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At the time of the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, David Chen was a 25-year-old student. Using a camera his uncle had given him, he spent a week taking photos of the protests. Those photos have been hidden away until now: the NY Times has published a selection of them today.
I’ve seen several versions of the iconic Tank Man photo but here’s a little-known wider view that shows just how many tanks the guy was holding up. Larger version here. There is also, amazingly, video of the incident:
You’ll note at the end that the man is hustled off by a group of people. See also the Tank Man of Tiananmen (via @polarben)
Update: There is also this view of Tank Man, taken from the ground level:
You can see how long he was standing there waiting for the arrival of the tanks.
The NY Times Lens blog, which has been really good right from the start, has a great story today about the photographers who took the pictures of the man in the white shirt staring down the tanks in Tiananmen twenty years ago.
As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.
I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.
Update: The Lens story prompted photographer Terril Jones to share a previously unpublished photo he’d taken of the tank man from a unique angle.
Update: From Lawyers, Guns, and Money:
The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn’t the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn’t die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn’t die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there’s some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don’t doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity.
James Fallows reports that China has been very successful in erasing the Tiananmen Square protests from the official record.
I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family’s experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.
As the June 4 anniversary of the crackdown approaches, the Great Firewall of China has been strengthened by adding Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and Bing to the list of sites that are unavailable by China’s internet users. (via snarkmarket)
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