Christine Loh

Opinion | Xinjiang ‘genocide’ claims and coronavirus origins: beware of spin and disinformation amid rising US-China tension

As the Iraq war and Tiananmen Square crackdown have shown, accepted narratives can prove to be wrong. The lesson amid today’s shifting geopolitics is: don’t pass judgment too quickly, especially when things are evolving

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Why you can trust SCMP

Christine Loh

Published: 3:30am, 19 Jun 2021Updated: 5:07am, 19 Jun 2021

Tiananmen, the Iraq war, Xinjiang and the Covid-19 pandemic are different issues but they have all given rise to vivid, competing accounts. At a time of severe geopolitical tension, we need, more than ever, to reflect on and review these narratives assiduously.

For a generation of people worldwide, the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown defined how they saw the Chinese authorities. It was very close to home for Hong Kong because the transition from British rule to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 was just around the corner.

The world believes large numbers of people were “massacred” at the square on June 4. Bob Hawke, who was the Australian prime minister in 1989, read part of a diplomatic report in public just days after.

He said: “When all those who had not managed to get away were either dead or wounded, foot soldiers went through the square bayoneting or shooting anybody who was still alive … anti-personnel carriers and tanks then ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp, after which, bulldozers moved in to push the remains into piles which were then incinerated by troops with flame-throwers.”

The Chinese State Council’s spokesman, Yuan Mu, was ridiculed at the time when he said that no one had died at Tiananmen Square. But an ABC News report earlier this month has thrown doubt on what happened.

The report noted that diplomats knew soon after the Tiananmen Square incident that many of the details, including those read out by Hawke, were false.