Tank Man

While most people are familiar with the iconic photo of Tank Man standing defiantly in front of an oncoming PLA tank while carrying nothing more than a plastic bag and a briefcase, there is a lot more going on here than I'd ever realized.  For starters, this photo was taken the day after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, where somewhere between 300 and 3,000 pro-Democracy Chinese protesters were machine-gunned, burned, and run over in the street, and this guy is literally standing in front of some of the tanks that perpetrated the massacre.  These tanks are leaving the scene.  This guy knew they meant business, and he's standing amid the rubble and ruin these same tanks may have created – the scene surrounding him for hundreds of yards in every direction is a post-apocalyptic hellscape of burned-out busses, dead bodies, and the charred carcasses of APCs that ended up on the wrong side of a Mazeltov Cocktail.  Playing chicken with a 40-ton armored vehicle in the middle of a warzone and daring an armored column to run you over takes serious balls – especially when you are currently surrounded by the proof that their driver has a green light to crush you like a spent cigar under his treads and would do so without a moment of hesitation.

And, second, we still to this day have no idea who this man is, what happened to him, or what he said.  He simply stumbled into a moment in history, made a stand, and then vanished forever, existing only in this singular moment in time.  The best we have on any of it comes from an interview with former Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin, who was pushed on the subject by a Western reporter.  Jiang had given the entire interview in Mandarin through an interpreter, but he responded to the fate of Tank Man in English. 

All he said was, "I think never killed."

The story of Tank Man begins in April of 1989, when a Chinese politician named Hu Yaobang was forced to resign from the Communist Party and then subsequently died of a heart attack.  Hu was a reformer, someone who was pushing back against some of the big problems facing Communist China in the 80s – rampant corruption, secrecy, and the suppression of civil liberties that were typical of totalitarian regimes from this era.  With his death, rallies and protests began in cities across china, demanding greater civil liberties, a continuation of Hu's policies, and more freedom and liberty for the Chinese people.  The biggest of these demonstrations took place in the heart of Beijing, at Tiananmen Square, just outside the entrance to the Forbidden City, the Tomb of Mao Zedong, and the capital building of the Peoples' Republic of China.

It started first as protests and demonstrations, but by mid-May there were rallies of over a million people crowding the square to demand freedom, Democracy, and an end to the corruption that was plaguing the country.  They built a 33-foot tall statue of the "Goddess of Democracy" to stare down the big portrait of Mao at the entrance to the Forbidden City, sang songs, held signs, went on hunger and work strikes, and basically turned the political heart of China's capital city into a Burning Man for Democracy. 

Well, unfortunately for the protestors, the Chinese government was expecting a big visit from Soviet Union Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and it wasn't a good look for the China to have all these gnarly protesters hanging around asking for the right to vote for more than one party or the right to not be purged into fucking oblivion in the middle of the night without due process or a fair trial – and when you're talking about a country that will send your family an invoice for the price of the bullet they used to execute you (this really happens), you can be pretty fucking sure that they weren't going to just ask politely for you to please take your homemade Statue of Liberty and shove it up your ass.

No, they sent in the Peoples' Liberation Army instead.

At 1am on June 4, 1989, the PLA entered Tiananmen Square from four directions, bulldozed their APCs over human chains of people trying to block them, and then proceeded to open fire into the mob of protesters with whatever the official Chinese name is for the AK-47.  Six weeks of demonstrations ended in a four-hour gun battle.  The protesters, to their credit, fought back valiantly – pulling PLA soldiers from their trucks and beating them to death, throwing rocks, or hurling explosives – but they didn't have a chance.  They were machine gunned, run over, blown up, and, depending on who you ask, many wounded survivors were put to the bayonet.  The scene was so brutal that the PLA showed up the next morning with fire hoses to spray the blood off the street, and the burned-out husks of busses and vehicles lingered on scene for the days and weeks to come.

The Chinese government claims that 300 protesters were killed that day, which of course means that the real number is way higher than that.  The Chinese Red Cross estimates about 2,700 dead – a number that, if true, would make the death toll of the Tiananmen Square Massacre a little higher than the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor.  It's an estimate that also doesn't include the countless wounded, the thousands who were arrested, and the dozens of protesters who were executed weeks later by the Chinese for their crimes as counter-revolutionaries and political dissidents.

It was a brutal crackdown on a powerful, sweeping movement for Democracy, a dark day in Chinese and world history, and one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. 

But in this unlikely setting, at the end of this crushing defeat of liberty and justice, a lone, mysterious hero emerged who would change the course of this narrative forever, and do so in such an iconic and defiant manner that his heroism and bravery – not the wanton cruelty and bloody destruction of the night before – would be the single enduring image that would be forever inextricably tied to the movement for freedom in China and serve as a reminder to the world that the people of Beijing had stood strong and remained steadfast, even in the face of unprecedented tyranny and corruption.

We know him today only as Tank Man, but what he represents is something far greater than that.

On the morning of June 5, 1989, the column of tanks parked in Tiananmen Square fired up their engines and began to roll out in a single-file column, when, suddenly, a man in a white shirt and black pants appeared in the crosswalk.  In the course of looking both ways before crossing the street, he happened to notice an armored column of 40+ modified Soviet T-54s rolling his direction, but, where as most people would mutter oh shit and just hustle across the street, this guy stopped and decided to have a staring contest with a Type 59.  The lead tank, a 40-ton Main Battle Tank with a 520 horsepower engine, a 100mm main cannon, and three machine guns, rolled right up to him, but this man refused to yield his position in the fucking crosswalk.  He just stood there, seething with defiant rage against the corrupt and brutal political dictatorship that had crushed on his freedom for too long, resigned himself to his fury, and dared the commander of that bulletproof war machine to commit one more act of bloody military repression. 

And, as horrified onlookers, injured survivors, and shell-shocked foreign journalists peeked out from cover all across the square, just waiting for this guy to get mulched under a tank tread, the most incredible thing happened.

The lead tank stopped.  And the entire rest of the armored column stopped behind him.

For a long moment, both man and tank stared each other down like the finale of a Clint Eastwood movie.  Then, the tank turned, and began to maneuver around to Tank Man's left.

Tank Man took three steps over and blocked it.

It turned right.

He blocked it again, waving his arms this time and yelling.

The tank swerved to get around him, but he continued to block it.  In inched closer, but he didn't give up his ground.

And then, to the surprise of everyone watching, something amazing happened.

The tank stopped, gave up, came to a rest, and switched off its engine.

But tank man wasn't done. 

He climbed up onto the lead tank and yelled shit through the viewpoint at the crew who had just fucked up his city a night before.

Amazingly, the hatch opened, and the tank commander popped his head out.  There was a short exchange between the two men, and then Tank Man climbed down from the vehicle and returned to the crosswalk.  The tank fired up its engine and started to roll forward again.

And, once again, Tank Man blocked it.

A few defiant moments later, Tank Man was grabbed by a small group of guys in plain-clothes, pulled out of the crosswalk, and immediately disappeared from history forever.  Whether those men who grabbed him were government agents or simply concerned protesters who didn’t want to watch this guy become a martyr, we’ll never know for sure.

But the image of this lone guy standing defiantly, one man against an army, had already been burned into the minds of everyone in the square that day, instilling a spirit of hope amid a week of misery, chaos, and destruction.

And, thanks to a few daring photojournalists, the stand of Tank Man was about to inspire a hell of a lot more people across all corners of the world.

The two most iconic photos of the incident came from Western photographers who happened to be looking out of the balcony of one of the hotels overlooking the square.  Both men, James Widener and Charlie Cole, had to take extreme measures to ensure that the images they'd captured stayed out of the hands of the Chinese government – Widener knew the Chinese FBI would confiscate all of his film as he attempted to leave the country, so he paid a French student to smuggle the film out of the country in a can of tea.  Cole ran and hid his film can in the tank of his hotel toilet, had the door of his hotel room kicked in by Chinese agents 15 minutes after snapping the picture, spent a day in a Beijing prison, and had to sneak back into the hotel two days later and hope that nobody had flushed the toilet while he was gone.  All of these guys knew they'd captured something special – and they took amazing measures to protect it.  To this day, images of the Tank Man are illegal in China, and just as recently as last year a group of kids got three and a half years of hard labor for selling booze with a cartoon image of Tank Man accompanied by the phrase "Never Forget, Never Give Up."

In the Western World, the jarring image of a lone ordinary dude standing up to the symbolic might of the PLA resonated with everyone who saw it.  Sure, in the end Tank Man was probably little more than just an annoying pedestrian who took too long in the crosswalk and held up a column of government vehicles for five minutes, but the images captured of this guy, in this place, at this time, made people feel some serious shit.  His image became symbolic of the entire Tiananmen Square Incident, of fearless resistance against iron-fisted totalitarianism, and of the power a single person can have against the political machine of the world's most brutal Communist regime.  When his photo was posted in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – there were many Western journalists in town to cover the protests, but there were also many Soviet Bloc journalists there in preparation for Gorbachev's visit – it blew peoples' fucking minds, and reinforced their belief in their power to change the world.  A few months after this photo was taken, in the Summer of 1989, Poland overthrew it's own Communist regime and Austria reopened its border with Communist Hungary.  In November 1989, just five months after Tank Man's stand, the Berlin Wall was pulled down.  Two years later, the Soviet Union was dissolved.  And, sure, I'm not saying that Tank Man single-handedly brought about the fall of Soviet Communism, but I am also not going to say that the inspiration people gained from seeing his bravery didn't help facilitate the process, even if it was just a little bit.

Links:

Frontline (YouTube clip of the incident)

Jeff Widener

NY Times

The Independent

CNN

TIME

Wikipedia