Deng is said to have backed Tiananmen violence

Beijing: The former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the military to try to limit injuries when it moved against Tiananmen Square protesters 21 years ago, but told them to be ready to "shed some blood" if necessary, according to an unpublished diary said to document internal decisions that led to the violent crackdown.

The death toll from the military action against the protesters, whose anniversary is on Friday, remains in dispute. Official estimates at the time said 200 demonstrators died; some rights activists place the toll at 1,000 or more and say anywhere from 70 to 300 Tiananmen protesters remain in prison.

The diary, covering some nine weeks before and after the military action, is said to be written by Li Peng, China's premier at the time and an ally of conservatives in the Chinese leadership led by Mr. Deng. A Hong Kong publisher, New Century Press, plans to release the 279-page manuscript as a Chinese-language book on June 22.

The same publisher caused a sensation in May 2009 by issuing the secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Communist Party leader who opposed using force against the Tiananmen protesters and was ousted by the conservatives after the military moved in.

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Mr. Zhao, who spent the rest of his life under house arrest, had to secretly record his memoir on tape cassettes that later were smuggled out of China. Mr. Li, by contrast, was said to have been ready to publish his work in 2004, on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, but was discouraged by Chinese leaders.

Bao Pu, the Hong Kong publisher of both works, said in a telephone interview on Friday that he had received the latest diary from an unidentified source, and so could not unconditionally guarantee its authenticity. The memoir and 34 accompanying photographs appeared to have been photocopied from a printer's galley, he said. Mr. Bao said he was unable to contact Mr. Li, now 81 and reportedly in ill health, to verify the contents.

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But he said a detailed study of the work convinced him and other experts that Mr. Li is the author. A Hong Kong magazine, Asia Weekly, reported the existence of a Li Peng memoir with identical details in 2004, one year after Mr Li retired from the government.

"I still think it's real and it's really presentable," he said. "What's really striking is that it provides amazing detail that we don't know."

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A complete copy of the manuscript was not immediately available. But Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, which reported on Friday that it had obtained a copy of the manuscript, said Mr. Li wrote in a foreword dated December 6, 2003, that he felt bound to record what happened "to serve as the most important historical testimony" about Tiananmen.

The newspaper said he wrote that the protesters threatened to send China into a new era of political upheaval akin to the chaos into which Mao periodically plunged the nation during his rule.

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"From the beginning of the turmoil, I have prepared for the worst. I would rather sacrifice my own life and that of my family to prevent China from going through a tragedy like the Cultural Revolution," the newspaper wrote, quoting a May 2, 1989 diary entry.

That view -- that the protesters sought to upend Communist rule -- was in stark contrast to Mr. Zhao, who argued that the students wanted reform, not revolution. In the memoirs, the newspaper wrote, Mr. Li states that he began to take issue with Mr. Zhao days after the protests began in April 1989.

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But according to a prologue by Wu Guoguang, a University of Victoria, British Columbia scholar, the memoir makes clear that Mr. Deng, not Mr. Li, led the drive to crush the demonstrations and oust Mr. Zhao from power.

"This book has clearly revealed that Deng was the proposer and decision maker of enacting martial law in parts of Beijing in 1989," Mr. Wu wrote, "And he gave the final approval to "ground clearing" operation in Tiananmen Square on June 3."

In an interview on Friday, Bao Tong, a senior aide to Mr. Zhao who was imprisoned after the Tiananmen protests, said that he welcomed publication of the new memoir, although Mr. Li's view of the crisis is at sharp odds with his own. "There's an old saying in China: if you hear widely from all the sources, your doubts of the situation will very soon clear up," he said.

Ordinary Chinese will not have that opportunity, because Mr. Zhao's memoir is not legally available on the mainland, and Mr. Li's also seems certain to be banned. Since the 1989 crackdown, references to the Tiananmen protests have been so vigorously suppressed that many young people have little knowledge of what happened.

Mr. Bao, who is the father of Bao Pu, called that suppression "a great shame."

"But the world has entered into an era of information," he said, "and with the spread of the Internet, there can be no monopoly on the truth." In time, he said, most Chinese will be able to consider both sides of the Tiananmen story.