MCLC: tank man (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From William Goldman <billgoldman at mac.com>
Subject: tank man (2)
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The Chinese are not, of course, uniformly ignorant of the 1989 events as
some westerners assume. When I was teaching at Tsinghua (2006-'07), I used
to use Vidalia with Tor to evade the Great Firewall and surf the net as I
pleased.  Perhaps naively, I assumed that all my students would be
freedom-fighters, so I used to make a point of taking them through the
simple technical stages of downloading and using Vidalia and Tor. One
week, I did this and then asked them to tell me what website they would
like us to look at (This was a Newspaper Reading class). My own concern
had been to be able to freely look at BBC News. There were one or two
suggestions, when suddenly an intelligent, pretty student sitting near the
front of the class said "Show us Tankman". For a second or three, I was
puzzled, till I realised who Tankman was.

So, then I showed them how to access the BBC News website, and where to
fill in something like "Tiananmen square 1989", which of course brought
up, among other things, a news report by Kate Adie from the square. I
showed them the whole report. Afterwards, we had a discussion, at the end
of which one student asked me: "What do *you* think? Do you think the
government's action was justified?" I responded that since, as far as I
knew, the students had been non-violent and idealistic, the military
action to silence them was a wrong move. This seemed to go down quite well
with the class, who, I should perhaps have said earlier, had been
horrified at what news film revealed about their government's actions.

Bill