Tiananmen Square: How Journalists Smuggled Out the Iconic “Tank Man” Photo

Editor’s Note: Mike Chinoy is a nonresident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California, former Beijing bureau chief and CNN’s senior Asia correspondent. He recently published “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.” The interviews in this piece are taken from the book.

CNN
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The photo is iconic: an unidentified man in a white shirt, his hands full of bags, confronting a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing, after the Chinese Communist Party ordered a bloody military crackdown on protesters pro-democracy.

The photo and images of the so-called “man-tank” became the defining image of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the 35th anniversary of which was on Tuesday.

On the night of June 3, 1989, after nearly two months of protests by students and workers demanding faster political reform and an end to corruption, convoys of armed troops marched into central Beijing to clear the square. It was a bloodbath; Witnesses described tanks rolling into unarmed protesters and soldiers shooting indiscriminately into crowds.

To this day, the massacre remains one of the most sensitive political taboos in mainland China, with any mention of it strictly censored. Commemoration can lead to imprisonment. Chinese authorities have not published an official toll, but estimates vary between several hundred and several thousand.

Yet every June 4 since, diaspora communities and surviving protesters in exile across the world have commemorated the event – ​​often sharing the historic photo by Jeff Widener, then a photographer for the Associated Press (AP), as well than the images shot by CNN teams. .

The photography journey also captured the tension and fear of the times – involving the smuggling of equipment and film past authorities and across borders. At this point, the Chinese government was desperately trying to control the message broadcast to the world – and trying to stop all US media outlets, including CNN, from broadcasting live from Beijing.

These interviews, taken from “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic” by Mike Chinoy, CNN’s Beijing bureau chief during the crackdown, offer the behind-the-scenes story of perhaps the most famous moment of crisis. Chinoy was in attendance, broadcasting live from a balcony overlooking the scene, and spoke with witnesses during and after the historic event.

Infiltration and smuggling of equipment

It was Monday June 5, 1989 and Beijing was in shock from the repression of the day before. Liu Heung-shing, the AP’s Beijing editor, asked Widener to help him obtain photos of Chinese troops from the Beijing hotel — which offered the best vantage point of the square, now under military control.

Widener had flown in from the news agency’s office in Bangkok a week earlier to help with coverage, and was injured when the crackdown began, he previously told CNN – after being shot in the head by a stone and collapsed from the flu.

He left, with his photographic equipment hidden in his jacket – a long 400 millimeter lens in one pocket, a doubler in another, the film in his underwear and the camera body in his back pocket.

“I’m cycling towards the Beijing hotel and there’s nothing but debris and charred buses on the ground,” he said. “All of a sudden, four tanks arrive, manned by soldiers armed with heavy machine guns. I’m on my bike and I’m thinking I can’t believe I’m doing this.

“I hear rumors that other journalists have had their films and cameras confiscated. I had to find a way to get into the hotel,” he added. “I look inside the dark hall and there is this Western student. I walked up to him and whispered, “I’m from the Associated Press, can you let me up to your room?” He understood it immediately and said, “Of course.”

This young man was Kirk Martsen, an American exchange student who introduced Widener to his hotel room on the sixth floor.

From there, Widener began photographing the tanks rolling on the roads below – sometimes hearing the sound of a bell which signified the passing of a cart with a body, or an injured person being taken to hospital, did he declare.

Other journalists were also present at the hotel, including Jonathan Schaer, the US-based CNN cameraman, who traveled to Beijing to support his exhausted colleagues. He had set up a camera on the balcony of CNN’s room at the hotel, where the network had been broadcasting live reports of the crackdown throughout the weekend.

“Another cameraman said, ‘Hey, look at the guy in front of the tanks!’ I just zoomed in and started filming,” Schaer recalls.

“When the column stopped and the man blocked the tanks, they tried to scare him by shooting over his head. Well, shooting over his head was basically our position. The bullets were so close you could hear them whistling.

Back in Martsen’s room, Widener was at the window, preparing to photograph the column of tanks coming down the road, when “this guy with shopping bags comes up front and starts waving the bags,” he said. he declares. “I just wait for him to get shot, focus on him, wait and wait.”

The tank stopped and tried to go around the man. The man moved with the tank, blocking his path again. At one point during the standoff, the man boarded the lead tank and appeared to speak to anyone inside.

But Widener had a problem: the scene was too far away for his 400mm lens. His doubler, which would allow him to zoom in twice as much, was placed on the bed, leaving him the choice: should he go get the doubler, and risk losing the shot in those precious seconds?

He took his chance, put the voice actor on camera, took “one, two, three shots. And then it was over,” he said. “Some people came, grabbed this guy and ran away. I remember sitting on this little couch by the window and studying him (Martsen) said, ‘Did you understand?’ Something in the back of my mind told me that maybe I understood, but I’m not sure.

Liu remembers receiving the call from Widener and immediately giving him instructions: Roll up the film, go down to the lobby and ask one of the many foreign students present to take it to the AP office.

The images were soon transmitted by telephone to the rest of the world.

Widener did so, sending the student away on his bicycle with the film hidden in his underwear. Forty-five minutes later, “a An American with a ponytail and a backpack showed up with an AP envelope,” Liu said. They quickly developed the film, “and I looked at this image – and that’s the image. He died.

Schaer, the CNN photojournalist, didn’t initially realize what they had captured on tape. These were the early days of email, which didn’t yet handle large videos. So CNN was using a “gadget that could send video…a prototype that Sony gave us to test,” which took an hour to scan an image. of video and send it over a phone line, he said.

So they sent five pictures, made copies of the tape and sent it to the airport in Beijing – where they hired a tourist to take the tape to Hong Kong, which at the time was still a British colony and not subject to Chinese domination.

Several media outlets took a photo of “Tank Man”, but Widener’s photo was used the most. It made headlines around the world and was nominated that year for a Pulitzer Prize.

Widener said he didn’t know the image had such an impact until the next morning, when he arrived at the AP office to find messages from viewers and reporters around the world.

To this day we do not know who this man is and what happened to him. But it remains a powerful symbol of the individual’s resistance to state power.

“I guess for a lot of people it’s a personal thing, because this guy represents everything that we’re fighting in our lives, because we’re all fighting something,” Widener said. “He really became a symbol for a lot of people.”