The Tank Man (Tiananmen Square Anniversary)

After all others had been silenced, his lonely act of defiance against the Chinese regime catalyzed the world. What became of him? And 17 years later, has China succeeded in erasing this event from its history?

On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army's deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, a single, unarmed young man stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world.

Seventeen years later, veteran filmmaker Antony Thomas goes to China in search of "The Tank Man." Who was he? What was his fate? And what does he mean for a China that today has become a global economic powerhouse?

Drawing on interviews with Chinese and Western eyewitnesses, Thomas recounts the amazing events of the spring of 1989, when a student protest that began in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic central space of the nation, spread throughout much of the rest of China. Several weeks later, when the government sent in the army to end the demonstrations, the citizens of Beijing poured into the streets in support of the students. "You had a million people on the street, minimum. ... That was unprecedented, definitely in modern Chinese post-revolutionary history," says John Pomfret, who was in Beijing at the time, reporting for the Associated Press.

The demonstrations ended in a massacre on the night of June 3-4, when the government sent the troops into the city with orders to clear Tiananmen Square. Eyewitnesses recount what happened -- from the first shots fired in the city's outskirts, to the students' withdrawal from the square in the early hours of June 4, to the Tank Man's courageous stand the following day.

From there, Thomas looks at what the Tank Man's life might be like in today's China. China observers and scholars, including Orville Schell, talk about the turning point the nationwide unrest of 1989 represented. "After the massacre of 1989, [Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping] in effect said, 'We will not stop economic reform; [but] we will, in effect, halt political reform.'"

Almost two decades later, the educated elite who led the protests of 1989 have benefited handsomely from China's rapid economic growth, but many Chinese workers still face brutal working conditions and low wages. "A lot of factories do not even have one day off," says labor expert Dr. Anita Chan who has been researching working conditions inside China for 15 years. "That means seven days a week, 13 hours a day."

In fact, some experts see the emergence of two Chinas: one modern, wealthy and urban; the other rural, poor and disenfranchised. There is evidence that unrest among workers and peasants is growing; in 2005, there were more than 87,000 "civil disturbances" in the country.

The Chinese government has responded to this threat by cracking down on dissent, and on the media. The regime has managed to erase the Tank Man's image, famous throughout the world, from Chinese memory. Thomas shows the iconic picture to undergraduates at Beijing University, the nerve center of the 1989 protests; none of them recognize it. Central to the regime's struggle to control information is its filtering of the Internet, a complex undertaking that raises serious issues about the role of Western IT companies in China's censorship strategy.

In the face of official silence about 1989 and the Tank Man, the program concludes with Thomas' quest to find out what became of the Tank Man and who he was. In the end, his identity remains a mystery, but the symbolism of his act of defiance continues to have power. "That story ... is not getting weaker because of time. Because we don't know who he is, it's actually getting stronger," says Xiao Qiang of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "In the long frame of history ... human freedom, courage, dignity will stay and prevail, and that's what that picture will testify [to] forever."

The spring of 1989 saw the largest pro-democracy demonstration in the history of China's communist regime. The following timeline tracks how the protests began in April among university students in Beijing, spread across the nation, and ended on June 4 with a final deadly assault by an estimated force of 300,000 soldiers from People's Liberation Army (PLA). Throughout these weeks, China's top leaders were deeply divided over how to handle the unrest, with one faction advocating peaceful negotiation and another demanding a crackdown. Excerpts from their statements, drawn from The Tiananmen Papers, reveal these internal divisions.

In this email exchange with four people who have inside perspective on China's censorship in general and Web filtering/blocking in particular, FRONTLINE explores the great battle that's underway in China: In the age of the Internet, can the Communist Party regime maintain its tight control over what information is available to its citizens?

In each of the sections below, the following China specialists and eyewitnesses to the events of spring 1989 in China address some of the major themes in this FRONTLINE report, "The Tank Man":

Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch; John Pomfret, Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post (1998-2003); Robin Munro, an eyewitness to the 1989 massacre; Orville Schell, China specialist and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley; Timothy Brook, professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia; Jan Wong, former Beijing correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail; and Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley

This is one issue that both the American Right and Left can come together on.

It will be our eternal shame that we stood by when Chinese patriots made a stand for freedom no less significant than those behind the iron curtain did a couple of years earlier and we in the West stood silent while the ChiComs crushed their difiant stand against tyranny. We pay for that cowardness every time we buy something "made in China" and at the gas pump as China sucks up the World's oil supply to fuel their Communist industrial empire.

I saw this program. It was very good, and I recommend it highly. I believe it can be viewed online at the PBS site if you haven't seen it yet.

Good point about left and right agreeing on it. I'll go a step further and say that sometimes it seems like only "outside the mainstream" voices on the left and right even care about this issue any more. Our elected leaders-whether they have D or an R after their name--by and large turn a blind eye, as do the corporations that make a bundle off Chinese labor.

"In the long frame of history ... human freedom, courage, dignity will stay and prevail, and that's what that picture will testify [to] forever."

A great quote. It's been said that the Chinese government takes the long view of things. This quote succintly points out that the dissidents are taking the long view as well. They're not going away.

In 2004, I traveled to Beijing from Korea and was amazed at being on the square. Also, the city is pretty Americanized and they love the greeback. We all took a bunch of one dollar bills to buy different stuff. It was interesting place a pretty clean. The Wall is incredible.

He was probably used as a source of organ harvesting from a living donor ,as is the PRC tradition now for many that end up in their so-called mental hospitals. Mental patients are any of those citizens who stand up against their system.
(Falun Gung) I would say Tankman would qualify under their
definitions.

In Seattle this will be aired on KBTC-28 on Wed, Apr 26 at 9:30 am. (May already have aired at normal times.)

Tivo's a wonderful thing. :-)

The "Tank man", the tank driver the commander and a couple others that where involved in that tank column stopping where all killed shortly after Tiananmen Square thingy happened. The only one that lived in side the tank was the gunner he was released after 3 months in prison for basically not shooting the commander and taking over the tank.

That's not exactly what happened and you will be surprised to know that many Chinese view the student protest in Tiananmen as Americans viewed student anti-government protest at Kent State. Actually, given the history of student movement during the cultural revolution, even more frowned upon. All is not as you see it from the eyes of the West.

I hope the Tankman is still alive, but somehow I believe the communists in China killed him in 89.

I thought I too had heard that he had been slaughtered sometime early after the protests.

"China is on a knife's edge," says Dr. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch. "If we in the West are not aware of this, the leaders in Beijing are very much so, and this is their top concern. They know that the stability is very fragile."

The Chinese government has responded to this threat by cracking down on dissent, and on the media.

The growing divide in China between the wealthy and the poor, especially as China continues to see unparalleled growth, will lead to China's undoing. The more that the authoritarian Chinese dictators bear down on the people, the greater the issue of revolt grows. If China truly wants to survive this period of growth and wealth relatively intact, they need to ease up on the authoritarianism, NOT bear down.

Not only do many see things only thru the prism of their own interpretation of events, they also seemingly see every event round the world as somehow the fault of our current American President Bush.

I do not believe that the Tank Man is still alive. He was, undoubtedly, one of the most important men in the 20th century. But as much as I respect this man (from where I derive my screen name), I believe that the, in my mind, ruthless Chinese Communist party (nothing personal to any formal members) of 1989 executed him as soon as possible.

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