ABSTRACT
Television viewers all over the world watched the incredible drama of the 1989 student and worker uprising in Beijing, the intense ideological standoff between the people and the government at Tiananmen Square, and the horror of the June 4th military repression that — for the moment, at least —has stymied both the country's official reformation effort and its grassroots 'freedom and democracy' movement. Ironically, television had just peaked as a communications medium in China during the troubled 1980s and had become a symbol of the success of the national modernization. By the middle of the decade nearly every urban family had bought a television receiver, many had color models, and some owned more than one set. Journalistic practices and cultural developments in general were more liberal and exciting than ever before. But when push came to shove, the last scenes from troubled Beijing were not telecast in China. While the rest of the world tuned in to pictures of courageous students, intellectuals, and workers standing up to the brute force of tanks and the political power of aging bureaucrats, Chinese television viewers saw very different pictures and accounts of the tragic events in the capital city, and even those images came late. Television had been forcibly restored to its original place as a blatant propaganda device.
