The Fourth of June. Can't think of what to say since words are incredibly weak in front of acts. I don't believe any students and other citizens on Tiananmen Square in 1989 had the slightest intention of being martyrs at that time. They were ordinary folks, no more and no less human like you and I. They failed to achieve their goals: democracy, liberty and the end of corruption in China.

Perhaps they weren't smart enough in handling the negotiation with the Communists so they didn't make it. But they are all heroes, regardless of any faults, strategically and morally (why must heroes be faultless anyway?). Don Quixote did what he considered as the right thing, and I think that's good enough.

Quoting a real story of bravery; or an alternative ending of David and Goliath.




                                                                    JEFF WIDENER/AP
A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east
on Beijing's Cangan Blvd. in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989



The Unknown Rebel
With a single act of defiance, a lone Chinese hero revived the world's image of courage
By PICO IYER

Monday, April 13, 1998

Almost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world's living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square -- June 5, 1989 -- may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined.

The meaning of his moment -- it was no more than that -- was instantly decipherable in any tongue, to any age: even the billions who cannot read and those who have never heard of Mao Zedong could follow what the "tank man" did. A small, unexceptional figure in slacks and white shirt, carrying what looks to be his shopping, posts himself before an approaching tank, with a line of 17 more tanks behind it. The tank swerves right; he, to block it, moves left. The tank swerves left; he moves right. Then this anonymous bystander clambers up onto the vehicle of war and says something to its driver, which comes down to us as: "Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you." One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People's Republic -- the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people -- while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

Occasionally, unexpectedly, history consents to disguise itself as allegory, and China, which traffics in grand impersonals, has often led the world in mass-producing symbols in block capitals. The man who defied the tank was standing, as it happens, on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, just a minute away from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which leads into the Forbidden City. Nearby Tiananmen Square -- the very heart of the Middle Kingdom, where students had demonstrated in 1919; where Mao had proclaimed a "People's Republic" in 1949 on behalf of the Chinese people who had "stood up"; and where leaders customarily inspect their People's Liberation Army troops -- is a virtual monument to People Power in the abstract. Its western edge is taken up by the Great Hall of the People. Its eastern side is dominated by the Museum of Chinese Revolution. The Mao Zedong mausoleum swallows up its southern face.

For seven weeks, though, in the late spring of 1989 -- the modern year of revolutions -- the Chinese people took back the square, first a few workers and students and teachers and soldiers, then more and more, until more than 1 million had assembled there. They set up, in the heart of the ancient nation, their own world within the world, complete with a daily newspaper, a broadcasting tent, even a 30-ft. plaster-covered statue they called the "Goddess of Democracy." Their "conference hall" was a Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor on the southwest corner of the square, and their spokesmen were 3,000 hunger strikers who spilled all over the central Monument to the People's Heroes. The unofficials even took over, and reversed, the formal symbolism of the government's ritual pageantry: when Mikhail Gorbachev came to the Great Hall of the People for a grand state banquet during the demonstrations--the first visit by a Soviet leader in 30 years -- he had to steal in by the back door.

Then, in the dark early hours of June 4, the government struck back, sending tanks from all directions toward Tiananmen Square and killing hundreds of workers and students and doctors and children, many later found shot in the back. In the unnatural quiet after the massacre, with the six-lane streets eerily empty and a burned-out bus along the road, it fell to the tank man to serve as the last great defender of the peace, an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for human rights.

As soon as the man had descended from the tank, anxious onlookers pulled him to safety, and the waters of anonymity closed around him once more. Some people said he was called Wang Weilin, was 19 years old and a student; others said not even that much could be confirmed. Some said he was a factory worker's son, others that he looked like a provincial just arrived in the capital by train. When American newsmen asked Chinese leader Jiang Zemin a year later what had happened to the symbol of Chinese freedom -- caught by foreign cameramen and broadcast around the world -- he replied, not very ringingly, "I think never killed."

In fact, the image of the man before the tank simplified -- even distorted -- as many complex truths as any image does. The students leading the demonstrations were not always peace loving and notoriously bickered among themselves; many were moved by needs less lofty than pure freedom. At least seven retired generals had written to the People's Daily opposing the imposition of martial law, and many of the soldiers sent to put down the demonstrators were surely as young, as confused and as uncommitted to aggression as many of the students were. As one of the pro-democracy movement's leaders said, the heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown figure who risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut and the driver who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his compatriot.

Nine years after the June 4 incident, moreover, it's unclear how much the agitators for democracy actually achieved. Li Peng, who oversaw the crackdown on them, is still near the top of China's hierarchy. Jiang, who proved his colors by coming down hard on demonstrators in Shanghai, is now the country's President. And on a bright winter morning, Tiananmen Square is still filled, as it was then, with bird-faced kites and peasants from the countryside lining up to have their photos taken amid the monuments to Mao.

Yet for all the qualifications, the man who stood before the tanks reminded us that the conviction of the young can generate a courage that their elders sometimes lack. And, like student rebels everywhere, he stood up against the very Great Man of History theory. In China in particular, a Celestial Empire that has often seemed to be ruled by committee, a "mandate of Heaven" consecrated to the might of the collective, the individual has sometimes been seen as hardly more than a work unit in some impersonal equation. A "small number" were killed, Mao once said of the death of 70,000, and in his Great Leap Forward, at least 20 million more were sacrificed to a leader's theories. In that context, the man before the tank seems almost a counter-Mao, daring to act as the common-man hero tirelessly promoted by propaganda and serving as a rebuke -- or asterisk, at least -- to the leaders and revolutionaries who share these pages.

More than a third of a century ago, before anyone had ever heard of videotapes or the World Wide Web or 24-hour TV news stations, Daniel Boorstin, in his uncannily prescient book The Image, described how, as we move deeper into what he called the Graphic Revolution, technology would threaten to diminish us. Ideas, even ideals, would be reduced to the level of images, he argued, and faith itself might be simplified into credulity. "Two centuries ago, when a great man appeared," the historian wrote, "people looked for God's purpose in him; today we look for his press agent."

The hero -- so ran Boorstin's prophecy -- was being replaced by the celebrity, and where once our leaders seemed grander versions of ourselves, now they just looked like us on a giant screen. Nowadays, as we read about the purported telephone messages of a sitting President and listen to the future King of England whisper to his mistress, the power of technology not just to dehumanize but to demystify seems 30 times stronger than even Boorstin predicted.

But the man with the tank showed us another face, so to speak, of the camera and gave us an instance in which the image did not cut humanity down to size but elevated and affirmed it, serving as an instrument for democracy and justice. Instead of making the lofty trivial, as it so often seems to do, the image made the passing eternal and assisted in the resistance of an airbrushed history written by the winners. Technology, which can so often implement violence or oppression, can also give a nobody a voice and play havoc with power's vertical divisions by making a gesture speak a thousand words. The entire Tiananmen uprising, in fact, was a subversion underwritten by machines, which obey no government and observe no borders: the protesters got around official restrictions by communicating with friends abroad via fax; they followed their own progress -- unrecorded on Chinese TV -- by watching themselves on foreigners' satellite sets in the Beijing Hotel; and in subsequent years they have used the Internet -- and their Western training -- to claim and disseminate an economic freedom they could not get politically.

The second half of the century now ending has been shadowed by one overwhelming, ungovernable thought: that the moods, even the whims, of a single individual, post-Oppenheimer, could destroy much of the globe in a moment. Yet the image of the man before the tank stands for the other side of that dark truth: that in a world ever more connected, the actions of a regular individual can light up the whole globe in an instant. And for centuries the walls of the grand palaces and castles of the Old World have been filled with ceremonial and often highly flattering pictures of noblemen and bewigged women looking out toward the posterity they hope to shape.

But nowadays, in the video archives of the memory, playing in eternal rerun, are many new faces, unknown, that remind us how much history is made at the service entrance by people lopped out of the official photographs or working in obscurity to fashion our latest instruments and cures. In a century in which so many tried to impress their monogram on history, often in blood red, the man with the tank -- Wang Weilin, or whoever -- stands for the forces of the unnamed: the Unknown Soldier of a new Republic of the Image.

Pico Iyer is an essayist and novelist, author most recently of Tropical Classical

<http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/rebel.html>

[2007] JBR 6

Went to Manchester on Saturday with a friend to watch the match between Manchester United v. Bolton. What a fantastic day.

Outside Old Trafford, home of ManUtd.


Watching the play with the other 77,000+ spectators.


Matching out.


A transparent wall between the rich and the rest.


"People mountain, people sea".


MAN UTD scarf and I.


The front rows were reserved for elderly or less-abled people.


Free kick of Bolton.


Bolton's PK - that's how they got the only goal.


Die-hard Boltonians, protected and separated by police.


Final score: ManUtd 4 : 1 Bolton.


Theatre of dreams: Old Trafford.


Mounted police outside the stadium.



[2007] JBR 4

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[2007] JBR 2

Spending my New Year night with my laptop. I didn't realise that 2007 had come until I heard some noise and peeped outside the window, discovered the not-so-amazing, privately-administered fireworks started to burst into the dark sky. Absolutely no celebration of any kinds was held in the Albion House (my hall). Possibly because many people had gone home or travelling abroad.

Currently re-reading Kundera's book. I think I could now better understand, albeit in a limited sense, perhaps, of the irony and alienation portrayed in his book. If how we perceive the world is largely depends on our interpretation to the objective facts as we see them, do we too often over-interpret the little things that we have seen and thus make the world more complicated (in our perception)? I only know I don't know.

[2007] JBR 1

Just returned from my week-long trip to Italy yesterday. Physically exhausted due to the excessive walking during my jounery. Nevertheless, I still consider walking as the best way of exploration in cities, particularly the historical ones. There is no other means that you can taste the subleties of a city unless you walk across its narrowest streets. And after all, walking doesn't cost a penny (I travelled on a shoe string!).

NAPOLI (19-21 DEC 2006)

Panoramic view of Napoli city.


Napoli (Naples) -- a major port city in Southern Italy; once the capital city of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; the birthplace of pizza -- was my first stop in Italy. In view of economy, I took the cheapest train possible from Roma to Napoli which took me more than three hours to get there (c.f. one-hour trip for the fastest train).

Outside San Francesco di Paola, Napoli.


The food in Napoli was generally cheap and absolutely great. I'd tried three different types of pizza, including one which was deep fried (!). It was a great pleasure to sit by the street and dine under the warm radiation (not directly indeed) of the sun, viewing the deep-blue Mediterranean sea.

A luxurious (the only one) lunch in a very decent restaurant (costed me a fortune), Napoli.


I was lucky enough to get a last-minute, highly-discounted student ticket of a concerto in the Teatro di San Carlo, a majestic opera house which had stood on its site since 1737, by the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro di San Carlo and conducted by Jeffery Tate. The performance was amazing, though I was unable to understand what the chorus sung (in Italian). The transcript was projected to a little screen above the stage but it was also in Italian; I wondered what was the point of doing so except for the benefit of those Italians who were hearing impaired but still attended the concerto, which I doubted if there were any.

Inside Teatro di San Carlo, Napoli.


ROMA (21-26 DEC 2006)

The Roman Forum, once the centre of the Western world, Roma.


In whatever sense, Roma is the city of cities which I couldn't think of any other metropolis could parallel to. Perhaps only the Chang'an City in Tang dynasty China could trump the glory of Roma but it wasn't preserved as good as the Eternal City.

In front of the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, Roma.


Spending a whole day in the Forums and on the Palatine Hill, I felt I was literally walking into the history of the Roman Empire. Reading history on book is one thing, the experience of witnessing where the history happened is quite another and is much better. Before the trip I'd read some materials on the history of the Roman empire, but it was nothing comparing with what I actually saw, albeit most of them were the ruins.

Inside the Colosseum, Roma.


Piazza Navona, a showpiece of the Roman architecture in Baroque period, Roma.


It is impossible to imagine what Roma would look like nowadays without the influence of Christianity, in particular, Catholicism. Churches and religious buildings are everywhere in Roma; many buildings in Republic and Imperial period are converted into Catholic churches, sometime with destructive effects (e.g. the Pantheon).

Room of Maps, inside Vatican Museums, Vatican.


Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the masterpiece of Michelangelo, Vatican.


On the Christmas Eve, I atteded the Christmas Mass in St Peter's Basilica which was hosted by the Pope himself. It took me four hours to beg for a ticket and waited in. Notwithstanding my atheistic propensity and total lack of comprehensibility to Latin language, which the Pope used, the atmosphere inside St Peter's was great; the nuns in front of me were getting crazy when the Pope walked by us.

It wasn't a bad way to celebrate X'mas except for the fact that there was NO public transportation when the Mass ended in 2am and I had to walk back to my hostel, near Roma Termini, which took me one and a half hour. Jesus!

Hi Pope!


Outside St Peter's after the Christmas Mass, Vatican.



[2006] JBR 26