The shot is iconic: an unidentified man in a white shirt, hands full of bags, facing off against a column of tanks on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, after the Chinese Communist Party ordered a bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
The photo and footage of the so-called “tank man” became the defining image of the Tiananmen Square crackdown whose 35th anniversary passed on Tuesday. On the night of June 3, 1989, after nearly two months of demonstrations by students and workers demanding faster political reform and an end to corruption, convoys of armed troops entered central Beijing to clear the square.
Capturing the shot Other journalists were at the hotel, too – including Jonathan Schaer, CNN’s US-based cameraman who flew into Beijing to support his exhausted colleagues. He’d set up a camera on the balcony of CNN’s room at the hotel, where the network had been broadcasting live reports of the crackdown throughout the weekend. “Another cameraman said, ‘Hey, look at the guy in front of the tanks!’ I just zoomed in and started videotaping,” Schaer recalled.
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