If you were old enough to grasp the significance of this image then, it has remained indelibly etched into your memory ever since. One man bravely standing down a column of advancing tanks by himself. And, more amazingly, he succeeds!
That's an impressive enough feat to accomplish with only one tank. But if we look at a wider-lensed photo, we see that he was standing up to a whole lot more than one.
The lead tank crew, refusing to run the lone protestor over, shut off their engine, and the entire column was halted. Eventually, two unidentified men arrived to quickly escort the protestor away. The identity of "Tank Man" remains unknown to this day. Many assume that the men who took him were with the national security service, and that he was most likely imprisoned and, eventually, executed. But others think the men were fellow protestors who hid him from the government. Leaked internal reports from the Chinese government suggest that, despite an intensive search, they were never able to find Tank Man, and that they don't even know his identity. For his sake, I hope so.
Protestors in Tiananmen Square had already constructed their own Statue of Liberty to rally supporters to their cause. Their 'Goddess of Democracy' stood 33 feet tall, made of papier-mâché and foam over a metal armature in a mere four days. They made it so large because they knew the government would either have to accept its presence in the Square, or else destroy it utterly, rather than simply transporting it away.
Eventually, the Red Army managed to violently clear the Square, and tanks were used to topple and crush the statue. The pro-democracy movement was brutally crushed in China. For now, at least.
The People's Republic of China has gone to great lengths to make the entire protest disappear. The Chinese people cannot find reference to it on the internet, nor see any photos. Their history books contain not the slightest passing reference to it. Foreign journalists report today that a majority of university students asked have no idea there ever was a protest.
Nevertheless, there have been a great many fundamental changes in China under the seemingly placid surface in the years since. The protestors of 1989 took the hard-won lessons learned in Tiananmen Square and adapted them, going underground to slowly nudge their country closer to liberty and freedom from within. It's inconceivable to think that today's young generation of Chinese would ever engage in things like the 1960s 'Cultural Revolution' again...they are far too committed to personal individualism and self-awareness to ever become faceless pawns like that again.
Who knows, in another generation, true democracy may come to China, and the Goddess of Democracy was be permanently holding her torch above Tiananmen Square for all to see. We can certainly hope so.
No comments:
Post a Comment