I'm not disputing your narrative of this particular situation, but others thinking of discussing politics in China (or just about anything else) need to be aware that very frequently people will tell you the exact opposite of the truth with an entirely straight face if it is more convenient for them to do so. Admitting to recognising the pictures might be dangerous, especially if it might be necessary subsequently to comment on them, which could be especially dangerous with informants around.

Graduating in China is about keeping a clean record as much as it is about actually showing up for classes or getting high marks for exams (and many a foreign teacher has found his or her marking ignored or simply not required because who would pass or fail had already been decided on political or financial grounds). I don't think I'd put a class in such a difficult position by confronting them publicly with such pictures, but of course I wasn't there and don't know the circumstances.

But to come back to speaking truthfully about political events, a recent documentary by a British film maker called The Tank Man (shown on PBS in the states, but watchable in full on the PBS website--although doubtless not from behind the Great Firewall) highlighted both the desire of the West to draw certain conclusions about modern understanding of the Tian'an Men Square events, and provided a prime example of lying to camera, without the film maker understanding what was going on.

Having built up the man who stood in front of the tanks to some kind of indelible symbol of democratic freedoms, interviewed journalists who saw the incident, and repeated reviewed the footage, he gets three or four Bei Da (Beijing University, which has a new fashion for calling itself Peking University now, or PKU) students into a classroom somewhere, and after chatting to them about this and that, hands them each a blow-up of the man standing in front of the tank.

The point he is very keen to make is that modern-day students, a mere 20 years later, have no idea whatsoever what this event is. But there are a number of obviously very fake elements to the way this is done.

One boy on the left leans towards the girl next to him and whispers something we can't here, but the voice-over translation tell us in English is, "June 4" or similar--I'm not going back to the site to get this word perfect. The camera closes in on the girl looking confused and very uncomfortable, with the film-maker commentating in voice over that she looks completely blank. And then she gives a little speech about how she can't be sure what the image is but perhaps it's a military exercise or parade (or something like that), but stresses she's only guessing. She really can't say.

Her lead is followed by the others. Sound of trumpets: director gets to make point about internal suppression of information on the events of June 4, 1989, how it's been wiped out of history, how everyone these days has their eyes on the money, etc., etc.

Problems:

1. We've heard that the boy has an inkling at least of what it might be, but is scared enough only to whisper. This rather weakens the director's position. We'll come back to why he might want to whisper in just a moment.

2. In the second between the interpreter's voice-over translation of the boy's whisper and the film-maker's voice-over comment on the girl's confusion, she actually replies to the boy, and can be heard quite clearly on the film. She says, "Haoxiang si!", which means roughly, "It seems so," or "Looks like it." In other words, she very clearly also recognises if not the image itself, then what it is about, or when it was taken. The manipulative film-maker's point vanishes in a puff of cordite. But note also that although the girl knew something about the picture, she lied fluently to camera, as did the others including the whispering boy, and convinced the gullible film maker, who, had he spent longer in China might have understood these matters rather better. Some things are just better not said unless entirely amongst close friends.

3. To anyone with any familiarity of China, and in particular of the controls under which the foreign media operate there, it should be blindingly obvious that no film-maker gets to enclose an entirely randomly chosen set of Bei Da students (or any other students) in a classroom to ask them random questions. The students will of course have been hand-picked for their reliability. (Jonathan Dimbleby's ridiculous staging of the political discussion programme Question Time in Shanghai, which he claimed as a breakthrough because only half the audience were cadres (sic), simply failed to discover that the other half was hand-picked too since the authorities controlled who was handed an application form, and took them round to reliable journalism students, for instance, telling them to apply. There's nothing more gullible than a foreigner in China, and nothing worse than a journalist briefly in China and looking for glory.)

4. Were there just cameraman, sound, producer, film-maker/director, interpreter, and the students? Of course not. There was a minder, as well, sitting off-camera. And who would be likely to speak up in front of him? There will always be a minder in these situations, but in this case he actually gets a mention later in the documentary, and in an interview (also viewable on the PBS site) the director discusses how he tried to lull the minder by boring him with a period of absolutely anodyne questions before pulling the photo stunt.

But then what student would be insane enough to start talking about June 4 on camera anyway? Once the documentary was aired his or her remaining days at Bei Da would be numbered.

The question was a farce, and the replies were a farce. The entire scenario was fake and the film-maker either too ignorant to spot it, or he had his own agenda as a ground-breaking director-journalist to push, and was willing to mislead his audience.

Essentially all conversations about politics in China that take place in circumstances in any way public are false, and you might as well not have them at all.

In many other cases there's a concern to give you the best possible view of things Chinese regardless of facts to the contrary known to the speaker and perfectly obvious to everyone but the outsider, until you believe the astonishing proposition that China is little different from the West, and that your position on this is unassailable because someone in China told you so.

Sometimes denials of the truth can reach ridiculous heights. One of my favourites is the account of the author of a review of China's better museums, who commented about museum directors who swore that there were no fakes/replicas on display (most Chinese museums contain more replicas than real items, although these are rarely marked as such), only later to take her into the store room where the real items were kept, and without turning a hair. In China you simply don't remark on such things, but just go along with them.

I was touring the "underground city" in Beijing when an attendant-guide asked me about the book I was carrying. It was an English translation of Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, published after the author had become the first Chinese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I explained what the book was, who the author was, and his significance, and the guide said, "Oh yes. He's Taiwanese." "He's not," I said, "He's a mainlander but he's a political exile so your government won't tell you about his achievement." The guide then buttonholed a colleague with some English and showed him the book, "Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature" clearly written on the front. "He's from Taiwan," said the colleague. Starting to get angry (which is stupid of me) I showed him the biography inside the cover. "Born in 1940 in Jianxi [sic] Province in eastern China." "No," he said smugly, "he's from Taiwan."

Such real political conversations as there are take place between you and one or two other individuals who know each other well, and without any extra ears around. In those circumstances there can be a positive eagerness to express criticism, gratification that there's a willing listener, and the desire to make a good narrative can take over just as it would the rest of us.

Well, Philip Short's biography of Mao is probably that, but it could do with a bit more Jung Chang in it, and it's a bit of a dull read. Although a foreign correspondent in China for a while, I don't think that Short ever quite got the feel of the place. But this with Li Zhisui's slightly questionable but more verifiable account of his time as Mao's doctor would make a good combination.

Jonathan Fenby, former editor of the South China Morning Post, never quite gets China either, but his Generalissimo, a biography of Chiang Kai-shek, covers much of the same period and shows Chiang to be every bit the corrupt little thug, and equally as incompetent as Mao, but in the end unluckier perhaps. This is a rather better read.

For a general history from the late Ming to the mid-80s, Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China, is hefty but readable. Going from the broad view to the detail, Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker is an account of cannibalism in China during two of the great famines Mao caused (and contrasts cannibalism to avoid starvation with revenge cannibalism amongst Red Guards--triumphing over their enemies by eating their livers). It's repellent, but very well done and hard to put down. His The Chinese is an excellent single-volume overview of modern China, and although starting to date as any commentary on modern China will the moment it is published, ought to be read by all foreigners planning to visit China, and ought to be compulsory for all those who come back spouting tour-guide-like platitudes.

Peter N-H