HIJ403310
HIJ
Research Articles
Symbolic Use of Decisive
Events: Tiananmen as a
News Icon in the editorials
of the elite U.S. press
International Journal of Press/Politics
16(3) 335­–356
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1940161211403310
http://ijpp.sagepub.com
Chin-Chuan Lee1, Hongtao Li2, and Francis L. F. Lee3
Abstract
The Tiananmen crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989 was a decisive
event that has provided an enduring prism for the world media to interpret China.
This article examines how two of the most preeminent U.S. newspapers—New York
Times and Washington Post—editorially invoked Tiananmen as a “news icon” in the past
twenty years. We contend that the meanings of Tiananmen were reconstructed over
twenty years partly but not completely in line with the changes in the United States’
policy toward China. Specifically, Tiananmen symbolized Communist dictatorship in
the initial years after 1989 and then became an example of China’s human rights
abuse in the late 1990s. Into the 2000s, the significance of Tiananmen faded away. But
it remained as part of United States’ ritualistic memory of China’s repression that
invokes the moral bottom line of U.S. foreign policy. In theoretical terms, this study
shows how a news icon, in the course of an extended life cycle, may exhibit both
continuities and changes in its meanings, and there can also be subtle variations in
the relationships between a news icon and the dominant power structure over time.
Keywords
news icon, media discourses, the press and foreign policy,Tiananmen, U.S.–China relationship
Introduction
The Tiananmen crackdown of the pro-democracy movement on June 4, 1989, shocked
the world via live televised coverage. In its wake, the elite western media have continually
1
City University of Hong Kong
Zhejiang University, China
3
Chinese University of Hong Kong
2
Corresponding Author:
Chin-Chuan Lee, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon
Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Email: [email protected]
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
336
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
made symbolic uses of this decisive event to make sense of subsequent events in or
even outside China (Kluver 2002; Wasserstrom 2003). The media have extracted and
abstracted Tiananmen from its original context to symbolize complex, contradictory, and generalized layers of meanings about the country. For many people and
media around the world, the images of a lone man stopping a line of tanks “remain
among the most memorable symbols of resistance to tyranny,” and the Tiananmen
crackdown is “still the defining moment in how they perceive contemporary China”
(Chinoy 1999).
Against this backdrop, this article aims to examine what Tiananmen means in the
editorials of two preeminent U.S. newspapers—New York Times (NYT) and Washington
Post (WP)—in the past twenty years. These editorials represent the “enduring values”
of the United States (Gans 1979) and form a vital part of elite consensus crucial to
policy making and the shaping of public opinion. Specifically, we ask: When, how,
and for what purposes did the editorials of NYT and WP invoke “Tiananmen” as a
symbol to interpret disconnected events in China? How did the “uses” of Tiananmen
change over time? How did the changes relate to the larger context of U.S.–China
relationship? Answering these questions can help us further understand the nature and
characteristics of U.S. media discourses on China.
Theoretically, this article aims to contribute to the literature on news icons in journalistic discourses. Bennett and Lawrence (1995: 22) defined a news icon as a powerful condensational image that evokes primary cultural themes and tensions. While
some studies (Lawrence 1996; Livingston and Eachus 1996) emphasize the potential
of news icons to create junctures for oppositional discourses to enter the mainstream
media, other studies (e.g., Denham 2008) focus on the role of news icons in perpetuating dominant ideologies. While drawing on these insights, this article analyzes the use
of Tiananmen over twenty years, which enables us to characterize the extended life
cycle of a news icon and to examine the change of its relationship with the dominant
authority over time. In addition, we connect the concept of news icons to theoretical
discussions of collective memory in journalism.
News Icons and their Life Cycles
“News icon” is a term coined to examine the intervention by and persistence of some
decisive moments in journalistic accounts (Bennett and Lawrence 1995; Dahl and
Bennett 1996; Lawrence 1996). It is a special type of condensational symbols (Edelman
1964; Graber 1976) that represent an entire event into a single dominant image bearing
strong emotions. This image not only dominates the original narrative, but the media
may introduce it in other stories to help make sense of subsequent events that are often
unconnected to the original concern. A news icon is powerful because of its ability to
evoke cultural themes and tensions. For an image to become a news icon, there should
be wide recognition of the conflict, tension, and cultural values underlying it.
Depending on how journalists use the evoked cultural themes, the news icon can
challenge or stabilize the status quo. Bennett and Lawrence (1995) explicated the concept
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
337
Lee et al.
of news icon as part of an attempt to theorize the conditions under which journalistic
independence from political and economic power can arise. Hence they were interested in the type of news icons that appeared without official sanction and/or simply
“by accident” (Lawrence 1996). These icons “create an opportunity for journalists to
introduce indicators of social change and ideological challenge into news narratives,
making the news a potential site of cultural transformation” (Bennett and Lawrence
1995: 23). However, Bennett and Lawrence (1995: 22) also recognized the ability of
news icons to evoke “stabilizing cultural themes”; for example, the raising of the
American flag at Iwo Jima incited patriotism and military prowess. Similarly, Denham
(2008) analyzed how the U.S. media used the popular artist Kurt Cobain as a news
icon to construct a moral panic over young people’s illicit drug use.
Previous studies have not examined the change in relationship between a news icon
and the power structure over a long period of time. Here, the notion of the life cycle of
a news icon is highly important. In their original article, Bennett and Lawrence (1995)
described the life cycle of a news icon as composed of three stages: (a) an image appears
in a news story as a dramatic scene or event; (b) an image captures societal imagination; and (c) journalists use the news icon in narratives of other or subsequent stories.
Yet this characterization mainly captures the “birth” of a news icon, that is, the process
through which a powerful image associated with a specific event was turned into a
news icon with broader social and political significance. But over a long period of
time, the prominence of a news icon may rise and fall in relation to changing social
realities, and the meanings associated with the news icon may be reshaped through the
process of continual recirculation. Reiterations of the news icon in different contexts
may also add new layers of meanings onto it. These are hitherto underexplored issues
and possibilities, and some of them will be addressed by the present study, which
examines the life cycle of a news icon over a twenty-year period.
Studies on the relationship between journalism and collective memory may throw
important light on how the significance of a news icon may evolve over a long period
of time. The creation and use of news icons is part of the presence of “public past”
shared by members of a particular community in journalistic and public discourses
(Edy 1999, 2001). As Olick (2010) contended, collective memory can be best understood as a sensitizing umbrella concept referring to a wide variety of specific mnemonic
products and practices. Journalists’ use of news icons is one of such mnemonic practices. Journalists rely on the past to delineate the current situation. They use history “to
delimit an era, as a yardstick, for analogies, and for the shorthand explanations or lessons it can provide” (Lang and Lang 1989: 127). This is because media tend to assume
that the past, the present, and the future are in a linear progression with common
causes and consequences. Hence the past not only helps media to frame current issues
but also to predict the future.
During its life cycle, the meanings of a news icon may change with the situations,
concerns, and needs of the present. This presentist perspective in collective memory
studies goes back to the classic work by Halbwachs (1992: 49), who argues that
“[even] at the moment of reproducing the past our imagination remains under the
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
338
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
influence of the present social milieu.” But there are limits to a news icon in serving
the present, in view of the semiotic openness of an original event and the narrow range
of a derived image. A news icon is powerful in evoking prominent cultural themes or
what Gans (1979) called “enduring values,” which may direct and constrain further
usages of the icon. Both Schudson (1992) and Edy (2006) found that collective memories in media and public discourses exhibit a substantial degree of stability. In fine, we
expect to find both continuities and changes in U.S. media discourses on Tiananmen
in the past twenty years. The changes may reflect certain “present situations” of
U.S.–China relations and U.S. policy toward China, whereas the continuities may
result from the durability of the “enduring values” evoked.
Tiananmen and U.S. Media Discourse on China
The 1989 pro-democracy movement in China unfolded in mid-April and ended soon
after the crackdown on June 4 (Zhao 2001). For months, its core images—student
protests, hunger strikes, the statue of the goddess of democracy, reactions from the
Chinese national leaders, tanks, and bloodshed—filled the pages of the world’s leading newspapers and the time slots of television networks. The events created “a serialized
dramatic narrative that had powerful resonance within the U.S. political consciousness”
(Kluver 2002: 507). “Tiananmen” soon assumed the status of a news icon. Mere mentioning of the place can conjure the relevant images of the events in 1989 and provoke
profound imaginings in today’s public and media discourses and served as an enduring prism in observing contemporary China (Chinoy 1999).
As Wasserstrom (2003) observed, the western media have tended to invoke
Tiananmen as a main reference point for making sense of contemporary social issues,
and especially protests, in China. But following a body of research on international
news coverage and discourses (e.g., Hallin 1986; Herman and Chomsky 1988), we
contend that U.S. media images of Tiananmen, a historical event in a foreign country,
are likely to be influenced by America’s national interests and change with its China
policy over time. Government policies and state-defined national interests influence
international news discourses because of the tendency for the media to “index” the
range of voices and viewpoints expressed in mainstream government debate about a
given topic (Bennett 1990; Cook 1998). The indexing phenomenon was in turn a result
of journalists’ news making routines and sourcing practices. Zaller and Chiu (1996: 386)
found a strong association between the slant of press coverage of foreign events and
the positions taken by government officials, such that reporters appear to “wax hawkish
and wane dovish as official sources lead them to do.” They characterized U.S. media
as “the government’s little helper” in their coverage of international news, especially
during foreign policy crises and emergencies. Similarly, Lee (2002) characterizes the
elite U.S. media discourses on foreign policy as exhibiting a form of “established pluralism,” that is, a plurality of views within a narrow range of the established order or
official circle.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
339
Lee et al.
Through the process of domestication, the media attempt to illuminate complex and
ambiguous political realities in remote foreign places in ways easier for local audiences
to understand (Cohen et al. 1996). By so doing, the media may impose their own norms,
frameworks, agendas, and elite-defined national interest onto foreign matters (Dorogi
2001; Lee et al. 2001, 2002; Lee and Yang 1995). In order to “keep America on the top
of the world” (Hallin 1994), the U.S. media tend to set the United States off from essentialized “national others.” The media reduce the rich, complex, and even contradictory
realities of foreign cultures, religions, and peoples into oversimplified, innate, natural,
or immutable properties (Said 1981, 1993). The concrete processes and historical contexts of change, struggles, discontinuities, and internal contradictions are often ignored.
As far as China is concerned, studies have shown strong parallel relationships between
the U.S. media’s coverage of China and the U.S. government’s policies toward China
(Chang 1988, 1989; Kim 2000; Lee 2002; Peng 2004; Stone and Xiao 2007). Despite the
fluctuating discourse–policy cycles, the predominant theme in U.S. media coverage of
China has always been anti-communism (Dorogi 2001; Kobland et al. 1992). As Lee
(2002) observed, when China was a strategic ally with the United States against the Soviet
Union during the cold war, China’s record of human rights abuse receded into the background of U.S. media discourse. As the cold war ended, China came to be perceived as
a hurdle to reconstructing the U.S.-orchestrated neoliberal world order, and China’s
human rights abuse thus became the highlight of U.S. media coverage. The Tiananmen
crackdown was interpreted as validating America’s totalitarian stereotype of communism (Womack 1990). Hong Kong’s return to China was seen from the perspective of
America’s playing a new role as the guardian of the territory’s liberty and democracy
against communist abuse (Lee et al. 2001, 2002). Even the 1995 United Nations
Conference on Women in Beijing was reported through the lens of anti-communism
rather than as an event about women (Akhavan-Majid and Ramaprasad 1998).
Given its decisive significance to China and the world, the 1989 pro-democracy
movement in Tiananmen Square has been crystallized into a news icon. The research
questions for our analysis are as follows: (1) Whether and how did the meanings of
Tiananmen change over the past two decades in U.S. media discourses? (2) How can
we understand the changing meanings in relation to changing social and political contexts? (3) What are the limits of the changes in meanings of the news icon? and (4) How
do the continuities and changes in the meanings of the news icon shape its overall
social and political significance?
We do expect the meanings of Tiananmen and the purposes for which it was invoked
to have undergone transformations over the past two decades. Specifically, the meanings
of Tiananmen in American elite press should tend to bear the country’s ideological agendas and national interests. We should be able to make sense of the changing meanings
and usages of the news icon in terms of changing U.S.–China relations in the global
context. Nevertheless, as argued previously, the cultural themes and enduring values evoked
would constrain the changes of meanings in the icons. These are the working hypotheses
that guide our interpretive analysis of the editorials of NYT and WP.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
340
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
Method and Analytical Approach
Our analysis focuses on the editorials of NYT and the WP. As newspapers “of the elite,
by the elite, and for the elite,” they play a key role in setting agendas for national public discourses, establishing elite consensus, and shaping national policy in the United
States (Cohen 1963). They function as “something akin to a house organ for the political
elite” (Sigal 1973: 47) and are revered by media organizations in the country and
globally, and both NYT and WP devote much space to international reporting. Although
the proliferation of alternative news outlets, especially those emerging from the Internet,
have seemingly challenged the elite press’s central role in democracy (Zelizer 2009),
existing research has shown that even online citizen media are heavily reliant on the
mainstream and elite media as information sources (e.g., Goode 2009; Meraz 2009).
In other words, despite the seeming decline in audience sizes, elite media still retain
a significant part of its agenda setting and framing power. It is difficult to predict
future developments in the field of journalism at this juncture, but so far the elite press
has continued to be a focal point of domestic but particularly foreign policy discourses
(Bennett et al. 2007; Entman 2003).
Meanwhile, editorials, in expressing views on major issues, are less constrained
than news reports by the professional convention of objectivity and neutrality. They
thus constitute a site particularly suitable for observing the media’s ideological discourses and/or use of symbols and icons (Hackett and Zhao 1994; Le 2006; Lee and
Lin 2006).
We derived relevant editorials for analysis from Lexis-Nexis using the simple keyword search with the term “Tiananmen.” For the twenty years from 1989 to 2009, the
term appeared nearly two hundred times in the editorials of NYT (114) and WP (78).
But as Figure 1 shows, its frequency of appearance has, not surprisingly, declined over
time. Tiananmen was very frequently invoked in the early 1990s, but it gradually
tapered off in the 2000s. About 90 percent of the editorial references to Tiananmen in
NYT and 68 percent in WP were made in the first decade.
Three preliminary observations can be offered at this point. First, the two newspapers tended to adopt a simplified and clear-cut narrative and a condensed image of the
original event, neglecting the complexities of the political movement in 1989. Table 1
summarizes the frequency of three groups of descriptors in the descending order of
moral disapproval. Most references accentuated the dramatized image of the final
crackdown rather than the whole process of the 1989 movement. Among them, 55 percent
of the references in NYT and 61 percent in WP described the event as a massacre, killing, or slaughter, whereas 21.3 percent in NYT and 14.8 percent in WP used less strong
terms, such as crackdown, suppression, and repression. Only a small proportion of the
references (23.4 percent for NYT and 24.3 percent for WP) cast it in terms such as
protest, demonstration, or movement that do not embody a condemnation of the act of
the Chinese government.
Second, Tiananmen was often used as a device to make sense of subsequent events
or situations, especially through establishing analogies or contrasts between Tiananmen
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
341
Lee et al.
Figure 1. Number of editorials making reference to Tiananmen, by year
Table 1. Editorial Portrayal of the Tiananmen Event
Massacre/killing/slaughter
Crackdown/suppression/
repression
Protest/demonstration/
movement
New York Times (n = 94), n (%)
Washington Post (n = 74), n (%)
52 (55.3)
20 (21.3)
45 (60.8)
11 (14.8)
22 (23.4)
18 (24.3)
and “crackdowns” in other countries. A few months after the Tiananmen crackdown,
the NYT described in four editorials the killings of revolutionaries and demonstrators
in Romania by Communist leaders as “Tiananmen-like ferocity” or “Tiananmen-style
repression.” When Indonesian troops killed fifty East Timorese people in 1992, the
NYT labeled the event as “the Tiananmen in East Timor.” WP used similar expressions
to portray Thai army’s assault on demonstrators in Bangkok and the Kremlin’s action
in the Soviet Baltic.
Third, Tiananmen has also been invoked as a yardstick to measure against other
protests in China, ranging from local peasant grievances and worker protests to religious unrests. For instance, when more than 8,000 Chinese “from all walks of life”
signed the Charter 08, a manifesto demanding constitutional reform, WP editorially
described it as “the largest pro-democracy movement Beijing has known since the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests.”
These observations on some of the major characteristics are consistent with the
patterns of western media’s use of Tiananmen (Wasserstrom 2003) and also illustrate how Tiananmen fits into the concept of news icon. Our analysis aims at
deriving a more in-depth analysis to unravel the nuances involved in the extended
life cycle of Tiananmen as a news icon. To that end, we adopted Gamson and
Modigliani’s (1987, 1989) constructionist approach to discourse analysis as our
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
342
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
method. We first deconstructed the editorials into their constitutive elements and
identified the major framing devices: metaphors, exemplars, catchphrases, depictions, and visual images. Besides, we paid special attention to (1) the situations in
which the icon is invoked, (2) the main theme or issue being addressed in the editorial, (3) the rhetorical functions played by the icon, (4) the connections and
underlying rationale established between Tiananmen and the focal event or issue,
and (5) the policy environment or context underlining such connections. We then
reconstructed these elements into what Gamson and Modigliani (1987, 1989) called
“ideological packages.” This analysis captures what Hall (1980) calls the “dominant reading” of the text. Ideological packages were supplemented with a close
analysis of textual excerpts.
Based on iterative readings, we divided the evolution of the symbolic meanings of
Tiananmen into three stages. From 1989 to 1992, it was a sweeping symbol of Communist
dictatorship. From 1993 to 2001, it represented specific human rights abuses. From
2002 to 2009, it faded to become ritualistic memory, and yet it still crucially signified
a moral bottom line for U.S. foreign policy.
Ideological Packages of the Editorial Discourses
Tiananmen as a Symbol of Communist Dictatorship
During the period from 1989 to 1992, Tiananmen was invoked mainly to symbolize
the atrocious nature of communist—or more generally, totalitarian—dictatorship. As
a WP editorial in 1991 wrote, Tiananmen is a “classic metaphor for late twentieth century Communist repression” (“Tiananmen Square,” WP, February 6, 1991). Another
editorial characterized Tiananmen as “a humbling lesson in the mysteries of totalitarian rule” (“Massacre in China,” WP, June 5, 1989). More typically, the linkage
between Tiananmen and atrocity is notable from a range of lexicons used in the mentioning of Tiananmen. The event itself was cast in terms of “army and troops,” “gun
down,” “tanks and thuggery,” and “rivers of blood.” The nature of the event was defined
as a “crime,” “slaughter,” “killing,” “massacre,” and “carnage.” The perpetrators of the
act were “tyrants,” “killers,” “butchers,” “desperate old-line Communists,” and “the
bloodstained regime,” contrasted with such victims as “unarmed students and civilians”
and “peaceful demonstrators.”
These lexicons allowed the editorials to come up with descriptions and narratives
of strong moral condemnations. For example, the next day after the Tiananmen crackdown, on June 5, 1989, the NYT’s editorial was titled “Two Old Men (Deng and
Premier Li Peng), Many Young Lives.” Similarly, a WP editorial (June 5, 1989) wrote,
“In Tiananmen Square a cynical and panicked Chinese leadership has sent tanks and
indiscriminately shooting soldiers against unarmed students and workers asking for
democracy” (“Massacre in China,” WP, June 5, 1989). Another NYT editorial in late 1989
wrote that “[the Chinese democrats] were thwarted by desperate old-line Communists
who didn’t mind shedding rivers of blood and who calculated that the world would
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
343
Lee et al.
swallow their brutality without imposing real costs” (“‘Anti-Me’ on China? No.
Pro-Freedom,” NYT, December 28, 1989).
The storyline or script formed around these lexicons and the underlying intense
emotions strongly imply the attribution and target of condemnation. It also explicitly
or implicitly puts forward what the United States should do as an appropriate response
to the atrocity. In other words, such lexical choices help establish the news icon of
Tiananmen as a substantial frame that grants journalists the authority in “defining
effects or conditions as problematic, identifying causes, conveying a moral judgment of
those involved in the framed matter, endorsing remedies or improvements to the problematic situation” (Entman 2003: 417). Take the following example:
Excerpt 1
There was a big parade [on the National Day] in Tiananmen Square, but this
landmark is now a metaphor for repression. . . . Tiananmen left most Americans
repelled by the regime’s brutality and wondering whether a solid basis remained
for the relationship the United States has been building with China for two
decades. (“Back in Tiananmen Square,” WP, October 9, 1989)
In this excerpt, the “brutality” itself not only justifies the immediate actions of suspending military sales and high official exchanges but also questions the strategic
relations between United States and China established after 1978.
The iconic status of Tiananmen was further consolidated by drawing analogies
between the Tiananmen crackdown and other parallel events. An editorial in 1992
reported that “less deferential members of Congress have forthrightly condemned
Indonesia’s Tiananmen,” in referring to Indonesian troops’ killing of 50 civilians in
East Timor who was seized by Indonesia in 1975 (“The Tiananmen in East Timor,”
NYT, January 21, 1992). The modifier “forthrightly” attached to the verb “condemn”
indicates the editorial’s approval of the Congress members’ moves. The WP wrote in
1992 when discussing American policy to Burma:
Excerpt 2
The American government has already done plenty—sharp public criticism,
political isolation, economic sanctions—to indicate its disapproval since the
clique, which call Burma Myanmar, took over in 1988 in a burst of savagery that
made Tiananmen look pale. (“Bargaining with Burma,” WP, February 16, 1992)
Insofar as Tiananmen stood as a symbol of atrocity, any parallel drawn was meant to
make other incidents look morally more outrageous and more condemnable. Excerpt 2
suggests that the military junta in Myanmar was even more savage than Tiananmen.
More broadly, this kind of analogies created a family of incorrigible regimes that combined “Oriental tyrants” and “Communist dictators”: Deng in Communist China and
his fellow dictators in Burma, Romania, Russia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
344
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
Moreover, as Excerpt 1 illustrated, Tiananmen was invoked not only to describe an
event but also to make arguments about United States’ China policy. The text reflected
the power struggle of political elites in trying to manage an unexpected event. The
press was more hawkish on China than the Bush administration. In the wake of the
Tiananmen crackdown, both newspapers urged President Bush to stand tough on
China. They praised Bush for imposing an embargo on China as “do[ing] justice both
to American values and to American interests” (“Forceful, Not Frantic, About China,”
NYT, June 6, 1989). But later when Bush sent high-level officials to China seeking to
rebuild the mutual ties, he was repeatedly criticized as “toasting the butchers of
Beijing” (“‘Anti-Me’ on China? No. Pro-Freedom,” NYT, December 28, 1989; “The
First Friend,” NYT, August 14, 1992).
Even when the United States imposed a sanction on China, Bush already had to consider the United States’ multifaceted relationships with China. It took much longer for
the press to turn around and argue editorially for engaging with what they identified as a
“brutal, bloodstained regime.” How did the press reconcile its seemingly conflicting
positions? The key was to draw distinctions between us and them, to polarize between
in-groups and out-groups (van Dijk 1998). The United States and its allies were editorially pitted against Communist China and other dictatorships. Internal polarizations were
also made between “wrong/bad China” and “right/good China,” between Deng (his
hardline allies) and reform-minded factions, between the current regime and future leadership, between the authoritarian Chinese state and the emerging civil society, as well as
between the Chinese government and its people. Americans were urged editorially to
join the “good” China, “good” officials, and “good” people “in their mourning” (“Two
Old Men, Many Young Lives,” NYT, June 5, 1989). Likewise, the United States should
“identify [itself] . . . with the future of China” (“Correcting the Tilt to Beijing,” WP, May
11, 1990). Making such distinctions allowed the editorials to articulate a “balanced position” that unified the democratic rhetoric and practical interests:
Excerpt 3
Continuing favored-nation status would nourish China’s progressive forces
for the coming succession battles. Deng Xiaoping and his associates deserve to
be pariahs. The Chinese deserve to be a favored nation. (“Don’t Punish the
Wrong China,” NYT, April 27, 1990)
Excerpt 4
New trade-blocking tariffs would also weaken precisely the modernizing,
internationally oriented sectors of the Chinese economy and political society
that the United States has the greatest interest in cultivating. . . . In the name of
putting pressure on the China of repression, raising tariffs high would punish the
China of reform. (“Correcting the Tilt to Beijing,” WP, May 11, 1990)
By differentiating the conservative forces from the progressive forces in China, press
editorials were able to advocate the United States’ continued economic engagement
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
345
Lee et al.
with China. However, the distinction does not absolve the U.S. administration from
the blame of “identify(ing) more with China’s aging autocrats than with its brave
young democrats” (NYT, December 12, 1989).
The irony is that Deng was the architect of China’s economic reform and political
repression, and Bush could not be expected to engage economically with China without dealing with Deng. Here, we see some initial signs of the imposed “constraint” by
the enduring values. Although the editorial discourses did come to justify the U.S.
administration’s preferred policy by the end of the first period, the news icon’s moral
condemnation toward the authoritarian regime cannot be easily put aside, reversed, or
forgotten immediately.
Tiananmen as a Symbol of Human Rights Violation
Tiananmen continued to serve as an important news icon in the second period from
1993 to 2000, but three major differences between the two periods can be noted. First,
the tone severity and underlying emotional intensity in portraying the original event
saw a significant decline. Such words as massacre, slaughter, and killing were used
less frequently. During the first period, 71.5 percent of the NYT descriptions used one
of these three words, only to drop to 42.3 percent in the later years. WP presents
similar though not as striking a pattern (66.7 vs. 58 percent).
Second, Tiananmen was often invoked to disapprove China’s poor human rights
conditions, thus serving as a launch pad for the press to express concerns about what
the would-be sovereign (China) might mean to postcolonial Hong Kong that was to be
absorbed into the motherland’s fold in 1997. In addition, this line of rhetoric enabled
the press to contrast “authoritarian China” with “democratic Taiwan.”
Third and most importantly, Tiananmen evolved from a sweeping symbol of
authoritarianism and Communist dictatorship into a more concrete and specific symbol of human rights abuses. As we will further discuss below, Tiananmen was reduced
from being an atrocity unparalleled in contemporary Chinese history to a serious
wrongdoing on a comparable scale to other instances of human rights abuses in China.
During this period, the United States was shifting from an ineffective containment
policy to what President Clinton called a “positive engagement” policy when he declared:
“I want to bring China in, not to shut China out.” The significance of Tiananmen was
reconfigured to suit the U.S. practical considerations involving an adroit use of “carrots”
and “sticks.” Clinton made human rights improvement a condition for renewing China’s
“most favored trading nation” status in 1992, only to delink it two years later. On
Clinton’s China policy, the press referred to Tiananmen mostly as a historical context
rather than a critical leverage.
It should be recalled that President Bush was repeatedly criticized by the elite U.S.
press for “toasting the butchers of Beijing” when his officials visited China after 1989.
Instead of accusing President Clinton of “appeasing” China, the elite press praised him
ten years later (in 1998) for having spoken out “politely but forthrightly on Tiananmen,
Tibet, political prisoners and more” (June 30, 1998, WP) during his trip to China. Press
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
346
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
complaints about China were rather minor, such as “China’s decision to bar three journalists from President Clinton’s press plane” (“A Sour Send-Off,” WP, June 25, 1998).
By praising Clinton for speaking out “on Tiananmen, Tibet, political prisoners and
more,” WP regarded Tiananmen almost as equally important as Tibet and political
prisoners. In addition, the paper approvingly described Clinton as speaking “politely
but forthrightly,” thus signifying a shift in editorial attitude that paralleled U.S. policy
shift from “containment” of China to “positive engagement” with it (Lee 2002).
It is common for editorial discourses during the second period to combine Tiananmen
with other events, issues, and/or controversies to constitute a current agenda in which
China was seen as having a record of human rights abuses.
Excerpt 5
It [Tiananmen] is Beijing’s best known horror, but it was just a brief, awful
moment compared with the ongoing jailing of dissidents, suppression in Tibet,
the nationwide repression of religion and the national policy of forced abortions
and sterilizations. (“No Olympic Gold for Beijing,” NYT, July 29, 1993)
Excerpt 6
These grim findings again demonstrate Beijing’s indifference to human life.
. . . It matters not to Beijing whether the lives are those of unarmed civilian
demonstrators mowed down by tanks in Tiananmen Square, prisoners held at
the edge of starvation in “reform through labor” camps or children warehoused
in orphanages. (“In China, Sadly Familiar Behavior,” NYT, January 14, 1996)
The icon of Tiananmen has a number of functions in Excerpts 5 and 6. Most fundamentally, Tiananmen was no longer a catch-all symbol of dictatorship but a constituent part of “Beijing’s indifference to human life.” Tiananmen not only formed a
chain of equivalents with other instances but as “Beijing’s best known horror,” it also
helped to define those lesser known events. Neither forced abortion nor the conditions in orphanages were interpreted against the background of specific issues and
other possible causes. Rather, these events were lumped with Tiananmen as a package
of moral disapproval on the Chinese government. In the process, other social problems
were also detached from possible local contexts and became “national problems,” with
Beijing and Tiananmen serving as spatial metonyms of the national government and
its brutal actions.
In addition, Tiananmen was used to construct historical continuity. Putting old and
new events together serves to narrate China’s disrespect for human rights as an enduring and continuing process, and Tiananmen functioned as a “beginning” of this constructed history. Nevertheless, Tiananmen was not the beginning of China’s human
rights abuses, but merely the beginning of America’s focused attention to human rights
abuses in China. As some other editorials wrote, Tiananmen “unmasked the true nature
of [the] regime” (NYT, July 28, 1994) and enabled Americans to see more “dark side[s]
of Chinese Communist rule” (NYT, October 24, 1997).
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
347
Lee et al.
Even if editorials continued to invoke Tiananmen as a news icon, the focus turned
to more concurrent events and happenings that were defined morally as even more
problematic than events in Tiananmen in 1989. Excerpt 5 did not make Tiananmen a
time immemorial event, but emphasized it as a “brief and awful moment” in the flow
of recurring issues and events. To portray the human rights woes in China, the press
referred historically to such systems as the former Soviet Union’s KGB and gulag, other
than Tiananmen:
Excerpt 7
China’s president Jiang Zemin arrives in the United States today for the first
U.S.-China summit . . . since the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. . . . Most
Americans will recoil if Mr. Clinton does not accord sufficient weight to the
thousands of prisoners of conscience suffering in Mr. Jiang’s gulag today. (“The
U.S.-China Summit,” WP, October 26, 1997)
WP mentioned “gulag” in three other editorials, one of which asserted that “[with
regard to] suppression of minority rights and speech, religion and assembly, China
invites comparison with the soviet KGB and gulag at their worst” (January 12, 1997).
The connection between China’s Tiananmen and the Soviet gulag constitutes a larger
anti-Communist frame reminiscent of the cold war rhetoric. This is consistent with
what Le (2006) found in her study of how the NYT editorially represented Russia in
1999–2000. The victims of China’s abuse, according to press narratives, ranged from
political prisoners, forced labor, ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang,
to sufferers of forced abortions.
These excerpts illustrate the continuity of the strategy of polarization in media discourse. The argument in Excerpt 7 was built on the division between political prisoners in China and the Chinese leadership, while mentioning “prisoners of conscience”
clearly suggested that Clinton should uphold American-cum-universal values. Since
Deng reignited market reform in late 1992, the tension between “capitalism” and “socialism” has become less serious. The press turned mainly to the conflicts (1) between the
Chinese government and its people and (2) between the United States (and its allies)
and China. Throughout the 1990s, both NYT and WP frequently suggested that America
should identify with political dissidents and activists against China’s human rights
abusers. A WP editorial, for example, insisted that the U.S. government should ally
with Asia’s democracies (regionally) and democracy fighters inside China (nationally),
rather than side with the Chinese government.
Tiananmen as Ritualistic Memory and Moral Bottom Line
At the turn of the century, U.S.–China relation took a friendlier turn when President
George W. Bush declared a war on terrorism, for which China’s support was important, and when China was eager to join the World Trade Organization. It does not
mean that the moral judgment was completely reversed. China constituted “repressive
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
348
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
allies” (“America’s Repressive Allies,” WP, December 31, 2001) sharing different
values yet common interests with the United States. Both NYT and WP made fewer
and fewer references to Tiananmen. Much focus was shifted to the plight of Chinese
dissidents or activists, and Tiananmen was occasionally broached to background their
personal history. One WP editorial, for instance, described the famous journalist Dai
Qing as an early critic of the Three Gorges Dam project who “was jailed for 10
months after the Tiananmen Square massacre” (“The Dam Breaks,” WP, October 15,
2007). Mentioning Tiananmen can be considered as having the effect of strengthening
the moral authority of the dissident. Nevertheless, not every dissident connected to the
student movement in 1989 was described as such. Liu Xiaobo was once portrayed as
“a literary critic and Tiananmen Square veteran” (“China’s Politics of Punishment,”
NYT, October 31, 1996), but this time he became only “a literary critic” in a WP editorial about the Charter 08, a constitutional movement that earned him a ten-year
prison term (“Virtual Groundswell,” WP, January 30, 2009).
More importantly, the use of Tiananmen became more “commemorative.” The icon
was mentioned in a number of articles published around June 4 in different years commemorating the events in 1989. It is notable that after the first commemoration article
was published in 1990, just one year after 1989, the second commemoration article did
not appear until its tenth anniversary in 1999. Nonetheless, the third period (after
2001) saw another three commemoration articles. They amounted to editorial “pegs”
for the press to comment on (1) current political and social situations in China and (2)
U.S. policy toward China. Even though “Tiananmen is no longer much of a rallying
cry” (WP, June 3, 2002), the press attributed “Tiananmen taboo” (NYT, June 4, 2004)
to the regime’s “continuing inability to face that history” (WP, June 3, 1999) and its
effort to repress the “memory of Tiananmen” (NYT, June 6, 2009). Thus, China keeps
Tiananmen “an unhealed wound” (NYT, June 4, 2004).
But what is the purpose of commemorating Tiananmen for the American media?
Unlike those editorials merely invoking Tiananmen as historical analogy or contexts,
the commemorative editorials address Tiananmen in full length. Hence their significance should not be undermined simply because the two newspapers carried only a
few of them. They deserve close examination. We may focus on NYT’s 2009 commemorative editorial, titled “Remembering Tiananmen,” published on June 6:
Twenty years after the massacre of pro-democracy activists, Chinese authorities
flooded Tiananmen Square with security forces this week to ensure that there
were no protests and no commemorations. Visitors were searched at checkpoints,
foreign television crews were turned away and certain Internet sites were also
blocked.
Despite the country’s stunning economic growth over the past two decades,
Beijing’s autocrats are clearly still afraid of their own people. In the months before
the anniversary, they intensified a crackdown on human rights activists, including
mothers of Tiananmen Square victims.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
349
Lee et al.
According to Amnesty International, at least 100 people advocating for
land, labor and housing rights were detained or attacked by authorities. In another
15 cases, lawyers working for activist clients were threatened, blocked from
meeting clients or detained.
Activists in China, and those who have been exiled, are right to worry that the
massacre—and the demands for reform that drove the protests—will be forgotten.
Chinese students are not allowed to study that crucial moment in their history. And
a world eager for China’s business is eager to ignore its repressive ways.
We were encouraged when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called
on China this week to confront its past.
She urged Beijing to provide a public accounting of those killed or detained,
release protestors who are still in jail and begin a dialogue with victims’ families. She said China must embrace the rule of law and protect human rights and
civil liberties with the same urgency given to economic reform.
China’s leaders prize stability. But repression is not the answer. China’s citizens are restive. Activists say there are 100,000 protests a year, mostly over local
grievances. Beijing may be able to repress the memory of Tiananmen. But the
yearning for freedom remains. (“Remembering Tiananmen,” NYT, June 6, 2009)
As the title “remembering Tiananmen” implies, the paper designates itself the
responsibility of maintaining people’s memory alive about the event. As Schudson
(1997: 3) argued, formal commemoration that tries to preserve a collective memory
“often acknowledges not the power of living memory but its fading.” In the current
example, the need to continue the Tiananmen memory is (in the fourth paragraph) put
into the context of, on one hand, the repression of the memory within China, and on
the other hand, a perceived tendency outside China to forget the event because of economic interests. Here lies an implicit criticism that many people are putting their moral
judgments aside due to materialistic concerns. But notably, the criticism is targeted not
at a specific institution such as the Obama administration. The target is not even the
country of the United States; rather, the generalized category of “the world” is used,
thus universalizing this tendency. The editorial, hence, is essentially putting forward a
criticism without target.
Regarding the U.S.–China relationship, the editorial does not emphasize U.S. influence on China’s pursuit of freedom and democracy. It praises Hillary Clinton for “calling on China to confront its past” and stating the importance of the rule of law and
protection of human rights. Yet neither Mrs. Clinton nor the editorial tied these general
urgings with specific policy issues or concrete items in U.S.–China relations. In other
words, after highlighting the importance of not forgetting Tiananmen, the editorial
does not argue for any actions beyond verbal recitations of the abstract values.
The lack of emphasis on what the United States should do to pressurize China is
implicitly and indirectly justified by an emphasis on the presence of “internal causes”
for change in China itself. The editorial interprets China’s attempt to suppress protests
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
350
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
as a sign of the government being “afraid” of its own people, thus implying that China
is a weak rather than a strong state. More explicitly, the editorial ends with a stress on
continuity. Yet what is highlighted is not the continuity of suppression but the continuity of Chinese people’s “yearning for freedom.”
On the whole, what the NYT editorial illustrates is how the icon of Tiananmen was
invoked in such commemorative articles as a memory that is important for the reconfirmation of one’s values. The significance of Tiananmen does not reside in how it is
related to current controversies and events, but in the implicit argument that whether
one still remembers the distant events is a test of a person’s and by implication a country’s moral integrity and insistence in the face of social change. It draws a moral bottom line not to be crossed.
Conclusion and Discussion
This article presents a case study of how Tiananmen, as a decisive event, has been
invoked in the editorial discourses by the elite U.S. press in the two decades following
1989. Tiananmen as a news icon has “survived” in U.S. media discourses for a long
period of time. This is largely a result of (1) how the images of the original events had
struck at the core of the enduring values (Gans 1979) held by the U.S. society and
media; (2) the potential of this event to be invoked as a powerful and convenient analogy for understanding similar events, or to be included as part of the context in narrating other stories; and (3) the discursive opportunities for applying the symbol to
contemporary concerns.
We started our analysis by describing how the elite press condensed the images of
Tiananmen into a potentially powerful symbol and made reference to it as a useful
journalistic tool to define subsequent events or situations. This pattern is consistent
with the functioning of news icons as revealed by Bennett and Lawrence (1995) and
Lawrence (1996). We moved beyond these observations and further examined how the
meanings of Tiananmen varied with the larger political situations and the master
frames of media discourses over time. We have identified three ideological packages surrounding the use of Tiananmen as a news icon in three different time periods (Table 2).
Not surprisingly, references to Tiananmen peaked in the wake of the crackdown in
1989, and the icon was largely used to signify Communist suppression. As the initial
outrage subsided somewhat and the two countries began to engage in concrete policy
negotiations more intensively again, throughout the 1990s Tiananmen came to symbolize a case of human rights abuse in China. Yet the emphasis is not on Tiananmen
itself but on continual suppression of human rights in China. Then, since 2001, the
U.S.–China relationship has improved because of the strategic need for cooperation in
the global war on terrorism, and Tiananmen gradually lost part of its power as the
repository of collective memories about China in the elite U.S. editorial discourse.
In short, the meanings and uses of Tiananmen has experienced mutations over the
years, and such mutations are at the general level in line with the overall direction of
China policy adopted by different U.S. administrations. The invocation of Tiananmen
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
351
Lee et al.
Table 2. The “Ideological Packages” of Elite U.S. Press Editorial Discourses
Ideological Packages
Communist Dictatorship
Human Rights Abuses
Period
United States’
China policy
1989–1992
Containment
1993–2001
Engagement
Situations
in which
the icon is
invoked
China’s continuous
suppression, renewal
of China’s MFN, rocky
U.S.–China relations,
similar suppressions in
Eastern Europe and Asia
Human rights
conditions in
China, democracy
in Taiwan and Hong
Kong, the U.S.–
China relations.
Symbolization
Brutal and bloodstained
authoritarian regimes
(1) Hardliners vs. reformminded leadership
factions; (2) current vs.
future leaderships; (3)
Chinese government vs.
its people; (4) United
States vs. China and
other authoritarian
regimes
Butchers of Beijing, Big Lies
Generalized human
rights abuse
(1) Chinese
government vs. its
people; (2) United
States and its allies
vs. China
Polarization
Metaphors
Exemplars
Catchphrases
Ritualistic Memory of
Repression
2002–2009
Globalization/
antiterrorism
alliance
Anniversaries of
Tiananmen,
activities of
Chinese dissidents
or activists,
improved U.S.–
China relations
Distant memory of
past abuse
Chinese government
vs. dissidents and
activists
Mr. Jiang’s gulag;
Tiananmen taboo;
prisoners of
China’s information
conscience; palace
dam
intrigue
Hungarian uprisings
Jailing of dissidents,
The repression
of 1956; Indonesia’s
repression of
of Tiananmen
Tiananmen; Tiananmenlaborers and ethnic
memory and
like ferocity in Eastern
minorities in Tibet
commemorative
Europe, Southeast Asia,
and Xinjiang; forced
activities; thousands
and Soviet-bloc countries
abortions and
of protests over
sterilizations
local grievances
“A classic metaphor for late- Tiananmen
“Tiananmen is no
20th century Communist
“reopened
longer much of a
repression”; “a humbling
American eyes
rallying cry”; “China
lesson in the mysteries of
to the dark
keeps Tiananmen an
totalitarian rule”
side of Chinese
unhealed wound”
Communist rule”
(continued)
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
352
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
Table 2. (continued)
Ideological Packages
Depictions
Visual images
No. of
editorials
Communist Dictatorship
Human Rights Abuses
Suppressive leaders as old
Chinese leadership
men, tyrants, butchers;
as an “evolving
bloodstained regime;
regime”; people as
action as massacre, killing,
victims of various
slaughter, carnage; people
human rights
as unarmed, peaceful
abuses
students and civilians
Tanks and guns, rivers of
Prison tortures, red
blood
flag over Hong
Kong
NYT = 59, WP = 26
NYT = 50, WP = 37
Ritualistic Memory of
Repression
China as one of
the “repressive
allies”; dissidents
and activists
as courageous
“freedom fighters”
Security forces
flooded on
the Square on
anniversary days
NYT = 5, WP = 15
Note: MFN = most favored nation; NYT = New York Times; WP = Washington Post.
should be taken as an integral part of the overall media framing and discourse about
China as well as within the framework of U.S.–China relations (and by implication,
America’s master narrative of international relations) (Lee 2002; Stone and Xiao
2007). The life cycle of Tiananmen and its attendant meanings seem to parallel the
development of the U.S.–China ties, highlighting, defining, as well as mediating what
Hallin (1986) calls “elite consensus” in the post–cold war era. Tiananmen, like other
decisive events, constitutes the scaffolding of a particular ideological orientation,
which functions as the intermediary between the micro and macro dimensions of
press discourse and links the meaning of news icons and other rhetorical moves to the
larger discursive contexts.
However, it does not mean that the Washington elites were completely successful
in manipulating the meanings of Tiananmen, nor do we attempt to argue that the use
of news icons is completely driven by U.S. foreign policy interests toward China. As
previously discussed, a news icon may evoke the cultural themes and values that are
not completely liable to manipulation and may constrain further actions and discourses. Our analysis shows that the press used Tiananmen at different stages to criticize the U.S. administration’s China policy. This was particularly obvious when the
United States decided to “reengage” China in the early 1990s, it tried discursively to
differentiate China’s wicked government from its innocent people; the strategy was
only partially successful in justifying the policy shift. Into the 2000s, when U.S.–
China ties became friendlier in the context of further economic globalization and the
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
353
Lee et al.
United States’ war on terror, Tiananmen became less frequently invoked and more
detached from concrete policy issues, but it continued to signify the moral–political
principles of democracy and human rights.
While the symbolic power and meanings of Tiananmen have undergone some
changes, the different layers of meanings are mostly derived from a consensus on the
essence of the event (the governmental suppression of its own people) as well as
the values the icon evokes (democracy and the sin of killing innocent civilians). The
changes came from the tendency of media discourses to “index” the range of concurrent elite perspectives, while the continuity was due to the relative stability of the
cultural themes and values activated by the news icon. Despite a close affiliation
between the meanings of Tiananmen and the larger context of U.S.–China relations,
the administration did not always dictate the terms. Our findings are congruent with
both the presentist perspective on collective memory (Halbwachs 1992) and also with
Schudson’s (1992) and Edy’s (2006) findings about the relative stability of collective
memory in media and public discourses.
The relationship between a news icon and the dominant power structure is complicated and at times contradictory. Bennett and Lawrence (1995) recognized that news
icons can evoke recurrent themes and values to reinforce the status quo; it can also
present windows of opportunities for the press to incorporate new and previously marginalized ideas into their discourses. Our analysis shows that Tiananmen was used to
construct criticisms of U.S. government policies. Yet these criticisms usually fall
within a narrow range of ideologically permissible perspective constituting the U.S.
media’s “established pluralism” (Lee 2002). Even as the administration is criticized,
the icon of Tiananmen has served to reinforce the United States’ ideology of seeing
itself as the beacon of democracy and freedom.
Over its extended life cycle as a news icon, the symbolic potency of Tiananmen has
gone through a process of weakening, thinning out, and gradual decline. In the past
decade, Tiananmen received mostly ritualistic references in the elite press’s anniversary editorials as a discursive gesture. But it does not mean that the news icon of
Tiananmen will disappear or become irrelevant. Depending on the shifting global contexts, the cross-currents of events, and the future development of U.S.–China ties, it is
possible for Tiananmen to rise to prominence again. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize
to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010 is a potent reminder. In an editorial titled
“Honoring Liu Xiaobo,” Liu was described as having “credentials [that] are beyond
reproach” because “during the 1989 pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, he
negotiated a peaceful retreat of student demonstrators” (NYT, November 19, 2010).
Liu, a leading voice of democracy who descended from the Tiananmen movement,
was depicted as the best hope for China.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication
of this article.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
354
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of a grant from the Research Grants Council
of Hong Kong (9041283-660) and additional assistance from the Centre for Communication
Research at the City University of Hong Kong.
References
Akhavan-Majid, Roya, and Jyotika Ramaprasad. 1998. “Framing and Ideology: A Comparative
Analysis of U.S. and Chinese Newspaper Coverage of the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women and the NGO Forum.” Mass Communication and Society 1(3/4): 131–52.
Bennett, W. Lance. 1990. “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States.”
Journal of Communication 40(2): 103–25.
Bennett, W. Lance, and Regina G. Lawrence. 1995. “News Icons and the Mainstreaming of
Social Change.” Journal of Communication 45(3): 20–39.
Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. 2007. When the Press Fails.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chang, Tsan Kuo. 1988. “The News and US-China Policy: Symbols in Newspapers and Documents.” Journalism Quarterly 65(2): 320–27.
Chang, Tsan Kuo. 1989. “The Impact of Presidential Statements on Press Editorials Regarding
US-China Policy, 1950-1984.” Communication Research 16(4): 486–509.
Chinoy, Mike. 1999. “Tiananmen Part, But Not All, of Modern-Day China’s Legacy.” CNN Special Reports (2 June). http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/views/y/1999/06/chinoy.tiananmen.jun2/.
Cohen, Akiba A., Mark R. Levy, Itzhak Roeh, and Michael Gurevitch, eds. 1996. Global Newsrooms, Local Audiences. London: J. Libbey.
Cohen, Bernard C. 1963. The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Cook, Timothy E. 1998. Governing with the News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dahl, Megan K., and W. Lance Bennett. 1996. “Media Agency and the Use of Icons in the
Agenda-Setting Process: News Representations of George Bush’s Trade Mission to Japan.”
Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1(3): 41–59.
Denham, Bryan E. 2008. “Folk Devils, News Icons, and the Construction of Moral Panics:
Heroin Chic and the Amplification of Drug Threats in Contemporary Society.” Journalism
Studies 9(6): 945–61.
Dorogi, Thomas L. 2001. Tainted Perceptions. Lanham, MD: University Press of American.
Edelman, Murray. 1964. Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Edy, Jill A. 1999. “Journalistic Uses of Collective Memory.” Journal of Communication 49(2):
71–85.
Edy, Jill A. 2001. “The Presence of the Past in Public Discourse.” In Politics, Discourse, and
American Society: New Agendas, ed. Roderick P. Hart and Bartholomew H. Sparrow. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Edy, Jill A. 2006. Troubled Pasts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
355
Lee et al.
Entman, Robert M. 2003. “Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House’s Frame after
9/11.” Political Communication 20(4): 415–32.
Gamson, William A., and Andre Modigliani. 1987. “The Changing Culture of Affirmative
Action.” Research in Political Sociology 3: 137–77.
Gamson, William A., and Andre Modigliani. 1989. “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on
Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 95(1): 1–37.
Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Deciding What’s News. New York: Pantheon.
Goode, Luke. 2009. “Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy.” New Media & Society
11: 1287–1305.
Graber, Doris A. 1976. Verbal Behavior and Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hackett, Robert A. and Yuezhi Zhao. 1994. “Challenging a Master Narrative: Peace Protest and
Opinion/editorial Discourse in the US Press during the Gulf War.” Discourse & Society
5(4): 509–41.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis. London: Hutchinson.
Hallin, Daniel C. 1986. The Uncensored War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hallin, Daniel C. 1994. We Keep America on the Top of the World. New York: Routledge.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon.
Kim, Sung Tae. 2000. “Making a Difference: U.S. Press Coverage of the Kwangju and Tiananmen
Pro-democracy Movements.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77(1):
22–36.
Kluver, Alan R. 2002. “The Logic of New Media in International Affairs.” New Media & Society
4(4): 499–517.
Kobland, Clifford E., Liping Du, and Joongrok Kwon. 1992. “Influence of Ideology in News
Reporting: Case Study of New York Times’ Coverage of Student Demonstrations in China
and South Korea.” Asian Journal of Communication 2: 64–77.
Lang, Kurt, and Gladys E. Lang. (1989). “Collective Memory and the News.” Communication
11: 123–39.
Lawrence, Regina G. 1996. “Accidents, Icons, and Indexing: The Dynamics of News Coverage
of Police Use of Force.” Political Communication 13(4): 437–54.
Le, Élisabeth. 2006. The Spiral of “Anti-other Rhetoric”: Discourses of Identity and the International Media Echo. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
Lee, Chin-Chuan. 2002. “Established Pluralism: US Elite Media Discourse about China Policy.”
Journalism Studies 3(3): 343–57.
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Joseph Man Chan, Zhongdang Pan, and Clement Y. K. So. 2002. Global
Media Spectacle: News War over Hong Kong. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Zhongdang Pan, Joseph Man Chan, and Clement Y. K. So. 2001. “Through
the Eyes of U.S. Media: Banging the Democracy Drum in Hong Kong.” Journal of Communication 52(2): 345–65.
Lee, Chin-Chuan, and Junghye Yang. 1995. “Foreign News and National Interest: Comparing
U.S. and Japanese Coverage of a Chinese Student Movement.” International Communication Gazette 56(1): 1–18.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016
356
International Journal of Press/Politics 16(3)
Lee, Francis L. F., and Angel M. Y. Lin. 2006. “Newspaper Editorial Discourse and the Politics
of Self-censorship in Hong Kong.” Discourse & Society 17(3): 331–58.
Livingston, Steven, and Todd Eachus. 1996. “Indexing News after the Cold War: Reporting U.S.
Ties to Latin American Paramilitary Organization.” Political Communication 13: 423–36.
Meraz, Sharon. 2009. “Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda
Setting Influence in Blog Networks.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 14:
682–707.
Olick, Jeffrey K. 2010. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and
Products.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning.
Berlin: De Gruyter.
Peng, Zengjun. 2004. “Representation of China: An across Time Analysis of Coverage in the
New York Times and Los Angeles Times.” Asian Journal of Communication 14(1): 53–67.
Said, Edward W. 1981. Covering Islam. New York: Pantheon.
Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.
Schudson, Michael. 1992. Watergate in American Memory. New York: Basic Books.
Schudson, Michael. 1997. “Lives, Laws, and Language: Commemorative versus NonCommemorative Forms of Effective Public Memory.” The Communication Review 2(1): 3-17.
Sigal, Leon V. 1973. Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking.
Lexington, MA: D.C. Health.
Stone, Gerald C., and Zhiwen Xiao. 2007. “Anointing a New Enemy: The Rise of Anti-China
Coverage after the USSR’s Demise.” International Communication Gazette 69(1): 91–108.
van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. “Opinions and Ideologies in the Press.” In Approaches to Media
Discourses, ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. 2003. “Current Chinese Protests and the Prism of Tiananmen.” Harvard
International Journal of Press/Politics 8(1): 81–86.
Womack, Brantly. 1990. “The Dilemma of Centricity and Internationalism.” In Voices of China,
ed. Chin-Chuan Lee. New York: Guilford.
Zaller, John, and Dennis Chiu. 1996. “Government’s Little Helper: US Press Coverage of
Foreign Policy Crises, 1945–1991.” Political Communication 13: 385–405.
Zelizer, Barbie, ed. 2009. The Changing Faces of Journalism. London: Routledge.
Zhao, Dingxin. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bios
Chin-Chuan Lee is Chair Professor of Communication at the City University of Hong Kong.
Hongtao Li (PhD, City University of Hong Kong) teaches journalism and communication at
Zhejiang University, China.
Francis L. F. Lee is Associate Professor of Journalism and Communication at Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016