Wen Wei Po: A reply to Jonathan Leung
He is quite right saying Wen Wei Po is not an anti-Beijing newspaper. So I too was most surprised to discover it was the source of the phoney New York Times June 12 article about machine guns in Tiananmen Square mowing down protestors.
The only explanation I can find for this egregious aberration says that at the time the energy of the protestors had triggered even strong pro-Beijing elements to go honest and admit previous regime mistakes (like the Cultural Revolution) had discredited the government to the point where they too were allowed to hope something better would emerge from the protests.
So for a brief moment even pro-Beijing sources like Wen Wei Po had been willing to go along with anti-regime propaganda. But they quickly changed their minds when they discovered how anti-regime elements with help from dubious US sources had used the protests to incite extreme violence against the unarmed soldiers originally sent in to pacify the protestors.
Check Wikipedia for full details about the strange events surrounding Wen Wei Po’s editorial stance during the Tiananmen protests.
Gregory Clark, Tokyo
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