Are the Tiananmen Papers fake?
Ezra F. Vogel, in his monumental Deng Xiao Ping and the Transformation of China [2011], has the best discussion.
He states 3 reasons why some of the documents are likely to be faked.
Firstly, the documents reporting meetings of eight senior leaders and those summarising phone calls are not authentic. Deng Rong, daughter of Deng, says that her dad discussed personnel issues in one-on-one meetings to get the views of each person rather than in larger groups.
Secondly, the Chinese edition (p. 988) used the term “Hanguo” for South Korea, but in fact, mainland publications did not use that term until 1992, when China normalised relations with South Korea. Before that, it used the term Nan Chaoxian. Because Taiwan and Hong Kong used the term Hanguo, this suggests the documents that use that term are fake.
Thirdly, the meetings of the eight leaders are not mentioned by Li Peng or Zhao Ziyang in their confidential accounts.
Strangely, Vogel used the rest of the Tiananmen Papers as genuine on the basis it is a “convenient collection.”. [p. 831–832].
For the same reasons above, Julian Gewirtz, in his excellent Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s [2022), used the Tiananmen Papers sparingly. [p. 374, endnote 52]. Again, I question on what basis the papers used sparingly are genuine.
In Deng Xiao Ping, The Man Who Made Modern China [2015], Michael Dillon cautioned that The Tiananmen Papers cannot be conclusively substantiated. He said, ‘What is offered as bona fide transcripts of meetings that show Deng as more confrontational in his approach to the demonstrators must be treated with considerable caution’ [p. 276].