The Tiananmen Tank Man Lesson
What Tank Man teaches us about history, power, and the fight or failure to remember
June 4th passes every year with little fanfare in the United States. In China, the government works even harder to make sure it passes with none at all. That date—June 4, 1989—is remembered across much of the world as the day of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A day when tanks rolled over students and citizens demanding democratic reform. A day when one man—now known only as Tank Man—stood alone in front of a column of military vehicles, refusing to move. An image so powerful that it has become timeless in the face of tyranny.
In China, the government has worked ever since to erase that image and everything it represents. Censors scrub references from the internet. Photos vanish from social media within seconds. AI systems are now deployed to preemptively identify even oblique symbols—like a banana standing in front of a line of apples, a sly stand-in for the Tank Man’s act of resistance, which is why Chinese government censors are trained to erase it from the Internet as quickly as people dare to upload it. It’s absurd on the surface. But underneath lies something deadly serious: the Chinese government is terrified of memory.
As the anniversary approached this year, Chinese security forces went on high alert. Systems of surveillance were ramped up to quash any mention of the day, and the military was dispatched to quell any protesters.
Radio Free Asia captured footage of a man sprinting toward the flagpole at Tiananmen Square before being tackled and whisked away in a van. The video disappeared almost immediately from Chinese platforms. So did any mention of the incident.
The message is clear: silence is safety. Memory is treason.
And we here in the United States condemn such censorship, yet as we condemn China for these actions, we should ask: how far are we ourselves from doing the same thing?
AI Weaponized
According to leaked documents reviewed by ABC News Australia, China’s censors are now using advanced artificial intelligence to erase history more efficiently than ever before. Chatbots like DeepSeek refuse to answer questions about Tiananmen. “Sorry,” the bot says, “that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
Gee, doesn’t that sound like an exciting Friday night!
Dr. Yangyang Cheng, a research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, notes a curious irony. What many thought might be a liberating technology—AI—is now a potential weapon against whatever enemy people in power decide is the enemy. In this case, the enemy is truth, or anything that makes The State uncomfortable.
Cheng grew up in China and only learned the full truth about Tiananmen after coming to the United States in 2009. She tells reporter Matthew Bell of the public radio international news magazine, The World, why the Chinese government is still so determined to bury the memory.
The Chinese state has constructed a narrative of triumph and legitimacy for the Chinese people through the Chinese government's leadership, [that their lives] have gotten richer, their lives have gotten better, and that narrative would be severely disrupted if not entirely ruptured by the events of Tiananmen.
In other words, a revisionist history wherein the Communist Party’s legitimacy rests on a story of economic progress, national pride, and historical destiny. Except that the events of June 1989 would undermine that narrative and expose the government as a liar. So the event—the truth—must be “unremembered.”
That wasn’t always the approach. At first, the regime tried spin: protesters were called counterrevolutionaries; the military was praised for restoring order. But the public didn’t buy it. So the Party pivoted from propaganda to purging—from justifying the violence to pretending it never happened.
For years, Hong Kong was the one place in China where mass vigils marked the anniversary. No longer. Those gatherings, too, have now been stamped out.
The lady doth protest too much
Jeff Wasserstrom, a historian at UC Irvine, says the Chinese government’s deepest anxiety isn’t the protests themselves but the image, that iconic image of the man who stood before all those tanks, all 18 of them. It undermines everything the regime wants its people to believe: that they are unified, proud, and above all, obedient.
Ironically, the Chinese state’s obsessive effort to erase the photo ensures that it is remembered. Each year, it reappears—because the world understands that some memories cannot, and must not, be deleted.
Pot Meet Kettle
But here’s where the story truly becomes interesting, and where it should be disconcerting for all of us.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned China’s censorship. In a statement, he criticized China for “actively trying to censor the facts” of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and massacre.
Excuse me, but isn’t our government engaged in its own suppression of the facts, in its own efforts to curate the American story?
We’ve seen how books are being banned from libraries and schools across the country, many dealing with race, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity. State legislatures are forbidding the teaching of “divisive concepts” about America’s past—slavery, segregation, colonization—whole chapters are being softened, rebranded, or erased altogether.
Look no further than the Department of Defense. Under the current administration, military archives and exhibits were quietly flagged to be altered or redacted—some 26,000 of them—all to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the military. The dreaded DEI. They include the removal of digital files and images dedicated to the contributions of women in the armed forces, the esteemed Tuskegee Airmen, the military’s all-black Army Air Corps unit, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, hastening the end of WWII in the Pacific theatre. Why, because the plane was named the “Enola Gay?” Clutch the pearls, should we ever have the word “gay” in the military’s archives.
Even photos of Jackie Robinson and the story of his service in WWII, were initially removed from the DoD’s website, only to be restored after public outcry.
These aren’t coincidences. They are decisions rooted in the same impulse that China is acting on, only more covertly here, and overtly there: the fear that history, left intact, might say something inconvenient about who we really are.
The administration is even preparing to deny visas to Chinese students who want to study here and who might, for the first time, learn freely about what happened in Beijing in 1989.
Yet Marco Rubio dares to call out Beijing for “erasing history, suppressing truth, and silencing dissent.” How does he say that with a straight face, knowing what’s going on in the very government in which he works?
In condemning China’s censorship, Rubio takes the easy path and has pointed a finger outward, while failing to look inward, the much harder thing to do.
I heard a broadcaster say this in a radio newscast: “Over the years, China’s government has taken ever greater steps to erase from the country’s collective memory what’s come to be known as the Tiananmen Massacre.”
Let’s try a little thought experiment, and let’s exchange a few phrases. Try replacing “China’s government” with “the American government.” Replace “Tiananmen Massacre” with “slavery,” “Jim Crow,” or “internment camps,” or “January 6th.”
It might sound like this:
Over the years, the American government has taken ever greater steps to erase from the country’s collective memory what’s come to be known as Jan 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Suddenly, it’s not so easy to stand in judgment, is it.
This is not to equate the two. China is an authoritarian regime; the United States is not, at least not yet. But both are locked in a struggle over the past. Both understand that history is not just what was, but what people are allowed to remember. Memory is no longer just nostalgia. It’s now a battleground.
And we are all standing on it.
A Final Thought
In China, the image of a banana and a line of apples is forbidden. No tanks, no men—just fruit. That’s all it takes to shake a government that fears memory even more than protest. Decades later, a panicked Chinese regime still scrambles its censors at even a fruit-shaped whisper of defiance.
Here in America, we laugh. We shake our heads in contempt and disgust. We say we’re better than those tyrants. Yet our own government censors textbooks, rebrands history, erases photographs, and denies pathways to principle. Both seek to curate memory and rewrite history. Because memory is an enemy, and truth is a menace—a terrifying threat to The State.
But the ghosts of our past, whether noble or horrible, must never be banished. They must always endure—in the silence of Tiananmen, the gas chambers of Auschwitz, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, in the paranoia of the McCarthy era, and in every bulldozed marker to a truth someone found uncomfortable, inconvenient, or terrifying. They are monuments to moments in time when some men decided to create a graveyard in which to dispatch those moments from our collective conscience.
But they must remain standing. For the minute we forget, the minute we cease to be inconvenienced, discomfited, or haunted by their remembrance, then we become the gravediggers to our own past—and to whatever future may lie ahead.
The memory lives—as long as we insist on remembering. Not only in China. Not only in America. But wherever any of us walk God’s Earth.
Thank you for this important reminder. The image of “Tank Man” is indelibly etched in my memory.
In 1994 during a trip to the Far East, as my husband and I wandered around the vast “open” expanse of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square (under the watchful eye of CITS - China’s Int’l Travel Service), I kept picturing that lone protestor in his white shirt and black pants standing in front of the gigantic tank in this otherwise seemingly happy place, where families with small children, young couples and tourists were milling about.
As you know, inbound tourism to America is down and going “downer” (bad English, but makes the point I think) as the political climate here worsens with each passing day, and life as we thought we knew it, is increasingly in jeopardy. What has happened to our precious democracy (far from perfect for sure) in just the last four months is terrifying. And unrecognizable.
To your point about Tank Man and Tiananmen Square… my fear is that all too soon, there will be no one left who is old enough to remember the pivotal events of our lifetime. And to know what came before, if the administration's efforts to scrub our nation's history continue apace.
Then what?
What will become of the United States of America if those charged with protecting her, seek only to destroy the hard-fought progress of past generations (with so much more left to do!) for their own personal gain? Meanwhile, their enablers and sycophants in Congress, throughout our government and in boardrooms across the country continue to cower before and kowtow to the will of a lawless wannabe dictator.
My heart is heavy.