The Tiananmen Papers are fake documents. So asserts Alfred L Chan, [author of Xi Jin Ping, HC 2022 ed]
[see p 277 Deng Xiao Ping by Michael Dillon, [HC 2015 ed] attached here]
I find it strange that the authors of major works can’t make up their minds on this issue. They blow hot and cold on the authenticity of documents that would never pass the test in a court of law.
Vogel said the papers are not reliably true and gave three cogent reasons. And yet, he cites most of them extensively in his biography of Deng.
Michael Dillon says the Tiananmen Papers cannot, as yet, be conclusively substantiated, and yet he said Vogel used the Tiananmen Papers extensively without informing his readers that Vogel has reservations. [p 276].
He doesn’t seem to be aware of Vogel’s reservations, which are put in Vogel’s book and highlighted by Julian Gewirtz in Never Turn Back China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s [p 374, 2022 ed].
Klaus Muhlhahn in Making China Modern, 2019 ed HC cites The Tiananmen Papers [p 683, footnote 40]. He appears unaware of their reliability issue.
Similarly, Pantsov in Deng Xiao Ping A Revolutionary Life [2015 ed HC] also cites The Tiananmen Papers without knowing they are not reliable.
So what we have is a serious issue of academic reliability. History on this topic is presented based on fake documents.