A blog in idleness

Today, I’ve seen the PBS documentary named “The Tank Man.” The Tank Man was the famous man, who stood in front of tanks in Tiananmen massacre in July, 1989. The program also told me how this brutal event was like. Because I was a child in 1989 and do not remember what exactly happened in the summer 1989 in Beijing, the image in the documentary really astonished me. The camera showed that even an ambulance and doctors and nurses in it were shot by the People Liberation Army when they come to help injured students.


The documentary also covered the today’s social contradiction in China. People living in China A, which has attained high development with enormous investments and trades, are enjoying the higher standard of Western life style. People in China B, mostly in rural developing areas, live under so bad conditions like people in other developing countries. Due to the huge gap and economic problems in the rural area, more than 75,000 demonstrations took place last year in China. The number before the year was 50,000.


The students in Beijing university are mostly from China A. They enjoy urban life and benefit from the China’s economic development. But,16 years ago, the university was center of the demonstration. Now, students do not know about the disastrous incident brought by their relentless government because schools do not teach any thing about it to them and the Chinese internet police (having more than 30,000 people) is restricting inappropriate information for them on the Web. Even American IT companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are cooperating with the Chinese authority to restrict searching the word “Tiananmen” and prohibiting Chinese people from knowing the truth.


This documentary was really good, and I recommend that a lot of people, especially Chinese people, see this program. PBS said the program is to be available on its website. According to this documentary, the tank man’s fate after the incident is unknown.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/