China Dictatorship (中国独裁统治)

17.3. Tank Man (坦克人)

Good list of all known photos: https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/30/the-other-tank-man-photographs/

A list of Tank Man parodies can be found at: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tank-man

TODO: can’t find a Tank Man ASCII art! How is that possible? Behold!

                                    |
                                    |
                                    |
   Tank Man                         |
   by Ciro Santilli          00     |
   2021 CC-BY-SA 4.0          \\  +-|-+
                               \\/   /|-+o
                                \\--+ / /o
                               /|\\ |/ /oo
                        |     / ----- /oo
                        |    /       /oo
                        |   +-------+oo
                        |   oo+---+ooo
                 00     |   oo     oo
                  \\  +-|-+
                   \\/   /|-+o
                    \\--+ / /o
                   /|\\ |/ /oo
            |     / ----- /oo
            |    /       /oo
            |   +-------+oo
            |   oo+---+ooo
     00     |   oo     oo
      \\  +-|-+
       \\/   /|-+o
        \\--+ / /o
       /|\\ |/ /oo
      / ----- /oo
     /       /oo
    +-------+oo
    oo+---+ooo
    oo     oo
 xx
 --
/||\
|--|
o||0
 ||
 /\

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/l2wqbg/ascii_art_of_tank_man_%E5%9D%A6%E5%85%8B%E4%BA%BA_from_tiananmen_square/gkdbe5d suggested a simpler one that has been in use with Chinese characters:

占占点人

where:

the first three characters look like tanks (unrelated meaning)
the fourth character looks like, and actually means person

So once a gain, Chinese characters are insane (汉字是疯狂的).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrbwFxd1c-I Michal Jackson’s Tank man performance in Munich (1997) The Cirque du Soliel "accidentally" showed Tank Man imagery for 4 seconds in a Beijing theater on a related 2013 act "Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour": https://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/15/world/asia/tank-man-cirque-soleil/index.html but it was removed on future performances.

Other tankman spoofs: * https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/505 in Doraemon (机器猫), a Japanese cartoon that is very popular in China, Ciro Santilli’s wife (三西猴的老婆) loves it. It is more commonly known in China simply as 机器猫 (mechanical cat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU CNN video of Tank Man: but not him leaving as other people beg him to, ridiculous, is there a full raw footage somewhere? Subset uploaded to GitHub: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/168. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk shows the start of the exit. https://twitter.com/carlzha/status/1134582926325104641 shows a bit more. Some wumaos like to claim that the people taking him away indicates that the people didn’t agree with that madman. This interpretation os of course ridiculous. But the fact that you can’t easily find the full footage except from wumaos suggests that there is some Western propaganda that tries to prevent that ridiculous idea nevertheless. https://twitter.com/carlzha/status/1134582926325104641. TODO who made the video? Who owns the rights now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSbx352cn8A Several quick cuts by CBS news that give a good overview of the incident, including him being pushed away by other protesters at the end.

Figure 197. Arthur Tsang’s photo of Tank Man. Source.

Figure 198. Stuart Franklin’s wider view photo of Tank Man. Source.

Figure 199. Terril Jones photo taken at ground level with Tank Man on background and men running away on the foreground. The photo was only published in 2009. Source.

Figure 200. Photoshop of Arthur Tsang’s photo of Tank Man with huge rubber ducks replacing the tanks. Inspired by a huge inflatable rubber duck sculpture floating in Hong Kong in 2013. Watermark reads "weibo.com/weibolg" on Weibo (新浪微博), which is confirmed by The New York Times. Source.

Figure 201. Rough Lego (乐高) model of the Tank Man scene. A Lego Xinjiang "re-education" camps (新疆再教育營, 2017-) can be seen at https://twitter.com/MidnightMitch/status/1412887665113018371, many people replied with that at: https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/1412743232270876675. A fake Lego advertisement video has also been made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wphTAEQusLk. Source.

Figure 202. Final Fantasy VI (最终幻想VI) battle screen style depiction of tank man by Cody Walton by it8Bit. Source.

Tank Man drawing by Ciro Santilli CC BY SA

Figure 203. Tank man drawing by Ciro Santilli. The only CC BY-SA 4.0 representaion of Tank Man found on the web? And the prettiest. Created manually with GIMP. This can be very useful e.g. if you are posting Stack Overflow answers about image processing, e.g.: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20737061/merge-images-side-by-sidehorizontally/63575228#63575228 It was of course taken down later on because it was considered spam: Stack Overflow political image answer placeholder (2021).

121059892 e2a0d380 c7b9 11eb 88f0 cacdefab548c

Figure 204. Xi Jinping erasing tank man by Twatical. Easy mp4 download: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/357. The character shown is "碾". TODO understand the slang. Source.

Tank Man Song by Xu Lin (坦克人歌曲，作曲家：徐琳, 2016)