Dai Tou Laam Diary has added yet another lengthy excerpt from William Hinton’s book and given us a biography of the man, describing his close ties and lengthy relationship with China and its leaders. And he gives us more of Hinton’s eyewitness descriptions of the Tiananmen Square massacre which I would put in the must-read category.

If the “Nightline” program I saw was typical of the television coverage, that showed personnel carriers on fire arriving in the square and being attacked by people, which gives a completely wrong impression of the sequence of events. It looked as though the people were on the offensive and the army was on the defensive. Actually, by the time these vehicles got to the square, they had shot their way through barricade after barricade and had killed probably close to 2,000 people. Arriving in the square was the end of the assault, not the beginning of it. Once the army began to shoot down people they got very angry and became active and counterattacked in any way they could. The Chinese television programs followed the same pattern; they showed the end first. They took scenes from Sunday afternoon where the people were burning tanks and weapons carriers and put them at the beginning. They said, “This is Saturday afternoon and this is the way people treated our poor soldiers. So our soldiers had no choice but to hit back.” Actually they reversed the days, and made out that the soldiers were the victims of the people, which was a complete lie. The army came in shooting and they killed people all the way down the avenue. And they kept killing people even after they secured the square.

That’s just a sample; be sure to read the entire post.