I'm a Tank Man, I'm a Tank Tank Man, Yes I'm a Tank Man.....

The Tank Man

This is one of the coolest and most powerful stories from China's post-Mao protest era. An unidentified, common man threw himself in front of Chinese tanks in order to stop them from coming into the city of Beijing. Witnesses and historians speculated that all he wanted was peace for the people of the city. He has never been officially identified and no one knows what became of him after that day.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre was filled with other stories of heroism similar to this one. Students protested for days, often running right into open fire and losing life and limb for their beliefs. The real threat the government felt, however, from the protests was not in Tiananmen Square but in areas surrounding the city where the ordinary person had joined in the fight. Up until this point, only students and college communities were protesting from political freedom but this particular movement inspired and motivated working class citizens to join in. This aspect opened the resistance to communism to millions and millions more people. The government realized this day that they had a real situation on their hands and the only way to kill it would be to censor the rest of China and the world from the events and photos from 1989's massacre. They all but wiped out every image and story about Tank Man and others and the movement was squashed. Life went about as normal for the unblissfully ignorant Chinese population as Deng's economic progress continued to move forward.

The Two Chinas

Deng Xioping's economic reform vision continued to be carried out and China grew more quickly than any other industrialized nation in the world. They are a superpower with a rising economy in the world. But that's only one China.

China A- Big Business
Modern, urbanized, rise of criminalization, health system overload, poor education

China B- Underdeveloped, rural
Poor, no growth (growth is in the city), poor water resources, no education

There is a huge inequality here. China B's young people are moving into China A in order to be able to feed and educate theird children, leaving behind parents, their kids, and their China just to survive. It's a difficult situation in which they must surrender or fall behind China A's progress.

I think even China's inequality is wider than the U.S.'s. It's true our top 10% make more than the bottom 50% of the nation, but everyone still pretty much lives in the same world in the U.S. In China, the China A lives in space age while China B appears to live in ancient China with farms and fires everywhere. These people are still not satisfied with life because they are either dirt poor or overworked in dirty factories in China A. It's no wonder they are still uneasy even with ecnomic freedom.

The crazy thing is that protests still happen in China. But, the story of the Tank Man is not one passed on from revolutionary to revolutionary. No one is old enough to have been there or have heard of it. So, the inspiration that could be drawn from it and used as fuel is gone from today's protesters. It was evident from an interview featured in PBS's Frontline presentation on the Tank Man where four young people could not even identify what the picture of the Tank Man was from. It's sad. Even Google and Yahoo have wiped the photos from their Chinese search engines but not their U.S. databases. Clearly, there is a system at work here where economic interests top the rights of the people.