TANK MAN: The 35th Anniversary Of The Event China Says Never Happened

It was a big story 35 years ago today. But it happened so long ago, few still remember it.

That suits China’s Communist Party just fine, since about the only story they work harder at suppressing than Tiananmen Square is the fact that Taiwan, though Chinese, has never once bowed the knee to China’s Communist Revolution.

It was a gruesome day in history, where China perpetrated one in a long line of hardline crackdowns on peaceful student protest, much like the almost-forgotten protests we saw in Hong Kong shortly before COVID shut down the world.

While the rest of us were worried about ’15 days to slow the spread’, China was busy jailing Hong Kong dissidents and seizing control despite an existing system with a duly-elected government.

In a curious twist of irony, this writer watched history unfold in real time on the news while his High School teachers were teaching about Bloody Sunday in the 1905 Russian revolution.

Even now, there is disagreement about how many thousands (some suggest as many as ten thousand) of civilians were killed by the State in that two-day stretch. But there is some level of agreement (except on the part of China) as to the thousands being plural at the very least.

All the world watched in amazement as one brave unnamed man stood alone against the military might of a government that thought little of the value of individual human lives. He stood up on June 5th — one day AFTER the CCP had used its jackboot tactics to crush a civilian protest.

Notice when the camera pans out that there is a FAR bigger military presence behind that lead tank than the close-up photo history best remembers him for would indicate.

And yet he STILL stood in the path of the tank. Better still… he climbed on top of it.

Judging by stories of the Human Rights abuses that continue to this day — religious minorities, ethnic minorities, selling fentanyl precursors to the West, and Uyghur slave labor camps — their respect for individual lives hasn’t changed much.

Happy anniversary to Tank Man… whoever you are.