The Tank Man

The world often forgets that China is an oppressive bureaucracy just like the ones in movies such as THX 1138, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Brazil, Equilibrium, and, more recently, V for Vendetta. Today, multibillion dollar corporations see China only as a place filled with dollar signs.

Opportunists do not want to talk about a China that controls information, suppresses its people, and violates human rights. Even Google, the company that promised "to do no evil", complied with Chinese government regulations by providing filtered and censored search results in China. Google claimed, "failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely." However, what Google really meant is that harsh censorship can be forgiven as long as the stock price goes up. And Google, the latest Chinese puppet, is just one of the many that demonstrates how easily money can corrupt.

Bush and his goons defends the WMD mistake driven Iraq war by singing that the world is a better place without Saddam. Yes, Saddam ran an oppressive bureaucracy. Yes, I will agree that the world is better without men like Saddam. The world will also be a better place without the current Chinese government, and it is without a doubt that China has a ton of WMDs! I think a preemptive strike is in order. I wonder how many people who spoke against the Chinese government have been buried in mass graves. What happened to the many who protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989? Do you remember Tiananmen Square? Truth be told, the Chinese government erased much of the Tiananmen Square history through censorship. For those of us in the land of the free, we easily forget unless it impacted us directly.

Finally, The Tank Man, a program by PBS, unveils the side about China no one wants to talk about for 17 years. Most of us remember the image of that man who stood in front of a tank during the 1989 Tiananmen protest. Sadly, "Thomas [the film maker of The Tank Man] shows the iconic picture to undergraduates at Beijing University, the nerve center of the 1989 protests; none of them recognize it." Check out The Tank Man by PBS and learn more about the real China. You will be shocked.