Tank Man
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Photo by: 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 still and motion photography of the man standing alone before a line of 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. In April 1998, the United States magazine TIME included "The Unknown Rebel" in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Behind the Image
The incident took place on the Chang An Da Dao, or "Great Avenue of Everlasting Peace", just a minute away from Tiananmen, which leads into the Forbidden City, Beijing, on June 5, 1989, the day after the Chinese government began cracking down violently on the protests. The man stood 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 was 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". It has been said that anxious onlookers then pulled the man down and absorbed him into the crowd and the tanks continued on their way.
Significance of Image
In the West, pictures of the Unknown Rebel were presented as a symbol of the Chinese Democracy Movement; a Chinese youth risking his life to oppose a military juggernaut seemed a fitting representation of students bravely and spontaneously protesting against the authoritarian rule of the CCP. An example of this continuing reading of the image can be seen in the 2000 novel Hong Kong, by Stephen Coonts, where "Tank Man" is fictionalized as a man who goes on to lead a group of political insurgents against the Communist government. The image resonated within democracies as a symbol of an individual's power to halt government and force a change in direction.
In the PRC the image was used as a symbol of the care of the PLA soldiers in protecting the Chinese People: despite orders to advance, the driver of the tank refused to do so if it meant injuring a single citizen. Tank Man was presented as a social delinquent – symbolic of irresponsibile opportunist rioters during the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As with most matters related to the 1989 protests, the Tank Man topic later became and remains a political taboo in mainland China; where any discussion of it is regarded as inappropriate or risky.
Biography
Little is publically 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.
There are several conflicting stories about what happened to him after the demonstration. In a speech to the President's Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn — former deputy special assistant to President of the United States Richard Nixon — 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 and in hiding in mainland China.
An eyewitness account of the event published in October 2005 by Charlie Cole, a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine at the time, states that the man was arrested on the spot by the Public Security Bureau.
The People's Republic of China government has made few statements about the incident or the person involved. 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 2000 Jiang Zemin was interviewed by Mike Wallace , the veteran CBS"60 Minutes" reporter. Wallace took out Wang Weilin 's picture and asked Jiang, "Do you admire this young man's courage?" Jiang offered a surprising reply, "He absolutely was not arrested. I don't know his whereabouts. To the experienced reporter, it was telling that Jiang had answered an unasked question.
See also
References
- The Unknown Rebel – Time Magazine's profile. Retrieved 19 January 2005
- CNN Interactive: Video Almanac – 1989 – 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.
- 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.)