June 5, 2024 — “The image of a man standing alone facing a line of tanks will forever be etched in our collective memory. The person in front of the tanks continues to remind us of the heroic spirit of Chinese ordinary citizens who risked their lives for dignity and freedom,” said former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on June 3.
Tuesday, June 4, marked the 35th anniversary of the June 4 incident. The photo of the “Tank Man” has become iconic and symbolizes the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
On the evening of June 3, 1989, after nearly two months of protests by Chinese students and workers demanding political reform and an end to corruption, the Chinese armed forces entered central Beijing to clear the area. It was a bloody massacre, with witnesses reporting tanks running over unarmed protesters and soldiers indiscriminately firing into the crowds.
To this day, the massacre remains one of the most sensitive political taboos in mainland China, with all discussions related to it strictly censored. Commemorative activities can lead to imprisonment. The Chinese authorities have never disclosed the number of deaths, but estimates by outsiders range from hundreds to thousands.
The photo of the “Tank Man” was taken by Jeff Widener, a photographer for the Associated Press at the time. The process of capturing the image documented the tension and fear of the moment, including how equipment and film were kept hidden from authorities. The Chinese government was making efforts to control the flow of information to the world and attempted to impede all live broadcasts from Beijing by U.S. news media.
An article published on CNN’s website on June 4 excerpted content from the book “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic,” authored by Mike Chinoy, the Beijing bureau chief for CNN during the crackdown. Chinoy was in Beijing at the time and reported live from a balcony overlooking the scene, engaging with witnesses during and after the historic events.
It was June 5, 1989, a Monday after the crackdown had begun the day before when AP’s Beijing photo editor Liu Heung Shing asked Widener to help capture images of the Chinese army from a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square, which was under military control at the time.
Widener had flown in a week earlier from the AP’s Bangkok office to assist in the coverage. He had been injured at the start of the crackdown, hit on the head by a stone and bedridden with the flu. Despite his condition, he concealed his photography gear in his jacket – a pocket with a 400mm lens, another with a teleconverter, film hidden in his underwear, and a camera body in his back pocket.
“I rode my bike towards the Beijing Hotel, with only rubble and burned buses on the road,” Widener recalled. “Suddenly, four tanks came, soldiers on board carrying heavy machine guns. I was riding my bike, thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.'”
“I heard other journalists had their film and cameras confiscated. I had to find a way to get into the hotel,” he added. “I looked into the dark lobby and saw a Western student. I went up to him and said in a low voice, ‘I’m with the Associated Press, can you let me into your room?’ He immediately understood and said, ‘Sure.'”
That young man was Kirk Martsen, an American exchange student who discreetly brought Widener into his sixth-floor hotel room.
From that moment on, Widener began photographing the tanks moving along the road beneath the hotel, sometimes hearing bells, which he later learned were carts carrying bodies or injured people being taken to hospitals.
Other journalists were also at the hotel, including CNN photojournalist Jonathan Schaer. He set up a camera on the balcony of the CNN hotel room and continued live broadcasting the crackdown over the weekend.
“Another photographer said, ‘Hey, look at the guy in front of the tank!’ So, I zoomed in with the lens and started recording,” Schaer reminisced.
“As the convoy stopped, the man blocked the tank, and they tried to scare him away by shooting above his head. Shooting above his head was basically in our direction from the hotel. The bullets were too close; you could hear them whizzing by,” Schaer said.
In Martsen’s room, Widener stood by the window, preparing to capture the approaching tank convoy when “a person with a shopping bag walked in front of the tank and started waving the bag,” he said.
The tank stopped, attempting to maneuver around the person. They followed the tank’s movements and once again blocked its path. At some point during the confrontation, the person climbed onto the lead tank and seemed to be speaking to those inside.
However, Widener faced a predicament – the scene was too far; his 400mm lens couldn’t capture it. His teleconverter was laid on the bed, and he had to make a split decision: Should he grab the teleconverter, risking losing the shot during those precious moments?
He seized the opportunity, attached the teleconverter to the camera, and took “one, two, three shots. And that was it.”
“Some people came, grabbed this guy, and ran away. I recall sitting on a small couch near the window, and the student (Martsen) asked, ‘Did you get it? Did you get it?’ There was a voice in my head saying, ‘Maybe I got it, but I’m not sure,'” he said.
After receiving a call from Widener, Liu immediately issued instructions: roll up the film, go to the lobby, and have one of the many foreign students there take it to the AP office.
Widener complied, allowing a student to ride away with the film hidden in their underwear. Forty-five minutes later, “an American with a ponytail and a backpack appeared holding an envelope from the AP,” Liu said.
They quickly developed the film, “I looked at that frame – that frame, and I sent it out,” Liu said.
CNN’s photojournalist Schaer initially didn’t realize what they had captured on the videotape. Since email couldn’t handle large videos at the time, CNN used a “small gizmo that could send video… a prototype we were using from Sony,” Schaer said. The gizmo took an hour to scan a frame of the video and send it through a phone line.
So they sent five frames, duplicated the videotape, and mailed it to Beijing airport, where they recruited a traveler to take the tape to Hong Kong.
Several media outlets captured photos of the “Tank Man,” but Widener’s photo was the most widely used. The picture made front-page headlines in newspapers worldwide and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize that year.
Widener mentioned that it wasn’t until the next morning when he arrived at the AP office and saw messages from audiences and journalists worldwide that he realized the profound impact of the photo.
To this day, the world still doesn’t know who the Tank Man was or what became of him. However, he remains a powerful symbol of individual resistance against the authoritarian power of the Chinese state.