纪思道2026年11月2日This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times. Read more here.本文是《纽约时报》为纪念创刊175周年来坚守现场报道而推出的系列报道之一。阅读更多内容。As I pedaled my bicycle toward the gunfire and Tiananmen Square, dodging people in crowds fleeing in the opposite direction, I kept thinking: What a crazy occupation this is.当我骑着自行车朝枪声传来的方向、向天安门广场赶去时，一路躲避着迎面逃散的人群，心里不停地想：这真是个疯狂的职业。For weeks during the spring of 1989, the question preoccupying the world had been whether the student-led Tiananmen demonstrations paralyzing China would end with a democratic revolution or with massacres. That night, June 3, the phone began ringing in the apartment in Beijing I shared with my wife and fellow New York Times correspondent, Sheryl WuDunn. We had our answer: Tens of thousands of army troops were forcing their way into central Beijing, mowing down crowds of unarmed protesters and bystanders who tried to resist.1989年春天的那几周，全世界都在关注一个问题：由学生领导、使中国陷入瘫痪的天安门示威究竟会以一场民主革命告终，还是以大屠杀收场？6月3日那天夜里，我和妻子、同为《纽约时报》记者的伍洁芳(Sheryl WuDunn)在北京的公寓里，电话开始响个不停。我们得到了答案：数万名军人正强行向北京市中心推进，向试图阻挡他们的手无寸铁的抗议者和旁观者开枪射击。So I jumped on my bicycle, legs pumping madly, careening around tank traps students had set up, so I could report on a modern army waging war on its people.于是我跳上自行车，双腿拼命蹬着，绕过学生们设置的坦克障碍，赶去报道一支现代化军队如何向本国人民开战。 1989年5月4日，天安门广场上的抗议者。It was probably the most important story I’ve covered and I got at least one big thing wrong — I’ll get to that — but I did manage to reach Tiananmen Square before the troops. I parked my bicycle near the famous portrait of Chairman Mao and began interviewing people in the throng of students and workers.这也许是我记者生涯中报道过的最重要的新闻，而我至少犯了一个重大错误——这一点我稍后会谈到。不过，我确实赶在军队抵达之前进入了天安门广场。我把自行车停在那幅著名的毛主席画像附近，开始采访聚集在广场上的学生和工人。Although it was already dark, the square was lit by overhead lights and by the glow of two armored personnel carriers that protesters had set ablaze. At first, the troops, arriving by the truckload, fired over our heads. Then they lowered their aim and fired right at us.虽然天已经黑了，广场仍被高处的灯光和两辆被抗议者点燃的装甲运兵车发出的火光照亮。起初，乘坐一辆辆卡车抵达的军人朝我们头顶上方开枪。随后，他们压低枪口，直接向我们射击。The gunfire was episodic, coming in cacophonous bursts every few minutes. People would fall, we would retreat, the guns would fall silent for a time and our retreat would halt.枪声时断时续，每隔几分钟便是一阵刺耳的密集枪声。有人倒下，我们后撤，枪声沉寂下来，我们也停下后撤的脚步。 I was rushing around, interviewing people in Chinese, always trying to keep a layer of protesters between me and the bullets. Until I realized that I was taller than almost everyone around me, so that a valuable few upper inches of me were still exposed. I began stooping as I spoke to people.我四处奔走，用中文采访，同时尽量借助人群掩护自己，躲避子弹。直到后来我才意识到，自己比周围几乎所有人都高，这意味着，我仍有要命的一小截身体暴露在枪口之下。于是，我开始弯着腰与人交谈。 “General strike!” the crowd shouted. “General strike!” Some people hurled rocks or Molotov cocktails toward the troops, but they couldn’t hit the soldiers — and then there would be another round of gunfire, and more would drop.“大罢工！大罢工！”人群高喊着。有人朝军队投掷石块或燃烧瓶，但打不到他们。紧接着又是一轮枪响，更多人应声倒下。Groups of protesters commandeered two buses in hopes of reaching the troops. About a dozen young people boarded each bus, holding iron bars or other weapons with which they intended to attack the soldiers. The crowd screamed encouragement, but their courage was misplaced. As the protesters drove the buses toward the troops, the soldiers opened fire. The buses came to a halt, one of them on fire, and in a moment, these young people transformed from heroes into corpses.有几群抗议者强占了两辆公共汽车，希望借此冲到军队跟前。每辆车上约有十几个年轻人，手里拿着铁棍或其他武器，打算攻击士兵。人群高声为他们鼓劲，但这份勇气用错了地方。当抗议者驾着公交车驶向军队时，士兵开火了。两辆车停了下来，其中一辆起了火，转眼之间，这些年轻人就从英雄变成了尸体。I found myself in the midst of a massacre. With each round of gunfire, we were pushed backward on the blood-soaked Avenue of Eternal Peace. My bicycle was now close to the troops and not recoverable, so I ran to a nearby hospital to count corpses, and then back home. I had forgotten that it was a Saturday evening, which for the paper meant early deadlines.我发现自己身处一场屠杀之中。每一轮枪声响起，都迫使我们沿着血迹斑斑的长安街向后退。我的自行车此时已离军队太近，无法取回，于是我跑到附近一家医院清点尸体，随后又赶回家中。我忘了那天是星期六晚上，而对报社来说，这意味着截稿时间要提前。When I didn’t return on time, Sheryl, who had filed her own story about the slaughter, was increasingly fearful that I had been shot. “There’s no point in worrying,” the foreign editor, Joseph Lelyveld, kept telling her on the phone; the anxiety in his voice made her worry even more. He tried to distract her by asking her to reach out to all the hospitals to document the death toll — a request that didn’t help Sheryl’s mood.我迟迟没有回来，已经发出自己那篇屠杀报道的伍洁芳越来越担心我中了枪。“担心也没用，”国际新闻编辑约瑟夫·莱利维尔德在电话里不断对她说，可他声音里的焦虑反而让她更加担忧。他想分散她的注意力，请她联系所有医院，统计死亡人数，这个要求丝毫没有缓解她的不安。 The New York TimesFinally, I burst in, hugged Sheryl, called New York to reassure editors there that I was fine and then filed my story by telex — a few paragraphs at a time, as I wrote them. I had never been so sad to have my byline and Sheryl’s under a banner headline across the front page.后来我终于冲进家门，拥抱伍洁芳，给纽约打电话，向编辑们报平安，然后用电传发出了我的稿子，写一段，发一段。看到我和伍洁芳的名字并列署在头版通栏大标题下，我从未像那一刻那样悲伤。Guilt nagged at me that night, and this brings me to my first great mistake in covering the crisis. During the demonstrations in the weeks before the bloodshed, I had periodically written condescendingly that the workers and peasants in the protest movement talked about democracy but couldn’t define it. I had suggested that they were driven by anger at inflation and corruption but didn’t necessarily believe in democracy for Tibetans or fully embrace the kind of free and pluralistic society they spoke of so glowingly.那天夜里，愧疚一直折磨着我。这就涉及我报道这场危机时犯下的第一个重大错误。在流血事件发生前的几个星期里，在报道示威活动时，我不时以居高临下的口吻写道，参加抗议的工人和农民虽然谈论民主，却说不清民主究竟是什么。我曾暗示，他们参加抗议是出于对通货膨胀和腐败的不满，却未必相信藏人也应享有民主权利，也未必完全认同他们热情赞颂的那种自由、多元的社会。1989年6月4日，人们骑着三轮车运送天安门广场枪击事件中的受伤者。There was something to this idea, but that night in June I had seen extraordinary courage from the workers and peasants. I was terrified that evening — my notebook was so damp with sweat from fear that I had trouble writing in it — and the bravest people of all were the poorly educated laborers from the countryside who drove bicycle rickshaws. Whenever there was a pause in the shooting, they would pedal their carts into the fray to pick up the bodies of students who had been killed or injured, then turn around and race to the hospitals. They might not have been able to define democracy but they were ready to die for it.这种看法并非毫无道理。但6月的那个夜晚，我亲眼目睹了工人和农民非凡的勇气。那天晚上我害怕极了，笔记本被我因恐惧而流出的汗水浸得湿透，几乎在上面写不了字。而所有人中最勇敢的是那些来自农村、受教育程度不高、靠蹬三轮车谋生的劳动者。每当枪声稍歇，他们便蹬着三轮车冲进交火地带，把中弹身亡或受伤的学生抬上车，再掉头飞奔医院。他们或许说不清民主的定义，却愿意为民主献出生命。Another hard lesson I learned covering Tiananmen: Victims lie or, more charitably, misremember. It’s human nature to doubt oppressors and believe victims, but in the aftermath of the massacre there were many “eyewitness” accounts claiming that thousands or tens of thousands of students had been slaughtered in Tiananmen Square; that huge numbers of them had been shot from machine gun emplacements there; or that many were killed when tanks rolled over tents with students inside. None of this was true.报道天安门事件时，我还学到了另一个沉痛的教训：受害者也会说谎。或者更宽容地说，他们也会记错事实。怀疑压迫者、相信受害者，这是人之常情，但在屠杀发生后，有许多“目击者”声称，有数千甚至数万名学生在天安门广场遭到屠杀，其中大量学生被广场上架设的机枪射杀，还有许多学生在坦克碾过他们栖身的帐篷时丧生。这些说法都不属实。Since then, I’ve seen many times in my career that perpetrators of atrocities lie to cover up their abuses, and that victims respond with exaggerations of their own. This has taught me that we must be as vigilant in verifying accounts of victims as we are in grilling oppressors. While many estimates of the Tiananmen death toll are in the thousands, I’m reasonably sure these are wrong. Sheryl and I made great efforts to cultivate sources at hospitals and morgues to determine the toll, and our best guess is that between 400 and 800 people were killed and several thousand injured.此后，在我的记者生涯中，我多次看到暴行的实施者为了掩盖罪行而撒谎，受害者则以自己的夸大之词作出回应。这让我明白，我们核实受害者证词时，必须像质询压迫者一样保持警惕。虽然有许多估计认为天安门事件造成数千人死亡，但我相当确信，这些数字是错误的。我和伍洁芳曾竭尽全力在医院和停尸房发展信源，以确定死亡人数。我们最合理的估计是，死亡人数在400至800人之间，另有数千人受伤。Accessing hospitals was difficult. Soldiers turned us away at entrances and doctors were threatened if they spoke to journalists. Chinese citizens and even some officials cooperated nonetheless, because they wanted the truth to come out. Disenchanted employees at one hospital sneaked us inside through a tunnel system from a neighboring building. We found that even the hallways were filled with shooting victims.进入医院并不容易。士兵在入口处阻拦我们，医生如果与记者交谈也会受到威胁。尽管如此，仍有中国公民愿意配合，甚至一些官员也是如此，因为他们希望真相能够公之于众。一家医院里，有几名心灰意冷的员工悄悄带我们从邻近建筑的地下通道进入医院。我们发现，就连走廊里也躺满了枪伤患者。1989年4月下旬，纪思道在一场学生抗议游行中。One young wife was weeping beside the unconscious figure of her husband, an inventor with seven patents in his name. Despite her warnings, he had gone out when the shooting started, in order to support the students, and she loved and admired him for his courage. But, she added between sobs, she hated that he might leave her alone with their 4-year-old daughter.一位年轻妻子在昏迷不醒的丈夫身旁哭泣。她的丈夫是一名发明家，名下拥有七项专利。枪击开始后，尽管妻子曾劝阻，他还是出门声援学生。她爱他，也钦佩他的勇气。但她抽泣着补充说，她恨他可能就这样丢下自己和他们四岁的女儿。Journalists like to project toughness, but I was shattered, physically and morally exhausted. We went days with barely a wink of sleep, and once, when we did nap, the army fired on our apartment compound with automatic weapons. Moving around Beijing to interview people, Sheryl and I were afraid of being shot, but worse was to see the hopeful, vibrant China we had been covering morph into a crushing dictatorship. I remember collapsing on my bed one day and finding tears trickling down my cheeks.记者总喜欢表现得坚强，但我当时已经彻底崩溃，身心俱疲。我们连续几天几乎没有合眼。有一次，我们好不容易小睡片刻，军队却用自动武器向我们居住的公寓区开火。我和伍洁芳在北京四处采访时，一直担心自己会中枪。但更令人痛苦的是，看着我们一直报道的那个充满希望、生机勃勃的中国正在变成一个令人窒息的独裁国家。我记得有一天，我瘫倒在床上，眼泪顺着脸颊流下来。The Chinese government rewrote history, calling the protesters “hoodlums” who had engaged in “rioting.” The state media singled me out, denouncing me for spreading lies and “writing not news reports but fiction.” The next day I ordered lunch at an empty Sichuan restaurant, where the staff gathered in a corner, pointing to me and whispering. I feared they had recognized me and I wondered if they might poison my food. Then several waitresses approached my table. “Are you the one they mentioned on television last night?” one asked. “The reporter who lies?”中国政府改写了历史，将抗议者称为参与“暴乱”的“暴徒”。官方媒体专门点名谴责我，说我散布谎言，“写的不是新闻报道，而是小说”。第二天，我在一家空荡荡的川菜馆点了午饭，服务员们聚在角落里，指着我窃窃私语。我担心他们认出了我，不禁怀疑他们会不会在饭菜里下毒。随后，几名女服务员走到我的餐桌前。“你就是昨天晚上电视里说的那个人吗？”其中一人问，“那个撒谎的记者？”1989年6月6日，天安门广场大屠杀发生两天后，北京街头的军用坦克。“Yes,” I said, and I started to explain, but she cut me off. “Never mind,” she said, beaming. “There’s no need to pay your bill. We’ll take care of it. We’re all ‘hoodlums’ here.”“是的，”我回答，正要解释，她却打断了我。“没关系，”她笑容满面地说，“不用付账了，我们请客。我们这里都是‘暴徒’。”As the government began mass arrests, one of our sources was a Chinese student whom we had inadvertently gotten into trouble. “Shawn,” as he called himself in English, was a student at Tsinghua University who had helped us cover the protests. Now he was being interrogated about his connection to us, yet he still dared to meet secretly with Sheryl — who is Chinese American and could melt into crowds in a way I could not — to update her on the crackdown at the universities. His courage was breathtaking, and we were frightened for him when he suddenly disappeared.政府开始大规模逮捕，而我们的一名消息来源——一位中国学生——因我们的无心之失而陷入了麻烦。他给自己取了个英文名字叫“Shawn”（肖恩），是清华大学的学生，曾帮助我们报道抗议活动。如今，他正因为与我们的关系而受到审问。尽管如此，他仍敢冒险与伍洁芳秘密见面，向她通报当局在大学校园里的镇压行动——伍洁芳是华裔美国人，能够像普通中国人一样融入人群，而我做不到。肖恩的勇气令人惊叹。当他突然失踪时，我们非常担心他的安危。This incident brings me to another moment that I still turn over in my mind. More than a year after his disappearance, Shawn reappeared in Beijing, met with me in secret and explained what had happened: He had been imprisoned but had escaped and was on the run. Now he asked for my help in fleeing China.这件事让我想起另一个至今仍在脑海中反复思量的时刻。失踪一年多后，肖恩重新出现在北京，秘密与我见面，讲述了他的遭遇：他曾被监禁，但后来越狱逃了出来，如今正在逃亡。他请求我帮助他逃离中国。One basic rule of being a foreign correspondent is that you obey local laws. You certainly don’t help an escaped felon leave the country. Yet here was a young man who had endured prison because he had helped us cover this story. If we didn’t assist him, he would almost certainly be caught.作为外派记者，有一条基本准则就是遵守所在国法律。无论如何，你都不应该帮助一名越狱的重罪犯逃离该国。然而，站在我面前的这个年轻人，正是因为帮助我们报道这件事才遭受牢狱之灾。如果我们不帮他，他几乎肯定会再次被捕。What to do? I wanted to consult editors in New York, but that was impossible because my phones were tapped. In any case, no editor could recommend helping an escaped prisoner.该怎么办？我想征询纽约编辑的意见，但这不可能，因为我的电话受到监听。无论如何，也不会有哪个编辑建议帮助一名越狱囚犯。Another concern: I harbored a nagging doubt about Shawn’s story. He said he had escaped while working in the fields of a prison farm, but we had never heard of anyone escaping from a Chinese prison. I wondered, Could this be a setup? The Chinese prime minister at the time, Li Peng, disliked my coverage, and his office was looking for an excuse to expel me. Was Chinese state security hoping to entrap me so that the authorities could arrest and imprison me and close The Times’s bureau?我还有另一个顾虑：我始终对肖恩的说法存有一丝疑虑。他说自己是在监狱农场干农活时逃出来的，但我们从未听说过有人能从中国的监狱越狱。我不禁怀疑：这会不会是个圈套？当时的中国总理李鹏不喜欢我的报道，他的办公室正在寻找借口将我驱逐出境。中国国家安全机关是不是想诱我上钩，好让当局逮捕并监禁我，同时关闭《纽约时报》北京分社？I wavered, but Sheryl had a firmer compass. She doubted that Shawn would agree to entrap me, and she insisted that, given the risks he had taken, we owed him our assistance. So we did help him, including providing money to finance his escape.我犹豫不决，但伍洁芳的判断更加坚定。她不相信肖恩会同意设局陷害我，而且她坚持认为，鉴于他曾冒过那么大的风险，我们有义务帮助他。于是，我们确实出手相助，包括出钱资助他逃亡。Shawn was able to slip into Hong Kong on Christmas Day, 1990, when he figured there would be fewer British police officers along the border. He called me that night, and the next day I flew to Hong Kong, where, with the help of Human Rights Watch, I negotiated to get him a visa to the United States. Shawn is now a U.S. citizen.1990年圣诞节那天，肖恩成功潜入香港。他认为那天边境一带的英国警察可能会少一些。当天晚上，他给我打了电话。第二天，我飞往香港，在人权观察组织的协助下，通过交涉为他争取到了美国签证。如今，肖恩已成为美国公民。Once I was out of China and could speak freely on the phone, I confessed to the paper’s top editors what I had done. To my surprise, they were congratulatory rather than scolding. A retired executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal, confided that three decades earlier he had helped sneak someone from Communist Poland to the West. And a Times correspondent, Sydney Schanberg, had tried desperately (though unsuccessfully) to doctor a fake passport for a Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran, to save him from the Khmer Rouge slaughter. Dith Pran eventually made it out on his own and worked as a much-loved colleague in The Times’s newsroom, a constant reminder that we have complex human obligations as well as professional ones.等我离开中国、能在电话里自由交谈时，我就向报社高层编辑坦白了自己的所作所为。出乎意料的是，他们非但没有责备我，反而向我表示祝贺。已经退休的执行总编辑A·M·罗森塔尔私下告诉我，30年前，他曾帮助一名身在共产主义波兰的人秘密逃往西方。《纽约时报》记者悉尼·尚伯格也曾竭尽全力，试图为柬埔寨同事迪斯·普兰伪造护照，帮助他逃过红色高棉的屠杀，虽然最终没有成功。迪斯·普兰后来凭自己的努力逃了出来，在《纽约时报》的新闻编辑部成为了一位深受爱戴的同事。这时刻提醒着我们：除了职业责任，我们还肩负着复杂的人道义务。There’s nothing I’ve done in my career that was as unprofessional as helping Shawn. But there are also few things I’m prouder of.在我的整个职业生涯中，没有哪件事比帮助肖恩更不符合职业规范。但也很少有哪件事能让我如此自豪。纪思道(Nicholas Kristof) 2001起成为时报专栏作家，曾两次获得普利策奖。他最新出版的回忆录名为《追逐希望：一名记者的报道生涯》(“Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life”)。欢迎在X上关注他：@NickKristof。翻译：纽约时报中文网点击查看本文英文版。