Jeremy Brown's "June Fourth"

Jeremy Brown is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Simon Fraser University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989, and reported the following:

If readers open June Fourth to page 99, they will find a title page for "Massacre," Part Three of the book. Flipping two pages ahead to this part's first page of text, browsers arrive at Chapter 9, "The Beijing Massacre as History." The chapter begins, "The People’s Liberation Army massacred unarmed civilians in Beijing on the evening of June 3, 1989, escalating into the early hours of June 4." I then mention different estimates of how many people died during the massacre, from 479 to 2,600 dead, before promising to "answer with more specificity the question of who died, where they died, and how they died."

The page 99 test reveals what June Fourth is trying to achieve and what it promises: naming the victims of the massacre and detailing their encounters with the PLA to underscore how senseless and unnecessary it was for an army to shoot its way through a city full of protesters. The victims included a watermelon vendor, young men trying to buy breakfast, a mother purchasing medicine for her sick child, and people looking out their windows to see what was happening.

My victim-centered account of the Beijing massacre is the central part of the book. The book's first two parts detail what made people in China happy and angry during the 1980s, predisposing some to join a protest movement that attracted a diverse range of supporters and raised hopes for a more transparent, less corrupt political system. Part four of June Fourth shows what happened nationwide in 1989, from friction between Han and non-Han people to violence, rage, and indifference in cities and villages outside Beijing. The book ends with a focus on the massacre's aftermath, which included a purge that mixed falsehoods and fear. During and after the events of 1989, protesters, observers, and Communist Party leaders repeatedly wondered what if events had unfolded differently and obsessed about critical turning points. June Fourth examines the alternative paths that people imagined at the time, showing that a violent end to the protests of 1989 was far from inevitable.

Visit Jeremy Brown's website.

The Page 99 Test: City Versus Countryside in Mao's China.

--Marshal Zeringue