The Unknown Rebel

The Vitrine — Evidence

1. Figure01

   The label's inventory of its sitter

   Protester: unestablished, then and since. Name: asserted within days, never confirmed in the thirty-seven years that followed. Age: given as nineteen, by a paper that named no source. Occupation: given as student, same source. Politics: unknown. Words: unrecorded. Motive: unattributed. Fate: unestablished. Contents of the two bags: unknown. Everything the photograph is said to mean was supplied from outside the frame.

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2. Primary document02

   The name, supplied within days — Sunday Express, London, June 1989

   The paper called him Wang Weilin, nineteen, a student, and reported that he had been charged with political hooliganism and with attempting to subvert members of the People's Liberation Army. It gave no source. No confirmation has followed from any government, any court, or any family. The Party's own assessment says the opposite — that it searched and could not place him among the dead or the imprisoned. A name arrived, carried the weight of a name for a while, and dissolved. It hangs here because manufacturing a fact and manufacturing a frame are the same operation, and this one was performed on a man who was in no position to correct it.

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3. Quotation03

   General Secretary Jiang Zemin, asked on American television what became of the man — ABC, 20/20, 19 May 1990

   I can't confirm whether this young man you mentioned was arrested or not... I think [that he was] never killed.

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4. Primary document04

   Internal Chinese Communist Party assessment, as reported

   We can't find him. We checked through computers but can't find him among the dead or among those in prison.

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5. Primary document05

   4th Gemini Awards, News and Sports — Reportage. Ceremony held 4–5 December 1989

   Tom Kennedy, "China in Crisis," CBC. The citation is the record. The broadcast is the object, and this label will not characterise a piece of film the visitor can watch unaided — the footage this broadcaster publishes from those days is one click away. Watch it, and judge the work. That is what a vitrine is for. The certificate's own terms are not in dispute. It was awarded in December 1989, six months on, to a body of work, at a point where the account of the man in the road had already set. Reporting and framing were bound together by then, and the industry certified the package. Which half it meant to certify, it did not say. What is publicly available of that coverage is the crackdown reporting of the third and fourth of June; whether the man in front of the column appeared in the cited work at all is not a question the public record answers.

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6. Primary document06

   CBC News, "1989 Tiananmen Square protests: iconic images" — posted 31 May 2014, image 1 of 18

   “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.” (Jeff Widener/AP) Read what he is called. A Chinese man. Not a protester, not a dissident, not a rebel. A man. The tanks are heading east, which is out of the city: they were leaving. The photograph is credited to the wire service whose man took it. This is the accurate version, and this broadcaster published it. Hold it against the next object, from the same newsroom, five years on.

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7. Quotation07

   CBC News, "From hope to despair: Remembering Tiananmen everywhere except where it happened" — 2019

   “One protester famously stopped a row of tanks by blocking the path and refusing to move.” There it is. The man of 2014 is a protester in 2019, in the same newsroom’s own voice, with no source, no hedge and no name. Nobody decided this. There is no memo, no editor to point at, no moment at which a claim was made and checked. A category was simply supplied, because by then it was the only category the picture had. Stopped is doing work too. The tanks did halt rather than run him over, so the sentence is not false — it just leaves out that they were already leaving, which is the only fact that tells you what halting them meant. One clause. No date, no direction, no photograph. The frame is assembled here by subtraction and one noun. Nobody had to lie. Set the two pages side by side and the shape is not erasure. It is exchange. The 2014 page carries the photograph and not the word. The 2019 page carries the word and not the photograph. In five years the accurate object left and the inaccurate sentence took its place, and the sentence does the same job in less room. Nothing was removed from the record. The record was simply no longer needed once the account could be carried in a single clause.

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8. Primary document08

   The same article, further down — a section heading

   “Scrubbed from history.” What follows it is true and worth printing: barred from Chinese classrooms, cut from the history books, censored on the Chinese internet, and “ignored at the National Museum of China that faces Tiananmen Square.” The charge is that a museum will not hang the thing. It is laid in a piece that gives the most reproduced image of the event one subordinate clause and does not show it. Call that hypocrisy and you have let it off. Hypocrisy requires someone who knows. Erasure by a state is a policy and takes ministries, instructions, people who could be named. This took nobody. A thing was simply not included, in an article about things not being included, and no one in the building had to know they were doing it.

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9. Reference09

   The man in front of the column — absent from the broadcaster's own record

   Kennedy's Sunday Report of 4 June is in the CBC archive and can be watched. The man in front of the column is not. The broadcaster's published archive of its own Tiananmen coverage holds no segment on him — on the single most reproduced minute to come out of the square. That is not a tape being withheld, and this label will not imply that it is. What it means is narrower and harder: the contemporaneous Canadian broadcast record of that minute is not publicly examinable, so what was said over those frames in June 1989 cannot be quoted by anyone outside the building. The certificate is a public record. The object is not in the room.

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10. Figure10

    How many died — the published range

    Chinese government: two hundred to three hundred. Chinese Red Cross: about two thousand seven hundred. The British ambassador's cable to London, declassified in 2017: “minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000.” A United States file cites a figure from inside the Chinese military of 10,454. The count is unknown to within a factor of fifty and always has been. The number was never what carried this event anywhere. One man, one minute, one frame — and his name is not known either.

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11. Figure11

    Gwangju, South Korea — 18 to 27 May 1980

    The army moved on pro-democracy demonstrators with tanks, armoured carriers and helicopters. Official toll: 165. Estimates run to 3,500, and the city's death records for that May ran roughly 2,300 above normal. Same decade. Same shape. Better counted. No photograph. Ask anyone in this country what happened at Gwangju. The frame hanging outside this room is not evidence that one of these was the worse thing. It is the reason one of them is the thing that is remembered.

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12. Primary document12

    Transit of the negatives out of Beijing

    Jeff Widener's roll left the Beijing Hotel with an American exchange student. Stuart Franklin's went out concealed in a box of tea. Charlie Cole hid his in a hotel bathroom and came back for it. The most reproduced photograph of the century survived on the improvisation of four or five people in a week, and not one of them could have told you what it would later be made to mean.

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