posted
Thanks for sharing that. I showed it to my 15-year-old (who learned about Tiananmen Square in her history class earlier this year).
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Wow. I remember Tiananmen Square, going to a protest at the Chinese embassy in L.A. was one of the defining moments of my childhood (along with watching the Berlin Wall come down on TV, and going to a party where we celebrated, among others.) One of the things that really crystallized my relationship with the rest of the world, in my mind.
That picture puts a whole new spin on the images. Thank you.
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Samp: I ranted about that in my Tiananmen Square memorial thread, but clearly the tanks scared posters away.
Awesome photo though. The biker riding along seemingly careless of the tanks is something that is vintage Chinese, I can't really explain it you just have to go there and see it.
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To be honest, I don't know how much of that is actually true.
Certainly the Western media seems convinced that Tiananmen Square is forgotten by Chinese people but my personal anecdotal experiences with mainland expats seem otherwise. They all seem to have learned about it from sources that even I wouldn't necessarily trust like VOA before coming over. Since it is not an easy to task to simply go into China and take a poll (and even if you did, one would hope that you wouldn't trust the results*), I must remain a skeptic in regards to this idea.
In fact, I think that the drastic loss of trust in foreign sources like the VOA, CNN, or the BBC after the Tibet riots of last year is one of the most interesting unintended results of that incident given the trust that I've personally witnessed being given to these sources in prior years on sole account of them being foreign.
* I'm reminded of this post.
quote: In this film four hapless Bei Da (Peking University) students are handed a copy of the image and asked what it says to them. You can see this painful and embarrassing sequence here:
It's part six, whose text summary says, 'Beida University students don't recognize the photo of the tank man...'
Unfortunately for this thesis, one of the students whispers, ''89', to which another replies, 'Haoxiang shi!' ('It seems like it') while the commentary over the top nevertheless disingenuously states that she's baffled.
Out loud the students demur: 'I really don't know; I'm just guessing,' and ask whether the photo is a piece of artwork especially put together for the interviewer's 'experiment'.
It's not just that the English commentary lies about the content of the conversation, but that the whole situation is journalistically bankrupt. Of course the four students were carefully picked by the film-maker's minders, although we're led to suppose that the crew just wandered onto the campus (of Bei Da!) and sat down a few random students in front of the camera for a chat. Nothing is said about the fact that the minder is sitting somewhere behind the camera (a point later admitted by the film-maker in an interview for a different programme, apparently without the slightest embarrassment), and what Bei Da student is going to risk piping up enthusiastically with, 'Yes, yes, I know!' in front of a vast potential foreign television audience and at the cost of failing to graduate or being kicked out altogether. Their expressed bewilderment is almost pantomimic, except that it clearly seems to say, 'How could you put us on the spot like this?'
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