The Tankman

If you get a spare hour and a half, head over to the PBS Frontline website and watch The Tankman. This is yet another excellent work in what is one of the finest collections of documentaries ever created, many of them available for viewing online at no cost.

If you haven't seen these either, they are both also well worth the time:

• Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
• The Insurgency

The Tankman documentary is both an account of the anonymous Chinese man who halted a column of tanks after the Tiananmen Square protest/massacre in Beijing in 1989, as well as a chronicle of the changes that China has undergone since that time, including many recent interviews with factory workers and students.


The account of the protest and the movement that inspired it is full of intrigue, if for no other reason than the sheer scale - on both sides. The size of the military force assembled to confront the protesters was twice the size of the U.S. military force currently occupying Iraq.

JAN WONG, Author and Journalist: In Beijing, one in ten of the population was joining in, and that includes all the old people, all the little children. So it was massive.

ORVILLE SCHELL, Author, Journalist: There were people in heavy earth-moving equipment. Honey bucket collectors and a tank truck came in. There were pilots. There were hotel workers.

ROBIN MUNRO: It was just a carnival of protest. All the groups were out there with their own banners, saying, "We are the Beijing journalists. We demand press freedom. We demand the right to tell the truth."

JAN WONG: You had doctors and nurses and scientists and army people demonstrating. The Chinese navy was demonstrating. And I thought, this is extraordinary because who's left? It's just the top leaders who aren't out there.

ORVILLE SCHELL: People thought that the old regime was somehow about to fall. And indeed, it was hard to imagine how it could be otherwise at that moment.

ANTONY THOMAS: For the very first time, press and television were reporting freely and truthfully. The virus of freedom quickly spread.

And, after the initial crackdown, what many refer to as the "real" massacre at Tiananmen square ensued.

T.D. ALLMAN:: Later that morning, amazing things started to happen. People, astonishingly, started trying­ holding hands, walking up the avenue, trying to re-enter the square in the face of these tanks.

JONATHAN MIRSKY, Author and Journalist: These people were frantic. They were nuts, out of their minds. And the reason they were out of their minds is that these were the parents of students who had been in the square that night. These parents were running back and forth, and they were saying, "We want to go in the square. We're looking for our children." Then an officer came out with a loud-hailer, and he said, "I'm going to count to five, and then we're going to fire."

JAN WONG: Then all the people realized that the guns were pointed at them, and they'd go running past the hotel. And then the soldiers would fire in their backs. I felt like I was watching some terrible opera.

JONATHAN MIRSKY: And a lot of people went down­ 30, 40, 50 people are knocked down. Everybody else ran away. I'm lying in the grass, thinking this is the worst thing ever. This is hell.

JAN WONG: But the odd thing was that after a little while, like, 40 minutes, an hour, people would gather their nerve again and crawl back to the corner and start screaming at the soldiers. And then the commander would eventually give another signal and the soldiers would raise their rifles again. And the people would go, "Oh, my God!" And they'd run away, and they'd shoot more in the backs. And this went on more than half a dozen times in the day. It was to me unbelievable.

JONATHAN MIRSKY: There then suddenly appeared right there an ambulance, and they rush in amongst all the people who were on the ground. And the soldiers open fire again and mow them down.

JAN WONG: The soldiers shot everybody ­ doctors, nurses, rescuers. Everybody was being shot at.

JONATHAN MIRSKY: This was seen by numbers of journalists, who will never forget it. This was­ a real massacre. This was the targeting and the shooting down of totally non-violent innocent civilians.

ROBIN MUNRO: The tactics of overwhelming force that were used had a point. They were meant to shock, terrify and awe. And they did. Terror works.

The showdown between a column of tanks and a solitary man carrying what appeared to be two shopping bags followed these events. In order to avoid the public security bureau, who were monitoring the foreign press from rooftops in the area, the film of this encounter, captured by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, was stashed in the holding tank of a toilet and retrieved two days later.

The image of the defiant anonymous rebel became a worldwide sensation appearing in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, and in 1998, Time Magazine included this young man as one of its 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

The aftermath of all this in the years that followed was to basically liberalize the economy and to clamp down on political dissent.

ORVILLE SCHELL: This was Deng Xiaoping's great moment of genius. After the massacre of 1989, he, in effect, said, "We will not stop economic reform. We will, in effect, halt political reform." What he basically said to people was, "Folks, you're in a room. There are two doors. One door says politics, one door says economics. If you open the economic door, you're on your own. You can go the full distance, do basically whatever you want, get wealthy, help your family, have a bright future, move forward into a glorious future. If you open the political door, you're going to run right into one obstruction after another, and you're going to run into the state."

This goes a long way in explaining why college students at one of Beijings most prestigious universities, when presented with a picture of the Tankman, had no idea what it was that they were looking at. It appears that the Chinese government has been successful in controlling education, the media, and publishing, essentially removing the events of 1989 from history.

Today, a search using Google or Yahoo! returns a very different result when seeking information on Tiananmen Square - depending upon where you are. In the West, pages and pages of stories and images of protests, people crowded in the square, and of course the Tankman. From inside China, only a few images of smiling tourists and maps of the area.

How do they do this?

With the help of Western technology. The executives at these companies are conflicted between the tremendous market that China dangles before them and the censorship demanded by the government.

ANTONY THOMAS: In February 2006, representatives of Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft appeared before a congressional committee, accused of being accomplices of oppression.

Rep. CHRISTOPHER SMITH (R), New Jersey: Leading U.S. companies like Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft have compromised both the integrity of their product and their duties as responsible corporate citizens.

ELLIOT SCHRAGE, V.P., Google Inc.: We have determined that we can do the most for our users and do more to expand access to information if we accept the censorship restrictions required by Chinese law. Our decision to create a presence, any presence, inside of China was a difficult one. Self-censorship like that which we are now required to perform in China is something that conflicts deeply with our core principles.

Rep. JIM LEACH (R), Iowa: If this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we go to you, the company that should symbolize the greatest freedom of information in the history of man.

ELLIOT SCHRAGE: This was not something that we did enthusiastically, or not something that we're proud of at all.

ANTONY THOMAS: No one had tougher questions to answer than Yahoo!

Rep. CHRISTOPHER SMITH: Women and men are going to the gulag and being tortured as a direct result of information handed over to Chinese officials. When Yahoo! was asked to explain its actions, Yahoo! said that it must adhere to local laws in all countries where it operates.

MICHAEL CALLAHAN, Sr. V.P., Yahoo! Inc.: The Shi Tao case. The facts of the Shi Tao case are distressing to our company, our employees and our leadership. When Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about a user, who we later learned was Shi Tao, we had no information about the identity of the user or the nature of the investigation. At the time the demand was made for information in this case, Yahoo! China was legally obligated to comply with the requirements of Chinese law enforcement.

Rep. CHRISTOPHER SMITH: My response to that is, if the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?

This makes you realize that we take for granted many of the freedoms that are so commonplace in the West.

It also makes you realize that civil unrest is, for good reason, at the top of the list of concerns for the Chinese government - right above securing the future energy needs for a growing economy. The continuing exchange between the U.S. government regarding threatened tarriffs and currency policies seems to be but a sideshow to what is going on inside the big tent - keeping hundreds of millions of people from revolting.