Tank man
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Tianasquare.jpg
Jeff Widener (The Associated Press)
Tank man or The Unknown Rebel is the nickname of the anonymous man who became internationally famous when he was filmed and photographed standing before a line of seventeen or more tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in the People's Republic of China. The photo was taken by Jeff Widener, a member of Associated Press.
The incident ironically took place on the Chang An Da Dao, or "Great Avenue of Everlasting Peace", just a minute away from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which leads into the Forbidden City, Beijing, on 5 June, 1989, the day after the Chinese government began cracking down violently on the protests. The man stood unwavering and alone in the middle of the road as the tanks approached him. He appeared to be holding two bags of some sort, one in each hand. As the tanks came to a stop, he appeared to be trying to wave them away. In response, the front tank attempted to drive around the man, but the man repeatedly stepped into the path of the tank. After about half an hour of blocking the tanks, the man climbed up onto the top of the lead tank and had a conversation with the driver. Reports of what were said to the driver vary, including "Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you"; "Go back, turn around, and stop killing my people"; "Go away". Finally, anxious onlookers pulled the man down and absorbed him into the crowd and the tanks continued on their way.
The striking still and motion photography of the small man standing alone before a line of very large tanks reached international audiences practically overnight. It headlined hundreds of major newspapers and news magazines and was the lead story on countless news broadcasts around the world.
Almost nothing is known of the man's identity. Shortly after the incident, British tabloid the Sunday Express named him as Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student; however, the veracity of this claim is dubious. What has happened to Wang following the demonstration is equally obscure. In a speech to the President's Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn — former deputy special assistant to President of the United States Richard Nixon and a member of the President Ronald Reagan transition team — reported that he was executed 14 days later; other sources say he was killed by firing squad a few months after the Tiananmen Square protests. In Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong writes that the man is still alive in hiding in mainland China.
The People's Republic of China government, if it knows, isn't saying much. In a 1992 interview with Barbara Walters, then-Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin was asked what became of the man. Jiang replied "I think never killed [sic]."
In April 1998, Time Magazine included "The Unknown Rebel" in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
As one of the Chinese pro-democracy movement's leaders remarked, there is more than one hero in the Tank Man picture. Besides the person who risked his life stepping in front of the war machine, there is the tank driver who disobeyed his orders and refused to overrun his compatriot and was later arrested.
As with most matters related to the Tiananmen Square protests, the Tank Man topic is still a political taboo in mainland China, where any discussion of it is regarded as inappropriate or risky.
See also
References
- Sunday Express names the Tank Man 'Wang Weilin' (http://alancanfora.com/nwspage.asp?id=113) Retrieved 19 January 2005
- WEHT.net: Bruce Herschensohn reports on the Tank Man execution (http://www.weht.net/WEHT/Wang_Wei_Lin.html) Retrieved 19 January 2005
- The Unknown Rebel (http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/rebel.html) – Time Magazine's profile. Retrieved 19 January 2005
- CNN Interactive: Video Almanac – 1989 (http://www.cnn.com/resources/video.almanac/1989/index2.html#tiananmen) – Contains a small 26-second video of the "tank man" stepping in the way of the tanks. Retrieved 19 January 2005
- The Tiananmen Papers, The Chinese Leadership's Decision to Use Force Against their Own People—In their Own Words, Compiled by Zhang Liang, Edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, with an afterword by Orville Schell, PublicAffairs, New York, 2001, hardback, 514 pages, ISBN 1-58648-012-X An extensive review and synopis of The Tiananmen papers in the journal Foreign Affairs may be found at Review and synopsis in the journal Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20010101faessay4257-p0/andrew-j-nathan/the-tiananmen-papers.html).
- June Fourth: The True Story, Tian'anmen Papers/Zhongguo Liusi Zhenxiang Volumes 1–2 (Chinese edition), Zhang Liang, ISBN 9628744364
- Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong, Doubleday, 1997, trade paperback, 416 pages, ISBN 0385482329 (Contains, besides extensive autobiographical material, an eyewitness account of the Tiananmen crackdown and the basis for an estimate of the number of casualties.)zh:王维林