Australia has a long history of calling out China for human rights abuses.

This week, during a visit to Queenstown, the prime minister Scott Morrison and his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern issued a joint statement expressing concerns about abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, prompting a swift and angry response from Beijing.

But there've been other times when Australia hasn't got the facts about China right.

In 1989, after tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in Beijing and brutally ended weeks of protests, the then prime minister Bob Hawke gave a horrifying description of what Australia thought happened.

But where did the account come from?

And why was it wrong?

Today on The Signal, we sit down with Matt Bevan from the ABC's new podcast China If You're Listening to discuss new information about the massacre, 32 years on.

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Matt Bevan, Host, China If You're Listening

Blanche d'Alpuget, Biographer and wife of late former prime minister Bob Hawke

Richard Rigby, Emeritus Professor of the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra