Tank Man, Tiananmen Square, and the June Fourth Incident
You have probably seen this photo of “Tank Man” a hundred times, and will likely see it dozens more on Tuesday, June 4th, 2024, a date which commemorates a violent tragedy around Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
The ubiquitousness of this image in western press, particularly in America, should give us some pause, and encourage us to consider to what end this imagery is being used. Because we are talking about the United States, a country which allocates hundreds of millions of dollars toward spreading anti-China news stories (1), as well as appearing utterly incapable of telling the truth about China at any and all times, as witnessed in their coverage of the “Chinese spy balloon” conspiracy theory. Even in their admissions that the weather balloon was not, in fact, conducting surveillance, American press still shamelessly insisted on referring to the meteorological device as a “spy balloon”. (2)
1 — https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/s1260/BILLS-117s1260es.pdf
2 — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-spy-balloon-no-information-pentagon/
I don’t believe it is controversial to suggest the default view America wants its people to adopt of China and its people is “China bad”. And that is indeed what many westerners take away from the undeniably powerful image of a lone civilian standing up to a line of Chinese military tanks, captured by Jeff Widener, then a photographer for the Associated Press. The identity of Tank Man remains unknown.
Jeff Widener, in an interview with CBS News, stated that he was expecting Tank Man to be shot or run over, but nothing of the sort happened. (3) There is video of the incident uploaded to CNN’s youtube channel which shows much more than the still image we all are aware of… (4)
3 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0oV5DwIDZo&ab_channel=CBSNews
4 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU&ab_channel=CNN
In the video, we watch Tank Man stand his ground and prevent the tanks from moving. They try to drive around him, but he blocks their path. This occurs several times. Then, shockingly, Tank Man actually climbs on top of one of the tanks. The People’s Liberation Army soldiers do nothing to harm the individual. The mystery man then stands in the street directly in the path of the tanks yet again. At this point, the video fades to black, suggesting that more occurred which we do not have footage of.
But we do have footage of what happened next… (5)
5 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaojdRThXbY&ab_channel=CBSNews
What happened next is that another civilian on a bicycle rides up to Tank Man and exchanges words with him. Immediately after, several other civilians on foot hurry up to Tank Man and physically move him out of the way, and into a large group of other civilians off to the side. Few appear concerned, and several are seen simply going about their business.
In the Jeff Widener interview, he speaks of violence that was not at all pretty, even being a victim of violence himself. We might be expected to presume this Tank Man incident is what precipitated this violence (as we are often not given the full context of what is occurring in the photo), and the civilians in the full Tank Man video are the victims of the massacre we hear about so often in western press.
But that is not the case. The violence Jeff Widener spoke of began on the night of June 2nd and continued into June 4th — which is the commemoration date, as that is when the violence stopped. Widener’s iconic photograph was captured on June 5th.
Another photo less ubiquitous and yet equally as striking as Widener’s (if not more-so) was captured by British photographer Stewart Franklin. (6) Franklin’s image shows a wider view with many, many more tanks in Tiananmen Square, revealing the procession of Type 59 tanks was in the process of leaving the Square.
6 — https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2019/06/stuart-franklin-tank-man.html
That the tanks Tank Man was holding up were in the process of leaving Tiananmen Square doesn’t make it into western press very often, which should also give us pause, as it begs the question — what exactly was Tank Man attempting to do?
Because Tank Man has never been identified, we can’t ask him why he wanted the tanks to remain in the Square (as his gestures to return there indicate), or if that was even what he wanted. Was he merely making a statement, and of what? Or was he afraid more violence would erupt if the PLA tanks left the Square? Maybe he wanted more violence to occur. Sadly, we will never know.
What we do know is that no violence occurred due to the Tank Man incident — although that did not stop photographer Stewart Franklin stating in the above interview that the image he chose to publish of the incident showed the most “tension”. Perhaps this is why so many westerners, especially Americans, have a Mandela Effect recollection of the incident, believing Tank Man was run over or otherwise physically harmed by the PLA. Or maybe we just assume that’s what happened because that’s what militarized police do to protestors in America. (7)
7 — https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/12/08/nypd-no-discipline-cops-suvs-protesters-brooklyn/
We should take a moment to consider how the enduring image of the incident at Tiananmen Square, routinely dubbed a massacre by western press, is completely unrelated to what actually happened. It is an image of a moment in which no harm was done to anyone, including Tank Man himself, and occurred after the protests which sparked the violence were already over.
When you have this context, it feels like a historic outlier — the enduring images of the Standing Rock protests are of the Standing Rock protests; the enduring images of the Occupy protests are of the Occupy protests; the enduring images of the sadly far too numerous to list protests regarding American police murdering black men and black children, are of the protests themselves. Why is Tiananmen Square different?
Of course, Widener’s Tank Man image is so powerful, speaks to universal struggles, and would obviously endure on those merits alone, and I say that as a professional photographer who is discounting the strength of the image in no way whatsoever. But what happens when that photo is used in remembrance of the Tiananmen Square protests and a massacre we’re reminded of every June 4th is that we are robbed of the context of the event, and the protestors are not permitted to tell their own story about what they were protesting and why it was important to them.
But even worse than that is how iconography of Tank Man, like this statue in California, of all places (8), is of a man who lived, and, to our knowledge, was not even involved in the protests or violence in any way. It must be stressed that actual people died, and we honor them with statues and iconography of a completely unrelated and unharmed man utterly disconnected from their struggles. That is how little value the west puts on the lives of actual Chinese human beings and their suffering.
8 — https://www.latimes.com/la-me-tiananmen-square-monument-barstow-20190603-story.html
How does that statue and others like it, and the photos and imagery of Tank Man in western media, inform us of the people who actually died, and what they were fighting for? It doesn’t.
Truly, the only context we possibly can take away from Tank Man being used in place of actual informative imagery of the protests and violence is simply just “China bad”. That is the only thing the west appears to desire that we take away from these annual reminders of the incident, which is effectively a form of orientalism — a practice of the west not allowing the east to represent itself.
Perhaps a better way of understanding the incident surrounding Tiananmen Square can best be gleaned from the people who were actually involved — in particular, the protestors themselves, and the press who were on the scene witnessing the events as they were unfolding.
The backstory is rather extensive and complex, but it essentially boils down to students staging demonstrations within, and ultimately occupying, Tiananmen Square following the death of party official Hu Yaobang on April 11th, 1989 to honor his memory, as his reformist policies were popular with many young people.
But not all were happy with the reformist policies of the CPC at that time, which began ten years prior in 1979 under party leader Deng Xiaoping, which saw a heavy burden placed on the working class as the wealth of the more privileged increased. The effects of Deng’s reforms were felt in 1988, a year before the Tiananmen incident, when the price of consumer goods and food rose 26% (9). Another effect of the transition to a western-style economy was an increased cost in education, even for the supporters of reformer Hu Yaobang.
9 — https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/29/business/inflation-hits-peak-in-china.html
This was a troubled time not only for China but for communist nations in general, as many were already succumbing to western-style economic reforms and a subsequent decrease in standard of living. Workers, in particular, felt opposed to the Dengist reforms as they saw their wages and protections erode, and staged their own demonstrations several kilometers away from the Square. Many photos of Mao Zedong and statements of support for the CPC could be seen in their marches (10). Indeed, the same Maoist imagery could be seen in the occupation of the Square itself (11), as the student movement was not a monolithic entity, but an evolving and growing group of varying goals.
10 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f76f7250bc7dedbd8886325a04a6cab5-lq
11 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/mao-picture.jpg
The students, however, were the primary factor in the tragedy at Tiananmen, so we shall stick with them. As many as 26 university campuses saw spontaneous memorials for Hu as early as April 17th. According to Ann Kerns in ‘Who will shout if not us? Student activists and the Tiananmen Square Protest, China, 1989’, “ …activities had already turned from mourning Hu to complaining about how he was treated by the CCP [sic] and then to wider social grievances”.
By the time the students marched from their campuses to Tiananmen Square, they had drawn up a list of 7 items (demands). Kerns, from the same source, lists them as:
1. reevaluate [the government’s] treatment of Hu Yaobang and announce that his views on democracy had been correct;
2. end the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization;
3. publish the salaries and other assets of government leaders and their families;
4. end government censorship of the press and allow the publication of privately run newspapers;
5. increase government spending on higher education and increase wages for intellectuals;
6. end government restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing;
7. hold democratic elections to replace corrupt or ineffective government officials who had been appointed by the CCP [sic]
Prominent leaders of the student movement included Chai Ling (who was elected by other leaders to head the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters group), Wu’er Kaixi, Wang Dan, Feng Congde, and others, many of whom expressed their reasons for protesting (albeit years later for some). Wu’er Kaixi said he wanted to be able to wear Nike shoes. (12) Wang Dan said he was motivated by the pursuit of wealth, what he called an “impetus for democracy”. (13)
12 — https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/30/opinion.wuerkaixi/index.html
13 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/06/02/chinese-militant-swaps-protest-for-a-beeper/5eafbc53-a892-4227-b4d5-cd8d4f6e0dd4/
At the end of April, the Party leadership met with the student protestors, and even televised the meeting. (14) Zhao Ziyang, General Secretary of the CPC, met with the protestors on May 4th to further discuss their demands, and again on May 19th to encourage the hunger strike, organized by the student leadership, to end. (15)
14 — https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/30/world/china-hears-out-students-and-lets-millions-listen.html
15 — https://history.state.gov/milestones/1989-1992/tiananmen-square
Martial law was declared on May 20th, more than one month after the student occupation of the Square had begun, and two weeks before the prominent violence of June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th which Tank Man photographer Jeff Widener spoke of. These dates may seem odd to many westerners who might have been led to believe the student protests in the Square were violently crushed by the PLA right after they began, and that no diplomacy or restraint was exercised by the CPC (because, you know, “China bad”) when, in fact, the occupation was permitted to continue peacefully for nearly seven weeks before the violence that marks the June Fourth Incident occurred.
So, what was happening in that large interval between the start of the protests and the violence by which they are remembered?
Apart from the aforementioned meetings between CPC officials and the student protestors, it would appear that the event was largely…uneventful. Students sat with PLA soldiers (16), sang songs with them (17), and even fed the soldiers (18). They were just kind of hanging out together. (19) The PLA soldiers were not even armed; the only protection they had for any potential violent activity were their helmets, and some did not even have that, which speaks to the fact that they were instructed to avoid dealing with the protestors in a violent manner.
16 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/img_3242.jpg
17 — https://videos.files.wordpress.com/hp4Cnqxb/tiananmen-song-military-people-2_std.mp4
18 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/tiananmen-peace.jpg
19 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51865c440f03f2acd26af4f72dc9e8cc-lq
Given that the wishes of the students (in their list of demands and their own statements) closely aligned with what the United States was also wishing for China, perhaps looking at what America was doing during this almost entirely peaceful protest might provide further edification.
Gene Sharp, author of the Color Revolution manual, traveled to Beijing and documented his experience there. (20) Sharp had previously worked closely with the US Department of Defense, and received funding from the DOD for his writings. (21) Sharp’s writings were later used in support of the Baltic nations of Lavia, Lithuania, and Estonia in support of their independence from the Soviet Union. (22)
20 — https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/90sa/90sa_Sharp.pdf
21 — https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/should-scientists-and-engineers-resist-taking-military-money/
22 — https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/30/gene-sharp-obituary-academic-nonviolent-revolution-223555/
On April 20th — just 5 days after Hu Yaobang’s death — James Lilley, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, was appointed as America’s new ambassador to China. (23) Lilley and then CIA Director and future US president, George H.W. Bush, had been close since the 1970s when Lilley was the head of station for the CIA in Beijing. By 1989, Lilley was quite experienced in regime-change operations, having inserted CIA agents into China, gathering intelligence for Hong Kong (which was still under British rule at that time), and undermining the efforts of the communist side in the Laotian Civil War. (24)
23 — https://web.archive.org/web/20090630141250/http://beijing.usembassy-china.org.cn/ambassadors.html
24 — https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-james-lilley16-2009nov16-story.html
Also during this time, more pro-democracy banners could be seen in the Square (curiously in English). (25) American state media Voice of America was broadcasting in China (26), increasing its coverage from 8 hours each day to 11, reaching 2,000 Chinese satellite dishes mostly owned by the PLA. Rumors then began circulating that Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and that Party leader Deng Xaioping was near death. (27) Both reports were untrue.
25 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/tiananmen-english.jpg
26 — https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/09/world/voice-of-america-beams-tv-signals-to-china.html
27 — https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/07/world/turmoil-in-china-shanghai-at-a-standstill-waits-apprehensively.html
Going back prior to the student protests in 1989, American regime-change organizations began operating in China. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) opened offices in China in 1988. (28) Even earlier than that was the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China. (29)
28 — https://www.ned.org/docs/annual/1988%20NED%20Annual%20Report.pdf
29 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/08/08/funds-representatives-arrested-in-china/24e8b72c-d6fe-4753-a007-51d181239cb6/
It is evident that America not only had great interests in the liberalization of China and its economy, but was actively taking steps in pursuing those interests for the sovereign nation. According to an incredibly difficult to locate article on page A20 of the Vancouver Sun on September 17th, 1992, “The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among [Tiananmen Square] protesters.”, and, “For months before [the protests], the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement.” (30)
30 — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BcfxpzK9Oy7oT9TCkJMEA6GaKcTOKu-FhCABj4TsidM/pub
Yet in spite of America’s involvement, the protests remained almost entirely peaceful throughout April and May of 1989. A key to the spark of the vastly more publicized violence in early June could be found in student leader Chai Ling’s words given in a private interview with US journalist Philip Cunningham on May 28th, in which she stated: “…what we are hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes… But how could I explain any of this to my fellow students?”, also admitting the Chinese people were “not worth her struggle”.
31 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__ESiklA1A
Chai Ling was instrumental in opposing government suggestions to relocate the protests back to university campuses, fighting to keep it in Tiananmen Square. She was later smuggled out of China via Hong Kong to the United States in a CIA program given the outrageously racist name Operation Yellowbird. (32) She attended Princeton University and Harvard Business School, later working for Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm.
Chai Ling was not the only student leader who later studied at prestigious western universities. Wang Dan also studied at Harvard, and performed research on regime-change in Taiwan at Oxford. He is alive today, as are other student protest leaders Feng Congde, Wu’er Kaixi, and Chai Ling herself.
The vicious comments of Chai Ling on May 28th came a week after martial law had been declared, and many protestors had actually returned home. However, several thousand still occupied the Square, and the student leadership called for keeping the occupation going until June 20th, when a meeting of the National People’s Congress was scheduled to take place.
As previously mentioned on May 19th, one day before martial law was declared, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang made his last public appearance in Tiananmen Square in which he said: “Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask you to forgive us. All I want to say is that students are getting very weak, it is the 7th day since you went on hunger strike, you can’t continue like this.” (33)
33 — https://www.thoughtco.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacre-195216
Upon seeing the effects of the hunger strike and hearing of a planned prolonged occupation, PLA soldiers were instructed to peacefully disperse the crowd of protestors on June 2nd. These PLA soldiers approaching Tiananmen Square were unarmed, and the troop convoys were subsequently swarmed by protestors after unknown demonstrators (either students, workers, or another group) struck the convoy with Molotov cocktails.
At least 100 of the tanks and convoy vehicles carrying PLA soldiers to the Square were set on fire (34, 35, 36), some with the soldiers still inside who were burned alive.
34 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e34a819b0470a339e6b97e9824da007b-lq
35 — https://www.voltairenet.org/local/cache-vignettes/L400xH288/TS-cr-a8438.gif?1714491746
36 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d79bfaf747f06699763523aab55bbcf1-lq
The students massacring the unarmed soldiers and torching their convoys doesn’t often make it into western press, likely because the admission that the PLA soldiers were unarmed would have to be made — how else could students and workers cause so much death and destruction of military personnel and property without they themselves being the victims of such horrific violence? In the west, we only ever hear that the PLA soldiers were the ones massacring the protestors.
Also left out of western media remembrances of the June Fourth Incident is how the bodies of several of these PLA soldiers were later strung up by their necks and put on display by the protestors. The images of these barbaric acts (37, 38) are extraordinarily graphic.
37 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-dce14c9610056835bfa596dbfef019a0-lq
38 — https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7b94a58c21597fb759327bf1ccf93ee0-lq
And if you are looking for western media confirmation of these atrocities, the Wall Street Journal, to their credit, addressed it on June 5th, 1989 (39), stating: “Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus.” Photographic evidence of this claim exists (40) and it, too, is extraordinarily graphic.
39 — https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-22543
40 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/img_4587.jpg
Not only is there photographic evidence of this barbarism, but video evidence, as well. CCTV footage shows some extent of the damage and fires with protestors commandeering an armored vehicle and driving it around recklessly (41) while a BBC report from later that evening reveals a far more chaotic scene. (42)
41 — https://videos.files.wordpress.com/G5kK5eS1/tiananmen-early-june-violence_mp4_dvd.mp4
42 — https://twitter.com/i/status/1665665705898033152
In response to the massacre of the soldiers by the protestors and extreme destruction they caused, PLA soldiers were given weapons on June 3rd, but these would not all stay in the hands of the PLA, who were instructed to exercise restraint. An image taken by Tank Man photographer Jeff Widener on that same day, June 3rd, shows a group of protestors looting a military vehicle, with the subject holding up a rifle. (43) We can see now why they would start throwing rocks at Jeff Widener’s head.
43 — https://worldaffairs.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image51.jpeg
The violence and bloodshed Chai Ling had wished for in her video interview had indeed come to pass, although it was not the students being massacred, as she had hoped. She later claimed her interview was heavily edited and her statements taken out of context, but as the video shows evidence of the contrary, Chai Ling had her defamation lawsuit against the Long Bow Group, producer of the 1995 documentary ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’, in which her interview was shown, thrown out by a Massachusetts court. Chai Ling had to pay $511,943.12 in fees and expenses. She later accused the Long Bow group of aligning themselves with the Chinese government, calling them “tools of Satan”.
On June 3rd and 4th, many violent clashes between the PLA and protestors occurred. A student claiming to be an eyewitness gave an exhausted report to Wen Wai Po, a Hong Kong newspaper, which was published in the New York Times on June 12th, 1989 (44) after everything had settled down. This account closely aligns with what most westerners have in their heads about the violence that occurred. However, this report is called into question by Nicholas Kristof, the correspondent sent to Beijing to cover the incident by the very same outlet which published the student’s claims, The New York Times.
44 — https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/12/world/turmoil-in-china-student-tells-the-tiananmen-story-and-then-machine-guns-erupted.html
45 — https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html
It must be stressed here with extreme clarity — it is nothing short of a monumental tragedy that soldiers were forced to engage in violent and deadly acts against the protestors to quell their furious and deadly rioting, as it is equally terrible that the students and other protestors behaved in such a barbaric manner against the soldiers to begin with. Anyone who suggests nothing of the sort occurred that day for their own political reasons is purely despicable, and so too are those who inflate, exaggerate, and sensationalize the accounts of violence for their own political purposes.
In the west, we are so often quick to criticize the Chinese government for suppressing the actual accounts of what happened — even though 100% of our information regarding this censorship comes from western sources who have proven to be untrustworthy in regards to China — but we never pause to consider if the extreme accusations of a massacre of tens of thousands in Tiananmen Square told to us by those same western sources hold any more veracity than the falsehoods published in the New York Times.
Furthermore, the suggestion that mentions of the events surrounding Tiananmen Square are indeed censored in China, as western press loves to remind us, is provably fictitious — it is mentioned in the Centennial Events of the Communist Party of China by CPC News (46); by The People’s Daily in an article on Memorabilia of the Communist Party of China 1989 (47); China Daily states: “I have seen reports from reporters and from eyewitnesses saying that students were evacuated from the Tiananmen Square peacefully and orderly as well as video clips to that effect. Why were the killing of soldiers not included? The use of the term “massacre” is much too loaded to be an objective description of what had happened.” (48); china.org.cn has also reported on the incident (49); among many other instances.
46 — http://cpc.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0629/c64387-32143323.html
47 — https://www.12371.cn/2012/06/12/ARTI1339473691203173.shtml
48 — https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2019-07/09/content_37489430.htm
49 — http://www.china.org.cn/world/2014-06/05/content_32576642.htm
Nicholas Kristof is not the only western correspondent to push back against the more sensationalized accounts (which often come without corroborating evidence). In the same NYT article above, Kristof speaks of the PLA allowing protestors to leave the Square peacefully. Video evidence provided by a Spanish crew confirms this to be true. (50)
50 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjz-6EdjPi8
The video showing protestors given ample time to leave the Square peacefully is nothing short of a radical departure from the claims we so often see in western press — that these students were massacred by the PLA in Tiananmen Square. Nicholas Kristof’s words are damning enough to this narrative, but it is always possible that he is the liar in this scenario — after all, he’s reporting for the New York Times. And the video from the Spanish crew could have been taken before this massacre we hear so much about.
However, Kristof is not the only western reporter to make such claims. CBS reporter Richard Roth, also on the scene, disputed the alleged “massacre”. (51) The same is echoed by BBC reporter James Miles who stated: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”. (52) Reuters journalist Graham Earnshaw, who was in the Square from the night of June 3rd through the morning of June 4th, wrote in his memoirs that the military came, negotiated with the students, and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully. (53) A cable from the US Embassy in Beijing sent in July of 1989 reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] Square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students … until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.” (54)
51 — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
52 — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm
53 — https://earnshaw.com/writings/memoirs/tiananmen-story
54 — https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
Even statements made by anti-CPC dissidents, such as Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national, one of the leaders of the protests, and one of the last to leave the Square, stated on video he saw no violence in the Square. (56) Even those who have every reason to lie to support their case, choose instead to refute the more sensationalist claims of PLA violence.
56 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSR9zgY1QgU
But this didn’t stop Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief, claiming on Meet the Press that “tens of thousands” died in Tiananmen Square (55), a number which flies in the face of the accounts of the actual reporters and protestors on the scene. Tim Russert was not in Beijing in June of 1989 — how would he know?
“Tens of thousands” is no doubt a number the United States would have loved to be accurate to give their anti-China propaganda more credence, but by all accounts of those who were present on the scene, no one is reported to have died in Tiananmen Square itself. By all accounts of those directly involved in the incident, including westerners reporting for western media, the most likely numbers are between 200 and 600 total fatalities, between students, workers, soldiers, and innocent bystanders, with about half being soldiers, in the areas surrounding the Square between 1 and 5 kilometers away.
There was no one-sided “massacre” of extreme violence being inflicted almost exclusively by one side on the other — as there is in Palestine today.
Those numbers on their own constitute a horrific tragedy that requires no inflation or exaggeration to mourn. It is absolutely shameful and regrettable that this incident happened, and every bit as shameful is how this incident is so often intentionally misrepresented in western press by aggrandizing it with fictions for America’s propagandistic warmongering purposes. Is what really happened not horrible enough?
Why is it that so many Americans prefer to mourn imaginary people instead of the real ones who actually died? You see this in the grossly overestimated death toll regarding the June Fourth Incident, just as you see today with endless rivers of crocodile tears shed for the “40 beheaded babies” conspiracy theory in Palestine while the tens of thousands of actual Palestinians being eviscerated by American weapons are not grieved by these same folks. That should tell you the value Americans tend to put on the lives of people who are different, which is none. They just can’t bring themselves to care about actual Chinese people or actual Palestinian people dying, and their exaggerations and hoaxes and lies serve only to manufacture consent for American aggression and more loss of life. It seems less like they are mourning tens of thousands of lives lost and more like they are desiring that number to come true.
So, what can we take away from all this?
First, it should be noted that without the involvement of the United States CIA, Voice of America, the NED, the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China, and other American entities and individuals working with student leaders like Chai Ling to influence and extend the protests, it is entirely possible that the protests both in and around Tiananmen Square might have concluded without any violence occurring. This would have been the worst possible outcome for the US, as it would not give them an occurrence to point to and say “See? China bad!”, much less a tragedy to exploit for the same purpose. As we have seen in the too numerous to list regime-change operations and color revolutions America has conducted around the world, immense loss of life is never a concern in their ongoing efforts to “spread democracy”.
35 years later, the United States is applying more pressure than ever on China, through its many military bases in the areas surrounding China, to its economic cold war, to its pressures on Taiwan for use as a potential proxy for violent armed conflict with mainland China, to its unceasing negative press regarding China — it is obvious that the United States and its corporate media apparatus is perhaps the very last place we should be getting our information about what is happening, or has happened in the past, in China.
And yet many Americans will be unquestioningly sharing Tank Man imagery on this and every June 4th, along with western reports about how terrible it was that “tens of thousands” of nonviolent student demonstrators were senselessly massacred by trigger-happy PLA soldiers exercising no restraint on orders from the “CCP” in a one-sided act of savagery — which says little about the context of what truly occurred in Beijing in June of 1989, but a whole lot about their own Sinophobic blood-thirst.
And when you have that context of the June Fourth Incident, “Tank Man” looks considerably less brave and more like a random buffoon who needlessly inserted himself into a previously-violent situation that was now under control with no further violence occurring, whose actions — if not thankfully stopped by other random civilians physically removing him from the scenario — could likely have reignited the violence all over again by his desire for the tanks to remain in Tiananmen Square as evidenced by his gestures for them to do just that.
Tank Man was not “brave”, he was a dumbass.
Real bravery could be witnessed in the reporters on the scene in and around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 putting their lives in danger to document the violence of the protestors and push back against their own media outlets publishing unsubstantiated contradictory falsehoods, and potentially putting their careers and livelihoods on the line in doing so. Real bravery can be seen in the student movements in America today pushing back against their country facilitating the genocide of Palestine. Real bravery is trying to stop your government from committing violence, not trying to ensure it continues.
It is simply outrageous that this random dunderhead has become the default symbol for state violence against political movements for so many Americans - not only because there is no indication at all that Tank Man was involved in the political movement, or because there is no indication at all to suggest any harm was done to him whatsoever, but because of the many dozens — if not hundreds — of instances of actual state violence used against political movements in America. Not Kent State, or Wounded Knee, or the MOVE bombing, or the COINTELPRO assassinations, or the 68 DNC convention, or the Occupy movement, or LA 92, or Standing Rock, or Ferguson, or NoDAPL, or Stop Cop City, or the Palestinian solidarity gatherings on university campuses happening in America in protest of genocide LITERALLY RIGHT NOW.
If you’re an American defaulting to Tank Man as a symbol of resisting government oppression or state-sanctioned violence, I don’t believe for one half of one second that you care at all about what your government or any other is doing against political movements, provided they don’t negatively affect you personally.
In closing, I would like to point out that in every possible instance, I have used western sources, not only to avoid dismissals of the source being Chinese state propaganda, but also to illustrate the fact that we in the west often are told about what is happening in the world (although perhaps less often today than in the past).
The information is out there if we are indeed interested in more than scratching a “China bad” itch. But sadly for many westerners, their negative views of China were not adopted based on evidence in the first place, and therefore cannot be altered with evidence. I did not write all this for those people; I wrote it for those who have a sincere desire to know what is going on in the world, what has happened in the past, why it happened, and what the institutions that hold power over us desire to happen in the future.
And for those sincere western folks who wish to voice their opposition to state violence wielded against political movements, I say to you — you needn’t travel back in time three and a half decades to look at what happened half-way around the world; you can simply look at what your government is doing today. You can look at the students on college campuses all across the United States protesting the genocide in Palestine, and the militarized police forces wearing body armor mobilizing en masse to viciously attack those students for daring to suggest we should not be slaughtering 100 children every day for seven straight months.
There is simply no greater atrocity in the world at this moment than what the United States is doing along with its vassal Israel to Palestine and its people. A real-life massacre is unfolding in real-time before our eyes. It is the single most filmed and photographed war crime in human history. It is a genocide. There is no shortage of documentation and evidence of the inhumane cruelty and abject sadism the US and Israel are engaged in, far more evidence than what we have regarding the June Fourth Incident by untold orders of magnitude. And yet this genocide is denied, ignored, or even supported by many of the same people lecturing you about how “brave” Tank Man was, how “tens of thousands” were “massacred” in Tiananmen Square, and exactly how “China bad”.
These people are not dumb, they are not misinformed, nor are they confused. They are evil.
