Kristof’s Monument to Passivism On Tiananmen Sq Aniversary

by Matt Browner-Hamlin, Current SFT Board Member and Former SFT Staff

Read the full post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-browner-hamlin/kristofs-monument-to-pass_b_211291.html

For as long as I’ve been blogging about Tibet and China, I’ve had problems with Nick Kristof. Any reader of my writing knows that I think New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is one of the most intellectually dishonest and profoundly unserious members of the American press who write with any regularity on China. That’s why I found it quite surprising last night to read Kristof’s column on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times then — something I did not know — and was covering the protests. His retelling of the protests and the zeitgeist in Beijing in 1989 is powerful and it seems Kristof is walking down what for him is a rarely walked path: criticizing the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party. Of course I was wrong to get excited about the first half of his colum, as what followed in the second half was Grade A wankery.