The force more powerful
Twenty years ago he was the ultimate symbol of a peaceful democratic protest that went terribly, fatally wrong: a lone Chinese man in a simple white button-down shirt, carrying two plastic shopping bags, staring down a column of tanks.
Tank Man — his identity has never been determined — shot to worldwide fame that day for stopping those tanks, hours after they had brutally crushed student-led protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds — possibly thousands — died in the early-hours protest on June 4, 1989, an event that still remains a forbidden topic in Communist-governed China.
Pictures of Tank Man’s courageous efforts and other information about the crackdown are still officially censored in China. But now, 20 years on, modern technology and the wide reach of social networking sites like Facebook are providing curious students with the information they were previously denied.
Good thing.
The vast majority of Chinese youth show no outward knowledge of what happened 20 years ago, a fact that pains the still-mourning relatives of those who were killed.
“This is a cruel reality — young people do not know the truth,” said Ding Zilin, a retired professor whose 17-year-old son was shot dead that night. “The government hides the truth from children and keeps it as a sort of forbidden zone. It isn’t taught in classrooms.”
But in the anonymity of the online world, Internet-savvy youths use mirror sites and proxy servers to explore alternative versions of the official history and to discuss their own frustrations with their government’s clumsy efforts at censorship.
The Great Firewall is intended to shut out information not approved by the regime. The human will to be free is more powerful.
