Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

As the Olympic Games started in Beijing, the question of human rights in China has been already well discussed. What was interesting to me was a Guardian op-ed by Brendan O'Neill on the journalistic and activist distortions and myth created regarding the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.

"Many have accused the Chinese of trying to control international perceptions of Tiananmen Square – Beijing's "blackened heart", as one reporter describes it – and no doubt that is true. Disgracefully, the Communist party of China's official position on the 1989 massacre is that it wasn't a noteworthy event. Officials still refer to it as "the incident", a shocking label for the Chinese military's massacre of anywhere between 300 and 1,000 people on the hot, heady nights of June 3 and 4 1989.

However, western reporters and human rights activists cannot pose as the defenders of the truth of Tiananmen Square. If the events of June 1989 are denied by the Chinese government, then they have been distorted – continually and wildly – by the western human rights lobby.

Where Chinese officials have reduced the brave uprising in Beijing to a mere "incident", western observers have mythologised it as a peaceful student protest in a central square that was cut down by gun-wielding soldiers. They have subtly, and unforgivably, written out of history the most numerous protesters of June 1989 and those who suffered the most: the workers in the suburbs of Beijing, miles from Tiananmen Square.

The lasting impression given by western coverage of Tiananmen is that students and academics set up protest camps inside the square that were ruthlessly liquidated by the Chinese military. The most famous, enduring image of the massacre – the grainy footage of a student standing in front of a row of tanks – strengthens the idea that this was a simple tale of students v the CPC. Even the title given to the "incident" by observers in the west – the Tiananmen Square massacre – implies that the killings took place inside the square alone.

This is such a partial and selective history of June 1989 that it can be described as a "denial" almost on a par with the Communist party of China's labelling of the massacre as an "incident". It is of course true that in May and June 1989 students and some professors held all-day and all-night protests in Tiananmen Square. But there were uprisings across Beijing, and in many other parts of China, as workers and ordinary citizens protested against the chaos and corruption unleashed by Deng Xiaoping's market reforms."

It is a common tendency in the Western media and culture to promote individual heros and heroines while minimizing the social context and the social movements of which they were a part (Rosa Parks is a case in point as much as the "Tank man").

Similarly, the media and activists here chose to promote to the heroic status a certain category of people: students, by extension, young people.

However, every time certain classes of peoples or certain types of actions are selected as relevant or captivating, a negative selection is also made that other categories of people and actions will be made invisible. In this case, the bottom of the social ladder was relatively ignored and one might have thought that the uprising was the doings of students alone. Workers were ignored as well as the most violent actions of the Chinese government.

"The tanks were sent out largely to crush this workers' rebellion, which posed a far graver threat to the CPC than did the democracy-seeking students. In their book Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy Movement, human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro argue that "what took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents – precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended". Black and Munro argue that the Chinese military set out to crush workers, who had "much more to be angry about than the students".

Certainly the most vicious state violence occurred in the western suburbs of Beijing, not in Tiananmen Square. There, as the China expert Jonathan Fenby says, there was a "far bigger massacre of non-students". Hundreds of workers were slaughtered in the streets. That is why some, including Fenby and some Chinese dissidents, refer to it as "the Beijing massacre" rather than the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, accuses western journalists of spreading an inaccurate, irresponsible myth about a massacre taking place inside Tiananmen Square: "Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances."

And nor were the events of June 4 "peaceful". Understandably, even admirably, some of the unarmed workers attacked their oppressors. In one suburb, two soldiers were hanged from a burnt-out bus. A photograph of this people's execution was published in Granta, but it has never appeared elsewhere in the British press – perhaps because it challenges the myth of a peaceful student protest inside Tiananmen Square."

And so, the stories of heroism are now defined by the "creative class" (students) and workers are robbed of the agency they showed during the events. The conflict is recentered on political issues (the demand for freedom, from a relatively privileged group, students again) away from economic issues (the demand for better economic conditions by the working class). The narrative that remains, then, is that China's big problem is the question of human rights (it is) but what the narrative evacuates is the economic side of China's reforms and their costs to the working class.

It is the way news stories should always be read: which category of actors is defined as having agency? What type of collective behavior or social action is depicted as compelling? What are the elements that the dominant narrative pushes to the background, to be left unaddressed, unquestioned and unexplained? Cui bono?

The invisibility of certain social classes as possessors of agency and full actors in major events is another form of symbolic violence that completes the actual mass violence of which they were victims and that negates the structural violence created by the economic reforms and their impact. In the process of creating a symbol as a narrative shortcut (the tank man), the social dimensions of conflicts have been evacuated in favor of a more privileged and individualized narrative.