TIANANMEN GATE

"THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE"
http://www.nmis.org/Gate

The homepage of "The Gate of the Heavenly Peace."

This website is brought to you by Frontline Online--the electronic edition of the PBS television documentary series. The site is dedicated to the film "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," the 1995 documentary about the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and the resulting Beijing Massacre of June 4. The film was directed by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, who spent six years investigating the story of the 1989 protests and interviewed over 20 students, workers, writers, teachers, government officials, and intellectuals. The film tries to explore the history of the demonstrations in relation to the political changes that have informed public life in China over the past century.

The "Heavenly Peace" website is a good resource for information about the film, its making, and Chinese history. Visitors will find background material on the film and its characters, video clips and photographs, a chronology of key events in 20th-century Chinese history--including the Beijing Spring of 1989--as well as information on topics that range from Chinese rock-and-roll to calligraphy. The site also contains the full manuscript of a previously unpublished book entitled "On the Eve--China '89 Symposium, Bolinas California, 27-29 April, 1989." The book covers discussions on Chinese politics and culture that took place at a symposium dealing with the key issues faced in China in the late 1980s and 1990s. Also featured at the site is an interactive tour of Tiananmen Square; never mind that the language inviting you to take the tour is pure Disney--"a theme park of the Chinese Revolution, become a virtual revolutionary tourist and do the sights"--the tour actually provides interesting information.

What makes this website remarkable, however, is the way it reflects the Web's relation to other media. History, particularly its violent manifestations, have increasingly become a series of media events. The response of the Chinese government to the documentary wasn't exactly enthusiastic."The Gate of Heavenly Peace" premiered in October 1995 at the New York Film Festival, and Zhang Yimou whose film "Shanghai Triad" opened the festival didn't attend the premiere due to the pressure the Chinese government put on him. Even before "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" was finished, it was surrounded by controversy. In May 1995, Chai Ling, the young woman student leader crowned "Goddess of Democracy" (by various media) protested against the film. In the U.S. Chinese press, she wrote:

Certain individuals have racked their brains for ways and means to gain the approval of the Chinese authorities. And a person with a pro-Communist history [i.e., Carma Hinton] has been hawking her documentary film for crass commercial gain by taking things out of context and trying to reveal something new, unreasonably turning history on its head and calling black white.

Print, TV or movies never manage to give us the full picture, not only because reality is too complex to be mediated--or mediated events have their own reality--but also because these media provide events with a certain amount of closure. In terms of the latter aspect, the Web has major advantages over other media; its openness to instant revision and to the linking of a different side of the story allows for a more complex 'virtual' reality.

The "Heavenly Peace" website does not only contain press reviews of the documentary and document the controversy surrounding it, it also features a section called "Democracy Wall," where visitors to the site may post their comments. The media have continued to become more and more powerful--presenting us with their 'own' reality, selective, distorted or even falsified. This is partly due to the traditional mediaÕs resistance to revision, to the fact that they provide events with a certain amount of closure. On the Web, it's up to everybody to make sure that we're getting a 'fuller' picture.