Symbolic use of decisive events: Tiananmen as a news icon in the editorials of the elite U.S. press

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. © The Author(s) 2011.