Reporter, novelist and China’s first post-Mao historical investigative journalist, Dai Qing continues her quest to reveal China to itself.

By Lisa Peryman for Probe International

A revised edition of Deng Xiaoping in 1989 戴晴 著, an account by the iconic investigative journalist Dai Qing of the events that led to the tragedy of June 4 on the 35th anniversary of its rupture, is a timely reminder of the worldview that has shaped the China of today.

In “June Fourth 2024—Dai Qing, a Former Person Who Refused to Be Silenced,” China Heritage co-founder and historian Geremie R. Barmé takes another look at Deng Xiaoping in 1989 with a deeper focus on Dai Qing herself.

At 82, Dai’s life and work embody the struggle for freedom of expression and individuality. Her journey from a “red princess” raised by the Communist party’s elite to her career as an outspoken journalist on sensitive subjects ranging from historical to political to environmental have tested her through loss, incarceration and erasure. Dai has persevered and adapted, amplifying her voice globally through international collaborations with partners such as ourselves, and others, to continue to advocate for a China that can reflect critically on itself by investigating its past.

The events of Tiananmen that led to Dai’s arrest in July 1989, and imprisonment for ten months on the charge of “advocating bourgeois liberalization and instigating civil unrest,” did not shutter Dai from resuming her work but it did prevent its circulation within China.

Included in Barmé’s commemoration are criticisms made by the late American journalist and historian, Jonathan Mirsky, in his review of a collection of Dai’s post-1989 essays, Tiananmen Follies. Mirsky contends that as one of China’s sharpest critics before 1989, Dai’s arrest and subsequent confession in exchange for freedom restrained her courage. Dai, in turn, is given space to address those criticisms, defend her work, and her life-long journey to challenge and investigate.

What we are presented with is a fascinating overview of the complexities at play when the subject and subject matter are aligned to the great shifts of time. Then, as now, Dai saw change for China as a slow passage that would find success in small victories rather than the foment for political reform the 1989 student movement lost its possibility to, manipulated in part, says Dai, by opponents of reformist Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, and in part by their own “youthful rashness”. Through the lens of 1989, we can also see how vulnerable China’s leadership felt to the existential threat of the West and the danger of becoming a ‘Western-dependent bourgeois republic’.

Barmé’s commemoration of Dai’s legacy illuminates both the present moment and a forbidden chapter that continues to play out for a nation of more than one billion denied the wisdom of the past. Dai Qing has served as a warrior to the cause of its teachings.

See the publisher’s website here for the full-text version of “June Fourth 2024—Dai Qing, a Former Person Who Refused to Be Silenced”.

A copy of the text is available to download below.

A long-time Probe International Fellow, Dai Qing’s work with us is available to view here, beginning with the English-language publication of Yangtze! Yangtze!

The revised edition of Deng Xiaoping in 1989 戴晴 著 is published by Bouden House 博登書屋 in New York [April 2024].