Tank Man 1989

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However it's a mystery what happened to him after the encounter (use your imagination), he was never heard from again.

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Speculation continues to circulate about Tank Man’s fate. Thousands of Chinese nationals were detained and imprisoned for their involvement in the protests, some of them kept in jail for almost their entire lives. Others were executed. No one has been able to determine whether Tank Man was among them.

A report (link in Chinese) cited a Hong Kong professor who said the man was a friend of his and an archaeologist from Changsha who had come to Beijing to protests. According to the professor, the man eventually escaped to Taiwan where he worked at the National Palace Museum. (The museum in Taiwan denied the report.) Others believed he was executed.

But it seems at least as plausible that the man disappeared back into his normal life. If he had left the country, he would have been free to speak out, according to Canadian journalist Jan Wang, who witnessed the confrontation. And if authorities had found him, they would have put him on public display, she told PBS. She believes there’s a good chance he’s alive and living quietly in China. The Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy Movement in China said in 1998 that it had obtained official party documents that showed authorities had no idea what happened to him. In a 1990 interview with Barbara Walters, former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin said he couldn’t confirm (video) whether the man was arrested or not. He broke from speaking to Walters through an interpreter and said in English, “I think never, never killed.”

It’s also possible that Tank Man may have been simply a regular citizen in Beijing who had seen or heard of the brutal government crackdown that left students, workers, children, doctors and passers-by dead, many of them shot in the back. According to film footage and witnesses, he was walking alone along the six-lane avenue, holding a bag of shopping, when he saw the tanks and decided to do something.

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