In June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989, historian Jeremy Brown asks and answers the question, what does it mean to examine the narrative of contemporary China's most taboo topic? As he notes in one of the final chapters, there is a fundamental problem with calling for pingfan, or redress and rehabilitation: pingfan calls on the Chinese Communist Party to be the arbiter of Chinese history (p. 248). In contrast, Brown's work positions the historian as one of the “revealers,” despite official censorship and state-sponsored amnesia. June Fourth thus not only gives voice to a wide range of documents and sources, it also integrates the words of those whom Brown terms “revealers,” including Tiananmen's exiles, grassroots historians, diplomat eyewitnesses, and journalists then and now. Indeed, Brown's research is informed by teaching June Fourth to his Canadian students; he remarks that some—in the process of writing original Wikipedia articles—became revealers themselves.

June Fourth is divided into five parts, which are further divided into short and engaging chapters, and each section ends with a consideration of “alternative paths.” Part one establishes the context for China in the 1980s, explaining how economic reforms and greater openness created an atmosphere of optimism, while persistent issues—from cadre corruption (pp. 27–28) to rigid leadership (pp. 28–31)—worked against rising expectations. Part two covers the Tiananmen protests, weaving the narratives of students, workers, and citizens on the ground with the maneuverings of central leaders. Part three studies the Beijing massacre, detailing the considerations of military actors and extending the traditional June Fourth account beyond Tiananmen Square to other Beijing “killing zones” (pp. 112–16) and to the days following (pp. 131–34). In part four, Brown tells the story of June Fourth outside Beijing, making the event both a nationwide narrative and one that reveals the divisions between urban and rural (pp. 195–203) and between Han and non-Han (pp. 155–67). Finally, part five examines the aftermath of June Fourth, from the differential treatment meted out to students and workers to work unit purges and party re-registration.

Grounded in meticulous research and deep understanding of grassroots society, Brown's book makes three major interventions in the study of June Fourth. First, the book is an argument for applying a wide-angle lens to 1989. In part, this lens is geographic, as in chapter 12, which shifts the focus from Beijing's Fuxing Road and Fuxingmen Avenue to the violence that ensued when soldiers moved into Beijing from the south toward Qianmen (p. 115). The geographic lens expands further in Brown's treatment of protests in ethnic minority regions, such as Tibet (pp. 156–60) and Xinjiang (pp. 166–67), as well as his examination of both rural support for, and misunderstanding of, protesting students (and vice versa). The national scope of June Fourth is presented from the beginning, in the paired trajectories of Peking University activist Chai Ling and Hunan mechanic Lu Decheng. Brown's wide lens on 1989 is also temporal, informed by the experience of the Mao years and after, and—through his chapters on “alternative paths”—linked to China's trajectory since.

The second major contribution of June Fourth is its focus on “alternative paths,” an argument built into the structure of the book. While some may take issue with the repetition of counterfactuals, Brown demonstrates how a historian can present “alternative paths” that are persuasively considered and supported by evidence. Some of these alternatives are broad and cultural: for example, what if political reforms (such as population policy) enabled cultural shifts (such as attitudes toward premarital sex) that created more freedoms for young people (pp. 34–36)? Other alternatives are specific: for instance, what if Li Peng and Zhao Ziyang had received the Beijing students’ petition on April 22 (p. 90), or what if General Xu Qinxian, who refused to impose martial law, had stayed on the job and either organized others or stalled on June 3 (pp. 149–51)? Throughout the book, Brown's detailed narrative and use of sources allows him to highlight both the contingency of the events of 1989 and the agency of individual actors, players both large and small. In Brown's own words, “Agency means that individuals and groups were not passive pawns—they had the power to change history” (p. xiv). Indeed, Brown's commitment to asking what could have been different—a question that haunts many participants—is a way of bringing into focus each event as it happened.

Linked to the book's wide historical lens is a third contribution, which roots the analysis of 1989 in Brown's extensive research on the Mao era. In this way, Brown is able to conduct close readings of handwritten Party dossiers with a masterful eye, as in chapter 27's examination of one engineering work unit's post-Tiananmen personal summaries (pp. 223–27). The historical context of the Mao years allows for incisive comments on how the reform era departed from the socialist past, but also on how Tiananmen revealed the legacies of “old-man politics,” and how its aftermath drew from aspects of a “campaign” (yundong) despite being referred to as “work” (gongzuo) (p. 218). Finally, framing 1989 in the larger context of PRC history explains its legacies, including why there has been no pingfan: there was no scapegoat like the Cultural Revolution's Gang of Four, reevaluation would implicate Deng Xiaoping and his legacy, and the post-Deng leadership owed its position to its performance in 1989 (pp. 246–48).

Clearly written and forcefully argued, June Fourth will be of interest to students and specialists alike. To be sure, the source base for its chapters is not even; some are based primarily on secondary accounts by activists and journalists, others on internet accounts and oral interviews, still more on newspapers, official documents, and ephemera, such as the work unit materials. Yet, this is the challenge of writing about 1989, one that Brown documents in exemplary fashion. Some readers may find Brown's writing blunt: in writing the history of ordinary people, he attends to “the hierarchies of Chinese society in 1989 [that] were patriarchal, sexist, antirural, and Han supremacist” (p. xv). The truths in the pages of June Fourth are often uncomfortable, including urban students’ failure to recognize the protests of Muslims or the petitions of peasants. But such is the prerogative of the revealer, and the work of “viewing the Tiananmen protests and Beijing massacre as history” (p. xi).