June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989

In June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989, historian Jeremy Brown asks and answers the question, what does it mean to examine the narrative of contemporary China's most taboo topic? As he notes in one of the final chapters, there is a fundamental problem with calling for pingfan, or redress and rehabilitation: pingfan calls on the Chinese Communist Party to be the arbiter of Chinese history (p. 248). In contrast, Brown's work positions the historian as one of the “revealers,” despite official censorship and state-sponsored amnesia. June Fourth thus not only gives voice to a wide range of documents and sources, it also integrates the words of those whom Brown terms “revealers,” including Tiananmen's exiles, grassroots historians, diplomat eyewitnesses, and journalists then and now. Indeed, Brown's research is informed by teaching June Fourth to his Canadian students; he remarks that some—in the process of writing...