Frontline: The Tank Man

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

I just saw the above documentary last night (was rerun in my area). It was reasonably good but long (almost 1.5 hours). It was about the Tiananmen Square incident, China's economic growth, factory workers' conditions and lack of freedom of press and speech there.

I was really blown away when they showed 4 students in a prestigious Beijing university the infamous "tank man" picture and they were all basically baffled. There was a mention of 1989 but the others had no idea and gave answers of "I have no idea" or "is it a piece of artwork?"

If you're in the SF Bay Area, it's going to be rerun at midnight 11/27, otherwise search by title or set an ARWL if you don't like watching online.

 

Essentially. It was mentioned at the end that the "tank man" image was shown only once on the news and they perverted w/claims that this showed the Chinese military's restraint.

In one part of the broadcast, they illustrated the censorship that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have to comply with to do business there. If you do a Google image search for "Tiananmen" in China, you apparently get 0 images of the tank man picture unlike here.