Tank Man is a just-released 15-minute drama film by Robert Anthony Peters, a young libertarian producer. It dramatizes the decision and action of a young Chinese man to stop (temporarily) a column of tanks one day after the very violent attack against Tiananmen Square demonstrators in June 1989. You can watch the film on You Tube.
Sarah Skwire, a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, wrote:
It made me cry. It’s a beautiful story. If you get the chance to see it, you should.
After watching Peters’ film, I watched the 2006 PBS documentary The Tank Man, on the same tragic and heroic event. Although the documentary is a bit dated, it is also worth watching. Just ignore the few comments by social justice warriors who understand little about economics—for instance, that nobody can get immediately rich in a previously very poor society and that the Chinese economy did not grow because of tyranny. If economic growth were caused by tyranny, the whole world would have become rich some time ago; and China would have become much richer than Hong Kong. The documentary does confirm some conclusions of the economic analysis of tyranny, such as the difficulty of collective action and the oft-noted fact that when the tyrant uses all his force decisively and the soldiers shoot, topping the regime is very difficult.
Many questions remain unanswered about why a regime in the process of liberalization, as Deng Xiaoping’s government was pushing the Chinese state, would resort to such savage repression. Internal politics and infighting, as well as the interests of some factions in the state apparatus, must have played a role. (I raised some related questions in my Regulation review of Ronald Coase and Ning Wang’s book How China Became Capitalist; as well as in my more recent Regulation feature on “Peter Navarro’s Conversion.”)
One minimum conclusion: beware of Leviathan.
READER COMMENTS
Knox
Jun 9 2019 at 4:46pm
i think you meant to say “I pose some related questions…”
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 11 2019 at 5:01pm
Thanks for finding the glitch. I made a correction.
Mark Brady
Jun 9 2019 at 6:48pm
Pierre, what do you make of this?
“[I]t was not just a polite student protest with polite, reformist ends. It was not even confined to Tiananmen Square. It went far beyond it into the working-class suburbs of Beijing, and spread out to other cities. Indeed, this is where the uprising started, among angry workers, enduring the impoverishing effects of Premier Deng Xiaoping’s crude market reforms from the late 1970s onwards. They were not polite and peaceable protesters; they were angry, with some even attacking their oppressors. In one suburb, two soldiers were hanged from a burnt-out bus.
“The protesters, however, were not solely motivated by economic concerns. They wanted better material standards of living, of course, but they wanted more, too. Above all, they wanted more freedom. In Charter 08, a manifesto written by dissidents and veterans of the Beijing uprising, the spirit of Tiananmen Square lives on:
“‘Freedom is at the core of universal values. The rights of speech, publication, belief, assembly, association, movement, to strike, and to march and demonstrate are all the concrete expressions of freedom. Where freedom does not flourish, there is no modern civilisation to speak of.’
[….]
“‘Democracy: The most fundamental meaning is that sovereignty resides in the people and the government elected by the people. Democracy has the following basic characteristics:(1) The legitimacy of political power comes from the people; the source of political power is the people. (2) Political control is exercised through choices made by the people. (3) Citizens enjoy the genuine right to vote… (4) Respect the decisions of the majority while protecting the basic human rights of the minority. In a word, democracy is the modern public instrument for creating a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”’
“There it is: the radical democratic impulse of Tiananmen. It restates what any true democrat already knows – that the source of sovereignty lies not in the party or parliament, but in the people. It is a vision of collective self-determination.”
Misremembering Tiananmen: Why Western liberals now say so little about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/07/misremembering-tiananmen/
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 10 2019 at 12:49am
Thanks, Mark, for bringing that piece to my attention. Reading it, I had the same impression I had yesterday while listening to self-righteous SJWs in the PBS documentary. They talk about democracy—and often “freedom and democracy”—all the time, but they don’t seem to know what they are talking about. In On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel explains neatly how democracy means two very different and incompatible things. For some, it means freedom and the rule of law. For others, it means “popular sovereignty” (as Black says so clearly), that is, the right of 50%+1 to oppress the rest. The SJWs also criticized the free-market reforms of Xiaoping; of course, everything should be free immediately, shouldn’t it? I suspect that the June 1989 demonstrators (the PBS documentary was clear that they were not only students and that demonstrations were held all over China) had no clear idea either about what “democracy” they wanted. Even if that is right, they could not, contrary to fashionable intellectuals, be easily blamed for their ignorance. What’s your take?
Benjamin Cole
Jun 9 2019 at 7:32pm
The Communist Party of China opened up a manufacturing platform for multinationals.
The marriage between multinationals and the Communist Party of China has been sold to Westerners as “liberalization.”
In fact for nearly 40 years all types of rights in China, human rights, legal rights, free speech rights, religious rights—-you name it—- have been vanishing.
It is the mark of our times that the most powerful commercial enterprises of all time, the multinationals, which could also be termed the amoral supranationals, have formed an alliance with the most powerful political party of all time the Communist Party of China.
Who can tell what path history will take, but if Pierre L. is afraid of the Leviathan, it appears now the most powerful Leviathan of all time will be ruled from Beijing.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 10 2019 at 12:55am
Benjamin C: There must be a bit of poetic license here:
There was not much to vanish after Mao.
I do recommend the book by Coase and Wang, which will give you another viewpoint on China after Mao.
Mark Brady
Jun 10 2019 at 2:20am
“How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. Luke McDonagh finds that Ronald Coase and Ning Wang provide a fascinating, though somewhat partisan, account of the Chinese economic transformation from the late 1970s up to the present day.”
Book Review: How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/12/13/book-review-how-china-became-capitalist-ronald-coase-ning-wang/
Mark Brady
Jun 10 2019 at 12:17pm
I haven’t read Ronald Coase and Ning Wang’s How China Became Capitalist, but I’ll happily grant that this book co-authored by Coase is worth reading. That said, the title is most unfortunate if only because it provides ammunition for those critics of the free market who conflate private property arrangements and market orders with authoritarian government, in other words, what they identify as a species of “neoliberalism.”
Phil H
Jun 11 2019 at 10:50am
Pierre is exactly right. This quote has it utterly backwards:
“In fact for nearly 40 years all types of rights in China, human rights, legal rights, free speech rights, religious rights—-you name it—- have been vanishing.”
The modulation of the quote later is no better. Have you ever been to China? Have you any idea what it used to be like? You can certainly criticise China today, but the idea that it used to be freer is crazy.
Benjamin Cole
Jun 10 2019 at 7:20am
China as an “indomitable economic force in the international arena.”!!!
Well, yes they did that through capitalism-=–but most of it was state capitalism, not free-market capitalism (which I prefer). The Belt and Road initiative is also fascinating, and does not strike me as free markets in action, but rather state-planning manifested. My rough guess is the BRI will be successful, a lot better than sailing 13 aircraft carriers around while infrastructure crumbles (the US plan).
I probably should have written that rights have been declining in China in the last 30 years (since T Square), not 40 years. In the last 10 especially.
Benjamin Cole
Jun 16 2019 at 12:01am
Pierre L:
“One minimum conclusion: beware of Leviathan.+—PL
You have written often against “the Leviathan.”
I would like to see your take on why the US federal government is responsible for, or even involved in, oil-tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf.
Should not oil-shippers provide for their own safety, through the hiring of private Blackwater-type navies, or their own negotiations with hostile forces?
Andrea Mays
Jun 21 2019 at 11:22am
Excellent read. Interesting question why the Chinese government would have used overwhelming force against an unarmed population at that precise moment. I wonder whether anyone has written about parallel events in East Germany and Hungary when Gorbachev and Hoenecker decided not to use force against those who were leaving the East through holes in the Wall.
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