A couple of days ago I crossed the campus to attend a screening of a documentary recently produced by the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute. It’s part of Assignment: China, a 10-film series on the work of American journalists. The sequence opens with the late civil war years at the end of the 1940s, looks at China watchers in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, deals with President Richard Nixon’s historic trip and the end of the Mao years in the 1970s, profiles the first generation of bureau staffers following the normalization of US-China relations in 1979, and moves on through the 1980s to the June 4 “incident”. The driving force behind it is Mike Chinoy, CNN’s Beijing bureau chief in 1989.

Sometime back I watched The Week that Changed the World on Nixon’s extraordinary 1972 visit. This time the story had moved on a little more than 15 years to Tiananmen Square and the events of 1989. In both films, American reporters assigned to China were interviewed about the issues they faced in their work, and the judgments they made. As USCI’s website notes, this is critical historical analysis: “From the barriers of language, culture and politics, to the logistical challenges of war, revolution, isolation, internal upheaval, government restrictions and changing technology, covering China has been one of the most difficult of journalistic assignments. It’s also one of the most important. For over sixty years, what American correspondents have reported about China has profoundly influenced U.S. views of the country, and the policies of successive American governments.”

The Tiananmen film is outstanding. Told mainly through the eyes of the dozen or so US reporters based in Beijing in 1989, and also picking up on the impact made by some 60 additional American journalists flown in for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s landmark visit in mid-May, it presents a very clear picture of US coverage of the Beijing student movement. With the wisdom of hindsight, many reporters acknowledge that the story beamed across the world as events unfolded had too much of a “made in America” democracy bias, generating false expectations of a happy ending. Clearly this shaped both US and global reactions to the brutal clampdown imposed on the night of June 3-4. Undoubtedly, the documentary thereby makes a significant contribution to the historical record.

Coming away from the screening, I couldn’t help but return to the points I made last week about capturing key aspects of Myanmar’s modern history. The 8-8-88 uprising is of course a close parallel to China’s 1989 student movement. More distant parallels also exist. Certainly none of Burma’s history was covered anything like as fully as China’s by western journalists. Nevertheless, some reporters were present at key moments, and the stories they told were critical in shaping global responses to circumstances on the ground. I know it’s been very difficult to finance Assignment: China. It would be even harder to fund Assignment: Burma. But it would be good to think it could happen.