The Lost Voices of Tiananmen Square

In this week’s episode  James Miles takes us back to the events of Tiananmen Square twenty years ago with a new two-part documentary, The Lost Voices of Tiananmen Square.  He was the BBC’s China correspondent back then and makes good use of archival tape from his old reports. Part 1 starts with Miles standing on a bridge looking down on a major thoroughfare in Beijing remembering the dead body he’d seen sprawled in the street 20 years before, along with the debris of barricades swept aside by tanks.  Then, suddenly, he plunges you, the listener, back into the archives–into the mayhem with the sound of sirens, crowds chanting, gunshots and the much more charged quality of his adrenalin-filled voice reporting from the scene all those years ago.

“Shooting began here about two hours ago according to residents, bystanders here. They say so far there have been dozens of casualties.”

It wasn’t easy figuring out what was happening that night and in fact Miles has written in this piece for the BBC website about the challenges of getting the story right in real time:

“We got the story generally right, but on one detail I and others conveyed the wrong impression. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

In fact the massacre was outside the Square, elsewhere in Beijing. The press got the essentials right but not all the details. The Chinese government was quick to exploit that Miles says.

Next week The World’s  Mary Kay Magistad examines the uses and misuses of history as she reports on how China has suppressed the memory of what happened in 1989.