When the Chinese government slaughtered unknown numbers of its own citizens in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago on June 4 (Chinese time), Americans waited in vain for their own president, George H.W. Bush, to issue a stirring ode to freedom.
The ode, though, was delivered in photographic form with the image of the lone, thin man standing, unyielding, before a Chinese tank.
Bush’s muted and later downright obsequious reactions count today as the ugliest blot on his record. “Tank man,” however, inspired hundreds of millions. He assuredly gave courage to those in Eastern Europe who later that year breached the figurative Iron Curtain and then tore down the very real Berlin Wall.
First, Bush: In a near monotone, the president spent about a minute saying he did “deplore the decision to use force” against the demonstrators who “were advocating basic human rights.” Still, he said, “this is not the time for an emotional response” about “a complex internal situation in China.” Less than a month later, despite public pledges otherwise, Bush secretly sent national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to Beijing to reassure the Communist government that friendly relations between the two countries should continue. Five months after that, he sent the two officials again, this time publicly, and Scowcroft literally offered a toast to Chinese leaders.
This was at a time when China was much less powerful, militarily and especially economically, than it is today. Extremely tough sanctions, and even tougher words, could have been visited upon China with much milder economic and military consequences for America. Instead, Bush tiptoed. The message he effectively sent the world was that freedom is nice, but that only mild consequences and restrained verbiage would be visited upon those who crush freedom with brutish force.
One lone man, enjoying neither a lethal weapon nor state power, transcended that message. Standing athwart the path of both history and an armored vehicle, tank man showed that moral and physical courage could, at least momentarily stop armed might. Tank man was risking his very life at the mercy of the grace and decency of the tank’s anonymous driver – and the driver’s humanity validated tank man’s hopes and bravery.
That image, viewed throughout the world with laser force, became the enduring symbol of resistance to Communist tyranny.
In East Germany later that year, border guards responded much the same way the tank driver had done in old Peking. When protesters by the tens of thousands gathered near the Berlin Wall at various times in the months leading up to the wall’s fall, police and army units were given permission to use force, but they rarely did. In a key demonstration on Oct. 9, not a single shot was fired. Then, a month later, when a garbled announcement led hundreds of thousands to swarm the wall itself, guards again held their fire.
The wall was breached, then toppled, without bloodshed.
It cannot be proven, but takes no large leap of logic, to assume that the example of China’s tank man, and the tank’s driver, played a role in how both the crowds and the soldiers reacted in Germany.
The many thousands killed and injured in Tiananmen Square did not suffer in vain, at least not in a global sense.
Freedom is a powerful force. Freedom is a natural desire of the human soul. And respect for the courageous assertion of freedom can stop a tank driver in his tracks. Let us always remember.
