Despite everything we know today about what happened on the night of June 4-5, 1989 in Beijing: There is no footage from the events on Tiananmen Square itself. But one image has burned itself into the collective memory: The Tank Man. The photo shows a man in the distance, standing in front of a tank column, stopping them in their tracks. This made Tank Man the epitome of the “power of the nameless,” writes Marcel Grzanna to mark the 33rd anniversary of the massacre this weekend. Tank Man has influenced pop culture and is even considered one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. However, China’s government deliberately keeps his identity a secret to avoid creating a hero. But this is precisely how it nurtures the myth of the ordinary citizen who courageously stood up to precisely this government power.
Millions of Shanghai residents regained some of their everyday freedom on Wednesday. Right off the bat, public transport capacity returned to 75 percent of its normal level. However, our author team in China asked around a little more closely: Many people feel cheated because they are still not allowed to go outside despite the lifting. As long as everyone sat at home equally, acceptance was still higher than it is now amid the inequality between neighborhoods. In a democracy, those responsible would have been voted out of office long ago.
It was only about three minutes on the morning of June 5, 1989, that turned one man into a hero. An unknown man stands in the way of a Chinese army tank column on Chang’an Jie in the heart of Beijing, near Tiananmen Square. Whether the man is an active member of the democracy movement, which paid with many lives for its demand for political participation the night before, remains unclear. Regardless, his courage will go down in history as the last act of open resistance of those days and weeks in the spring, 33 years ago.
These few moments on the Chang’an Jie have burned themselves into the memory of the global public. To this day, they exude a fascination that has created a global culture of remembrance that makes it impossible for the Chinese Communist Party to dismiss the Tiananmen massacre against its own people as a side note of history. The identity of the man is unclear, as is whether he was punished after several men pushed him off the street. And yet his pseudonym is still on everyone’s mind today.
His impact goes far beyond the memory of the CP’s crimes of 1989. “This young man changed the world,” says Professor Bruce Herschensohn in the 2006 documentary “Tank Man”. Herschensohn was once an advisor to Richard Nixon’s US administration and dealt extensively with communist regimes. “Tank Man’s actions supported the transformation of the Soviet Union,” believed the now-deceased Herschensohn, who traveled to various Eastern European countries shortly after the events in Beijing.
People around the globe took to the streets to protest pro-Soviet regimes in their own countries. Several times and in many countries, Herschensohn said, people had told him, in essence: “If this Chinese boy can stand in front of the tanks, so can we.”
Five months after Tank Man, the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc followed. Many societies got rid of their despots and dictatorial governors under Moscow’s leadership and developed democratic structures. But only few moments of these changes and revolutionary days remained in the memory of the world like the determination of Tank Man.
The US news magazine Time gave expression to his role in the fight against the oppression of the masses by corrupt regimes when it named the “Tank Man” one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. “The man with the tanks represents the power of the nameless,” the magazine wrote in 1998.
To this day, these recordings are still pulled from the archives regularly. Teachers in democratic countries use them as illustrative material in history lessons. The image of the dramatic moment can be found on T-shirts and posters. Tank Man has become a kind of pop culture in the West. “It is Tank Man’s mystery that enables his enduring presence – that permits him to be a code for so many Western values and desires,” Jennifer Hubbert, of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, told the New York Times a few years ago.
In her article Appropriating Iconicity: Why Tank Man Still Matters, published in the Journal of the Society for Visual Anthropology, Hubbert describes what happens when the iconic Tank Man picture is modified and repurposed for new political purposes. She concludes that the use of the image in new contexts in the United States leads it to become less about a lack of political liberalism in China and more about democratic deficits in the United States.
In today’s China, young people, in particular, have little knowledge of Tank Man. References to its history only rarely, if at all, slip through the Party’s censors. Chinese textbooks treat the so-called “incident” as a heroic deed by the Chinese military. Official Chinese sources speak of several hundred dead in the protests in and around Tian’anmen Square. Chances are that, in reality, there were probably several thousand. However, under the CP leadership, there will never be any clarification of the exact number of victims and a public reappraisal of the bloodshed.
It quickly takes action against anything that might remind it of the night of June 4. Most recently, in 2016, four men were sentenced to several years in prison for sticking labels on liquor bottles that drew references to the fatal events. As a cartoon drawing, they depicted Tank Man and a series of tanks on it. Underneath was written, “Never forget, never give up”.
Even 33 years after the massacre, it is still unclear who the man was. As early as 1990, foreign media had identified him as Wang Weilin. Among others, Bruce Herschensohn claimed that he had learned this name from sources in Beijing. But this assumption was never confirmed. Little is also known about the person behind the name Wang Weilin. There are also different versions regarding his fate. One is that he was executed at the end of June 1989, another says that his execution was carried out months later. And later on, rumors spread that Tank Man was living anonymously in Taiwan.
The theory of those who believe in his disappearance and thus his survival is based primarily on the fact that Tank Man was not publicly executed. Several protesters were publicly paraded by name on television following the events as a warning to the rest of the population and were subsequently murdered. Some of their offenses appeared much less provocative than the blockade of the tanks. Still, unlike many others, Tank Man was not executed on state television.
The question remains to this day who the men were who forced him off the street. State police or ordinary citizens? A year after Tiananmen, US journalist Barbara Walters confronted General Secretary Jiang Zemin with a photo of Tank Man in an interview for ABC. Jiang said he did not believe the man had been killed. But he also said he could not give any concrete information about his whereabouts. All the unanswered questions contributed to the Tank Man myth in the years that followed.
The people of Shanghai have eagerly been waiting for this day. At yesterday midnight, the strict lockdown officially ended. Millions of people were allowed to leave their homes for the first time in two months. Many stayed awake, just to be able to walk out the door at midnight sharp. On social media, Shanghai’s citizens shared images of walking the streets at night or celebrating their regained freedom with a beer in hand. Others shared videos of workers removing barricades. “These were the hardest two months of my life. Now I will have to get used to going to work every morning again,” said a Shanghai woman from the Jing’an district: “I am disappointed with the government, but just happy to be able to get out again“.
Like her, many people in the city of 25 million feel cheated by the authorities. During the lockdown, social networks were flooded with complaints about the lack of food, the often disproportionate brutality of pandemic workers, and general complaints about the disastrously poor communication by the authorities.
At the end of March, the government had still assured that there would be no complete lockdown. A few days later, it was announced that first the eastern and then the western part of the city would be placed under curfew for four days each. This then turned into a permanent lockdown on April 1, which was extended further and further (China.Table reported).
Now the worst seems to be over. Although not all, the majority of people are allowed to leave their homes again. Under the new regulations, all Shanghai residents who live in a neighborhood without a Covid case for the past 14 days will be allowed to return to their normal daily lives. According to estimates, at least 650,000 people remain confined to their homes.
Public transport is running, cars are allowed on the roads again without special permits. Most stores and restaurants have also re-opened since Wednesday. They are allowed to operate at 75 percent of normal capacity. Those who want to participate in public life need a recent Covid test, no more than three days old. “We will return life and the economy to normal,” the Shanghai Communist Party wrote in a thank-you message to the people: “Shanghai will do its utmost to make up for lost ground.”
It won’t be easy. The economic damage caused by the lockdown is enormous. In addition, the proud economic metropolis is likely to have lost much of its appeal. “Thousands of migrant workers who have lost their jobs due to the lockdown are set to leave, disappointed with Shanghai’s chaotic management of the coronavirus pandemic, are also expected to exit the city,” writes the South China Morning Post. The city has squandered “its image as the mainland’s most developed metropolis”.
However, there is hardly any guarantee against lockdowns in other parts of the country either. Covid outbreaks can occur quickly anywhere, as all of China’s major metropolitan areas have now experienced. “A decline in infections has allowed Shanghai to begin reopening. But with China’s zero-Covid regulations still in place, the risk of new restrictions continues to hang over the economy,” concludes Bloomberg economist Chang Shu.
The capital Beijing is still not out of the woods, either. However, it appears that the dreaded large-scale lockdown may not happen. After only twelve new cases were reported on Sunday, the authorities announced that the outbreak was under control. On Wednesday, the number rose again slightly to 14 infections. In Shanghai, the number was five. Hope is raised by the fact that, according to official statistics outside Beijing and Shanghai, there were only three other infections nationwide on Wednesday. So at least over the summer months, China could be spared more major lockdowns. Joern Petring/ Gregor Koppenburg
On Wednesday, China published a Five-Year plan for renewable energy that had been long-awaited in expert circles. The plan sets the following expansion targets:
Compared to expansion targets in Western countries, these plans are highly ambitious. But analysts expect that China will achieve these goals. The targets are largely in line with the plans of the central government and the provinces for the expansion of renewables.
China will install 108 gigawatts of new solar power capacity this year, according to forecasts. This is almost twice as much as the total capacity in Germany (59 GW – end 2021). Analysts had recently still assumed that China could meet future additional energy demand entirely from renewables (China.Table reported). However, planners appear to be assuming a larger increase in power demand by 2025. If this happens, power generation from fossil fuels such as harmful coal will continue to rise – and so will emissions.
In addition to the expansion of wind and solar power plants, the plan also envisages the continued expansion of biomass power plants. They are to be equipped with technologies for capturing carbon dioxide (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage – CCUS). The document also mentions the development of geothermal and tidal power plants. China also plans to expand the country’s power storage facilities. These are particularly important in the medium term to cope with the problem of dark periods and to ensure a stable power grid (China.Table reported). nib
An appointment as a university chair is usually reason enough for a female scientist to celebrate. Inga Heiland, on the other hand, recently took over not only the professorship of economics at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, but also the management of the Research Center for Trade Policy at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel). That sounds like a 20-hour day: “Yes, that’s almost how it feels to me,” says the 35-year-old. However, the university appointed her and seconded her to work at the IfW. “That means I deal with tasks that overlap with my research agenda. At the same time, I still have duties at the university, of course.”
Her research areas include, among others, the assessment of international supply chains. Here, she has developed a particular passion: container shipping. For her work on the Panama Canal in 2019, she and her team examined the global network of container ship routes. “We wanted to understand more systematically how trade routes are structured, which countries are interconnected and how, and also where the weaknesses are in this system.” The issue also moved into the public spotlight with Ever Given last year. When the container giant became stuck in the Suez Canal, “people suddenly realized how many countries were actually affected,” says the professor.
The Ph.D. economist works primarily on calculation models that may seem abstract to an outsider at first glance, but from which concrete recommendations for action can be derived for policymakers. “Where can improvements be made? Well, in the form of infrastructure projects that benefit the whole world. Using the Panama Canal as an example, we calculated which countries would benefit from the expansion of the canal.”
Providing political advice and commenting on public discourse is also a focus of IfW Kiel. In her career, Heiland has so far worked primarily as a researcher. She considers political communication “next to research, the most important task” in her new job, she explains.
After studying international economics and finance in Tuebingen, Heiland earned her doctorate at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Ifo Institute. She describes the doctoral position itself as an “important milestone” in her career because she was particularly involved at the Ifo Institute at an early stage in issues that were of political relevance. In that sense, it was also a preparation for her activities at the IfW today.
Meanwhile, Heiland’s last work on the People’s Republic of China was a while back. At the time, she examined China’s WTO accession and the potential impact on global supply chains. “And that, of course, becomes now exciting again when you think about whether there might be a decoupling of supply chains.” It is precisely the calculation of such scenarios that form the focus of her activities at the IfW.
IfW scientists currently analyze, for example, what would happen if trade between China and the European Union doubled. “That would be a case in which the initiative for research would come from us.” Another possibility is that proposals are made from the political side. For example, the design of a free trade agreement between the EU and China. “For example, what would be the effects on trade of various countries or on consumption opportunities and prices, would tariffs be reduced to a certain degree, or would tariff barriers not be introduced at all? We can feed that into our model and calculate it. That’s where things get very specific.” And this is where things also get very political. Constantin Eckner
Queuing for the first haircut in two months. For many people in Shanghai, this was probably high on their to-do list after the lockdown. It’s handy when, as in the photo, you can book a communal appointment with the hairdresser together with some of your neighbors.
Despite everything we know today about what happened on the night of June 4-5, 1989 in Beijing: There is no footage from the events on Tiananmen Square itself. But one image has burned itself into the collective memory: The Tank Man. The photo shows a man in the distance, standing in front of a tank column, stopping them in their tracks. This made Tank Man the epitome of the “power of the nameless,” writes Marcel Grzanna to mark the 33rd anniversary of the massacre this weekend. Tank Man has influenced pop culture and is even considered one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. However, China’s government deliberately keeps his identity a secret to avoid creating a hero. But this is precisely how it nurtures the myth of the ordinary citizen who courageously stood up to precisely this government power.
Millions of Shanghai residents regained some of their everyday freedom on Wednesday. Right off the bat, public transport capacity returned to 75 percent of its normal level. However, our author team in China asked around a little more closely: Many people feel cheated because they are still not allowed to go outside despite the lifting. As long as everyone sat at home equally, acceptance was still higher than it is now amid the inequality between neighborhoods. In a democracy, those responsible would have been voted out of office long ago.
It was only about three minutes on the morning of June 5, 1989, that turned one man into a hero. An unknown man stands in the way of a Chinese army tank column on Chang’an Jie in the heart of Beijing, near Tiananmen Square. Whether the man is an active member of the democracy movement, which paid with many lives for its demand for political participation the night before, remains unclear. Regardless, his courage will go down in history as the last act of open resistance of those days and weeks in the spring, 33 years ago.
These few moments on the Chang’an Jie have burned themselves into the memory of the global public. To this day, they exude a fascination that has created a global culture of remembrance that makes it impossible for the Chinese Communist Party to dismiss the Tiananmen massacre against its own people as a side note of history. The identity of the man is unclear, as is whether he was punished after several men pushed him off the street. And yet his pseudonym is still on everyone’s mind today.
His impact goes far beyond the memory of the CP’s crimes of 1989. “This young man changed the world,” says Professor Bruce Herschensohn in the 2006 documentary “Tank Man”. Herschensohn was once an advisor to Richard Nixon’s US administration and dealt extensively with communist regimes. “Tank Man’s actions supported the transformation of the Soviet Union,” believed the now-deceased Herschensohn, who traveled to various Eastern European countries shortly after the events in Beijing.
People around the globe took to the streets to protest pro-Soviet regimes in their own countries. Several times and in many countries, Herschensohn said, people had told him, in essence: “If this Chinese boy can stand in front of the tanks, so can we.”
Five months after Tank Man, the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc followed. Many societies got rid of their despots and dictatorial governors under Moscow’s leadership and developed democratic structures. But only few moments of these changes and revolutionary days remained in the memory of the world like the determination of Tank Man.
The US news magazine Time gave expression to his role in the fight against the oppression of the masses by corrupt regimes when it named the “Tank Man” one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. “The man with the tanks represents the power of the nameless,” the magazine wrote in 1998.
To this day, these recordings are still pulled from the archives regularly. Teachers in democratic countries use them as illustrative material in history lessons. The image of the dramatic moment can be found on T-shirts and posters. Tank Man has become a kind of pop culture in the West. “It is Tank Man’s mystery that enables his enduring presence – that permits him to be a code for so many Western values and desires,” Jennifer Hubbert, of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, told the New York Times a few years ago.
In her article Appropriating Iconicity: Why Tank Man Still Matters, published in the Journal of the Society for Visual Anthropology, Hubbert describes what happens when the iconic Tank Man picture is modified and repurposed for new political purposes. She concludes that the use of the image in new contexts in the United States leads it to become less about a lack of political liberalism in China and more about democratic deficits in the United States.
In today’s China, young people, in particular, have little knowledge of Tank Man. References to its history only rarely, if at all, slip through the Party’s censors. Chinese textbooks treat the so-called “incident” as a heroic deed by the Chinese military. Official Chinese sources speak of several hundred dead in the protests in and around Tian’anmen Square. Chances are that, in reality, there were probably several thousand. However, under the CP leadership, there will never be any clarification of the exact number of victims and a public reappraisal of the bloodshed.
It quickly takes action against anything that might remind it of the night of June 4. Most recently, in 2016, four men were sentenced to several years in prison for sticking labels on liquor bottles that drew references to the fatal events. As a cartoon drawing, they depicted Tank Man and a series of tanks on it. Underneath was written, “Never forget, never give up”.
Even 33 years after the massacre, it is still unclear who the man was. As early as 1990, foreign media had identified him as Wang Weilin. Among others, Bruce Herschensohn claimed that he had learned this name from sources in Beijing. But this assumption was never confirmed. Little is also known about the person behind the name Wang Weilin. There are also different versions regarding his fate. One is that he was executed at the end of June 1989, another says that his execution was carried out months later. And later on, rumors spread that Tank Man was living anonymously in Taiwan.
The theory of those who believe in his disappearance and thus his survival is based primarily on the fact that Tank Man was not publicly executed. Several protesters were publicly paraded by name on television following the events as a warning to the rest of the population and were subsequently murdered. Some of their offenses appeared much less provocative than the blockade of the tanks. Still, unlike many others, Tank Man was not executed on state television.
The question remains to this day who the men were who forced him off the street. State police or ordinary citizens? A year after Tiananmen, US journalist Barbara Walters confronted General Secretary Jiang Zemin with a photo of Tank Man in an interview for ABC. Jiang said he did not believe the man had been killed. But he also said he could not give any concrete information about his whereabouts. All the unanswered questions contributed to the Tank Man myth in the years that followed.
The people of Shanghai have eagerly been waiting for this day. At yesterday midnight, the strict lockdown officially ended. Millions of people were allowed to leave their homes for the first time in two months. Many stayed awake, just to be able to walk out the door at midnight sharp. On social media, Shanghai’s citizens shared images of walking the streets at night or celebrating their regained freedom with a beer in hand. Others shared videos of workers removing barricades. “These were the hardest two months of my life. Now I will have to get used to going to work every morning again,” said a Shanghai woman from the Jing’an district: “I am disappointed with the government, but just happy to be able to get out again“.
Like her, many people in the city of 25 million feel cheated by the authorities. During the lockdown, social networks were flooded with complaints about the lack of food, the often disproportionate brutality of pandemic workers, and general complaints about the disastrously poor communication by the authorities.
At the end of March, the government had still assured that there would be no complete lockdown. A few days later, it was announced that first the eastern and then the western part of the city would be placed under curfew for four days each. This then turned into a permanent lockdown on April 1, which was extended further and further (China.Table reported).
Now the worst seems to be over. Although not all, the majority of people are allowed to leave their homes again. Under the new regulations, all Shanghai residents who live in a neighborhood without a Covid case for the past 14 days will be allowed to return to their normal daily lives. According to estimates, at least 650,000 people remain confined to their homes.
Public transport is running, cars are allowed on the roads again without special permits. Most stores and restaurants have also re-opened since Wednesday. They are allowed to operate at 75 percent of normal capacity. Those who want to participate in public life need a recent Covid test, no more than three days old. “We will return life and the economy to normal,” the Shanghai Communist Party wrote in a thank-you message to the people: “Shanghai will do its utmost to make up for lost ground.”
It won’t be easy. The economic damage caused by the lockdown is enormous. In addition, the proud economic metropolis is likely to have lost much of its appeal. “Thousands of migrant workers who have lost their jobs due to the lockdown are set to leave, disappointed with Shanghai’s chaotic management of the coronavirus pandemic, are also expected to exit the city,” writes the South China Morning Post. The city has squandered “its image as the mainland’s most developed metropolis”.
However, there is hardly any guarantee against lockdowns in other parts of the country either. Covid outbreaks can occur quickly anywhere, as all of China’s major metropolitan areas have now experienced. “A decline in infections has allowed Shanghai to begin reopening. But with China’s zero-Covid regulations still in place, the risk of new restrictions continues to hang over the economy,” concludes Bloomberg economist Chang Shu.
The capital Beijing is still not out of the woods, either. However, it appears that the dreaded large-scale lockdown may not happen. After only twelve new cases were reported on Sunday, the authorities announced that the outbreak was under control. On Wednesday, the number rose again slightly to 14 infections. In Shanghai, the number was five. Hope is raised by the fact that, according to official statistics outside Beijing and Shanghai, there were only three other infections nationwide on Wednesday. So at least over the summer months, China could be spared more major lockdowns. Joern Petring/ Gregor Koppenburg
On Wednesday, China published a Five-Year plan for renewable energy that had been long-awaited in expert circles. The plan sets the following expansion targets:
Compared to expansion targets in Western countries, these plans are highly ambitious. But analysts expect that China will achieve these goals. The targets are largely in line with the plans of the central government and the provinces for the expansion of renewables.
China will install 108 gigawatts of new solar power capacity this year, according to forecasts. This is almost twice as much as the total capacity in Germany (59 GW – end 2021). Analysts had recently still assumed that China could meet future additional energy demand entirely from renewables (China.Table reported). However, planners appear to be assuming a larger increase in power demand by 2025. If this happens, power generation from fossil fuels such as harmful coal will continue to rise – and so will emissions.
In addition to the expansion of wind and solar power plants, the plan also envisages the continued expansion of biomass power plants. They are to be equipped with technologies for capturing carbon dioxide (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage – CCUS). The document also mentions the development of geothermal and tidal power plants. China also plans to expand the country’s power storage facilities. These are particularly important in the medium term to cope with the problem of dark periods and to ensure a stable power grid (China.Table reported). nib
An appointment as a university chair is usually reason enough for a female scientist to celebrate. Inga Heiland, on the other hand, recently took over not only the professorship of economics at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, but also the management of the Research Center for Trade Policy at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel). That sounds like a 20-hour day: “Yes, that’s almost how it feels to me,” says the 35-year-old. However, the university appointed her and seconded her to work at the IfW. “That means I deal with tasks that overlap with my research agenda. At the same time, I still have duties at the university, of course.”
Her research areas include, among others, the assessment of international supply chains. Here, she has developed a particular passion: container shipping. For her work on the Panama Canal in 2019, she and her team examined the global network of container ship routes. “We wanted to understand more systematically how trade routes are structured, which countries are interconnected and how, and also where the weaknesses are in this system.” The issue also moved into the public spotlight with Ever Given last year. When the container giant became stuck in the Suez Canal, “people suddenly realized how many countries were actually affected,” says the professor.
The Ph.D. economist works primarily on calculation models that may seem abstract to an outsider at first glance, but from which concrete recommendations for action can be derived for policymakers. “Where can improvements be made? Well, in the form of infrastructure projects that benefit the whole world. Using the Panama Canal as an example, we calculated which countries would benefit from the expansion of the canal.”
Providing political advice and commenting on public discourse is also a focus of IfW Kiel. In her career, Heiland has so far worked primarily as a researcher. She considers political communication “next to research, the most important task” in her new job, she explains.
After studying international economics and finance in Tuebingen, Heiland earned her doctorate at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Ifo Institute. She describes the doctoral position itself as an “important milestone” in her career because she was particularly involved at the Ifo Institute at an early stage in issues that were of political relevance. In that sense, it was also a preparation for her activities at the IfW today.
Meanwhile, Heiland’s last work on the People’s Republic of China was a while back. At the time, she examined China’s WTO accession and the potential impact on global supply chains. “And that, of course, becomes now exciting again when you think about whether there might be a decoupling of supply chains.” It is precisely the calculation of such scenarios that form the focus of her activities at the IfW.
IfW scientists currently analyze, for example, what would happen if trade between China and the European Union doubled. “That would be a case in which the initiative for research would come from us.” Another possibility is that proposals are made from the political side. For example, the design of a free trade agreement between the EU and China. “For example, what would be the effects on trade of various countries or on consumption opportunities and prices, would tariffs be reduced to a certain degree, or would tariff barriers not be introduced at all? We can feed that into our model and calculate it. That’s where things get very specific.” And this is where things also get very political. Constantin Eckner
Queuing for the first haircut in two months. For many people in Shanghai, this was probably high on their to-do list after the lockdown. It’s handy when, as in the photo, you can book a communal appointment with the hairdresser together with some of your neighbors.
