced by the US Army 4th Psyop Group and titled “Ghosts in the Machine”.
The Tiananmen Square “massacre” deception was first exposed in a 1998 investigation published by the Columbia Journalism Review. Additional confirmation was provided through US embassy cables published in 2011 by Wikileaks. Some journalists have since acknowledged that there really was no massacre in Tiananmen Square, but most Western media continue spreading the massacre myth.
If the Tiananmen “color revolution” had been successful, Chinese and global history after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR would no doubt have taken a very different turn.
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Video collections
Original footage, documentaries and presentations.
Situation Map
The deadly clashes occurred mostly on West Chang’an Avenue near Muxidi Bridge.
Photographs (18+)
Sources: WA (2019), Romanoff (2019), BNN (2022), Buzzfeed (2019), Politico (2022)
Literature
- Tiananmen Square Massacre: Facts, Fiction and Propaganda (World Affairs, 2019)
- Tiananmen Square: The Failure of an American Color Revolution (Romanoff, 2019)
- Tiananmen Square, 1989 — Revisited (Godfree Roberts, The Unz Review, 2018)
- How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square (Nury Vittachi, 2022)
- Was There Really a Massacre in Tiananmen Square? (Kuzmarov, CAM, 2023)
- The “Tiananmen Square Massacre” (WikiSpooks article, 2022ff)
- German: Tiananmen: Das Fake-Massaker (Peter Frey, 2019)