eli5: what is the context and the full story of the man infront of a tank video/picture
In: Other
Do you mean this guy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man?wprov=sfla1
Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
I’m not nearly educated enough on this subject to provide an answer beyond a TL;DR…
Chinese gov’t in the 80s encountered anti-government protests organized by university students. The gov’t’s response? Sending in local military operatives & riot control officers and opening fire.
Most pictures like that wouldn’t exist if there weren’t press members in China from other countries at the time. IIRC, a lot of those press members were either killed, or captured & disappeared into China’s state prison system.
So, on 4 June 1989, huge protests took place in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The people of China had serious complaints about how the CCP were running China, and were calling for democracy. It was a purely peaceful protest.
Well, the CCP weren’t having it. They sent in the military, including several tanks, to break up the protest. We don’t know exactly how many civilians died at the hands of their own country’s military, but it was in the thousands. This event is now widely known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
On the next day, June 5th, the CCP withdrew from Tiananmen Square. As the tanks were trying to leave, Tank Man (nobody knows his name) walked into the street and intentionally stood in front of the tanks. When they tried to go around him, he walked to the side and blocked them again. This was widely captured by protesters at the event, as a bold act of defiance and protest.
Nobody knows what exactly happened next, because it was not recorded, but Tank Man was assuredly killed by the CCP military for his actions.
The CCP aggressively censor the events of that day, and have worked very hard to try and hide evidence of dissent in China. The Tank Man photos escaped and were disseminated internationally before they could stop it, however. They’re quite striking photographs, and have become a symbol of CCP-resistance sentiment in China, and the world.
Every year, on June 4th, anti-CCP groups use the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the photos of Tank Man, to highlight the struggle for political reform in China.
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Incredible article by the man who shot this photo
http://www.jeffwidener.com/stories/2016/09/tankman/
Recently, sources have challenged long-standing beliefs about that narrative. There were protests all over China that day. There were protesters in Tianamen. Protesters did die that day. Government officials did open fire in Tianamen that day. But according to recent sources online, the idea that protesters died in Tianamen that day is based largely on the testimony of one BBC reporter who later walked back the claim.
And, some online sources hold, the democracy that protesters wanted was closer to the Barefoot Doctors and Iron Rice Bowl of pre-Deng China than to, say, George H. W. Bush. Allegedly, many protesters were waving copies of Mao’s little red book and protesting the so-called capitalist roaders of the post-Mao era.
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I’m going to add to what others are going to tell you, because I think context is important:
**1) Students as a force of political power in China**
The student body in China (historically students and scholars being one of China’s major political powers) were making increasing demands against China’s government in a pro-Democracy movement.
China’s leadership basically begged the student leadership to back down, saying the protests were becoming too unruly.
China’s student leaders refused to back down, after a combination of other measures to appease or suppress them failed, and so military force was deployed. Leaving these parts out makes it seem like central Chinese leadership just tankrolled peaceful student protests just because.
**2) Additional context – The Government Protecting Itself & Its “Legitimacy”**
While China and its people may seem suppressed, and ***they are***, China is historically an incredibly unruly place to be. There’s a saying I heard loosely translated from a Chinese proverb, “Those in Beijing don’t care about what the people are doing in Shanghai.”
Basically, while China has a very strong **central government**, it has historically had much, much difficulty unifying all of its provinces, who often work and function very independently and give zero shits about each other. This is combined with a culture where you are seen as foolish if you don’t take advantage of others’ weaknesses and ways to cheat or win even if it is unfair.
Social movements to China are not a joke in terms of the impact they can have. Look up how its leadership has been overthrown in modern times and the exchange of powers prior to the modern era. China is strong-armed because China is terrified of being overthrown and delegitimized. It treats Taiwan this way for the same reasons. It conveniently is never mentioned in pro-Taiwan posts on Reddit (I love Taiwan but again, context is important), but modern Taiwan came about from the exiling of the opposition party to the CCP during the Chinese Civil War. To this day Taiwan still calls itself a “Republic” of China in its official name. (Although in english it’s just known as Taiwan now.)
Yet another movement that China suppressed for the same reasons was a spiritual / tai chi movement that was allegedly becoming a bit cult-like.
To the Central Chinese Government, there can only be one ruling ideal that is common amongst all Chinese – and that is the party itself, otherwise, it may cease to exist.
OP. I think everyone else has covered the theory a damn sight better than I could. There’s one piece I’d like to add though. The *peaceful protestors* who were killed, and rest assured there were many regardless of anybody’s understanding, were killed in the most awful of ways. The government was known to have used flamethrowers to an enormous extent. The one that haunts me though is that they used the tanks to repeatedly drive and reverse over people (who may not initially have been dead) until they were sufficiently able to be washed down the drain with hosepipes. Drain. With. Hosepipes.
The CCP sufficiently scared those that survived that they daren’t talk about it. Now they deny it ever existed.
“Tank Man” would certainly have died in the most awful way (and he’d have expected to do so with his visible yet peaceful dissent) but he stood in front of a line of tanks to make sure at least the people there at the time knew how he felt about this. It just so happened that the image was captured by the rest of the world.
May we all be just a fraction as brave.
If the Chinese govt killed no protestors as they claim.
Then why censor the photos.
Please stop the Chinese propaganda story. It’s a complete failure on the same level as declaring the earth is flat.
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