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BEIJING — China’s government on Tuesday rejected newly published documents vividly describing how Chinese leaders split over the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, suggesting that the papers are fake. 

“Any attempt to play up the matter again and disrupt China by the despicable means of fabricating materials and distorting facts will be futile,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said in a statement issued early Tuesday morning via the official Xinhua News Agency. 

The crackdown was “highly necessary to the stability and development of China,” Zhu said. He said the ruling Communist Party’s “correct conclusion” about the 1989 protests would not change. 

It was the first official reaction to the papers, which were purportedly smuggled out of China by a disaffected civil servant and were published over the weekend.  

Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University who co-edited “The Tiananmen Papers” with Perry Link, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Princeton University, said he believed revealing Zhang’s identity would place him at risk. 

Nathan and Link, both well-known China experts, told The Associated Press the documents are consistent with the smattering of information already available outside China and with the testimonies of other former officials who have since fled. 

The two professors also spent hours interviewing the former civil servant. They say he painstakingly transcribed original records from files in Beijing and elsewhere onto computer disks, which he brought with him out of China. 

Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley and author of several books on China, worked with Nathan and Link. 

He said he was also skeptical about the authenticity of the documents at first. He said, the author’s extensive knowledge of inner workings of Chinese government and the clarity of his motive in releasing documents helped convince him that the work was legitimate. 

Beijing has long argued that the protests were an anti-government rebellion that needed to be crushed to safeguard economic growth and Communist Party rule. It has ignored calls for an investigation into the bloody June 4, 1989 crackdown, in which hundreds were killed, and sought to silence victims’ relatives who have demanded redress. The papers are said to be based on never-before-published minutes of secret high-level meetings, Chinese intelligence reports and records of Deng’s private phone calls. 

They reveal deep-seated paranoia that the protests were controlled by unknown anti-communist conspirators. They also expose anxiety by the party’s top leaders that the more than 1 million demonstrators gathered at Tiananmen Square could demand their arrest. 

If genuine, scholars who translated and published the papers said, the documents offer a rare glimpse into the motivations and fears behind the communist leadership’s decision to order troops into Tiananmen Square.