The night before, the People’s Liberation Army had rolled into Tiananmen Square and opened fire on its own citizens. The estimates of the dead range from hundreds to thousands. The Chinese government has never released a count. By morning, the square was cleared, the blood hosed away, and a column of Type 59 tanks was rolling down Chang’an Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — to prove that order had been restored. [1]
A man walked into the street.
He was wearing a white shirt. He was carrying shopping bags. He stepped directly into the path of the lead tank and stood there. The tank tried to go around him. He sidestepped to block it. It tried the other way. He blocked it again. He climbed onto the turret. He spoke to the crew. [1]
Then people — maybe friends, maybe strangers — pulled him away. He disappeared into the crowd and into history.
We do not know his name. The Chinese government has never identified him. When asked about the photograph in 1990, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin said: “I think that man was never killed.” That is all anyone in power has ever said. [1]
The photographs — taken from the balcony of the Beijing Hotel by Jeff Widener of the AP, Stuart Franklin of Magnum, Charlie Cole of Newsweek, and others — became the defining image of the century’s end. Not the fall of the Berlin Wall, not the moon landing — a man with shopping bags standing in front of a tank. [1]
He did not stop the tanks. They rolled on after he was pulled away. He did not save anyone. He did not change the Chinese government’s course by a single degree.
He showed the world what one person looks like when they decide that today, on this street, the killing stops here.
Bibliography
[1] Wikipedia. “Tank Man.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man