Stuff You Should Know - The Massacre at Tiananmen Square

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

Tank Man. An indelible image burned in our brains. But what led to this extraordinary event? Chuck and Josh walk you through the days and weeks leading up to the massacre at Tiananmen Square, which is more of a cautionary tale than we realized. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there everybody, it's your pals, Josh and Chuck, and we wanted to record an intro to this episode because when we first recorded it and got it ready to publish and edit, things were a lot different in America

because it was like a week ago. Yeah, exactly. And I think the events of the past week or two have taught us that something like this podcast episode is more relevant than ever. And it just kind of worked out that way. Yep, and we also wanted to say that we grieve the death of George Floyd

and everybody who's ever died unfairly at the hands of the police. And we stand with Black Lives Matter and anyone who's fighting for justice in the United States. Absolutely, so when you hear this episode on Tiananmen Square and think, well that could never happen, much less in the United States, be careful because that's the kind of dangerous thinking

that can get us all in trouble. And I'm with the show. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And it's just the two of us. Chuck and I decided we can make it if we try.

Just the two of us, Chuckers and I. How long did you plan that? Buddy, it just came pouring right out of my brain, through my mouth and just landed with a thud on the desk. Yeah, R.I.P. to the great Bill Withers. Oh, I was thinking more Austin Powers. Yeah, R.I.P. to him too. What? Austin Powers, he died a long time ago, right?

No, he got me there for a second. Yes, he did. What did you do? Mike Myers had passed? I thought Mike Myers had passed and then I was like, wait, did Dr. Evil die? I was like, wait, Dr. Evil's not real. It was really confusing for a second there, man. So I last night did one of the things

that I love doing as part of our work, Chuck, which is watch a really great documentary and get paid for it. Don't you love that? It's great, I love it. There's a really good documentary by Frontline, PBS's show about Tankman, which you probably- Tank girl?

Tankman, totally different kind of thing. This is not Lori Petty. This is an unknown person who no one, as far as anyone knows, knows their name. But even if you're not familiar with Tankman, just the name, you probably, if you live outside of China, seen this picture. It's a picture of just a lone man wearing a white

kind of dress shirt and black pants, holding a couple of shopping bags to the side, staring down a column of heavy tanks that he has stopped single-handedly just by standing in front of them. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those indelible images that if you were, it still resonates, obviously, but if you were cognizant of the news in 1989,

then you could not escape this image or forget it. Yeah, and I mean, you were close to around 18 or so, so I'm sure this really had a big impact on you when it was going on, right? Yeah, I mean, just had graduated high school. So this must have really kind of raised the hackles on the back of your neck and gotten you pretty worked up like the rest of the world, I would guess.

Yeah, I remember it being kind of one of the first big political events that got my head out of my butt. Yeah, it did that for a lot of people, too. I mean, like what happened that day or those days, like June 3rd and 4th of 1989, the communist regime that had a iron grip on the country and still does today, maybe even more so today, almost fell, was almost toppled by a popular uprising.

And to stamp it out, the government went to the most extreme measures possible, which was commanding the army to murder citizens, unarmed, peacefully protesting citizens, were gunned down in the streets like they were enemy combatants basically in their own city in Beijing. And it was just a horrific thing that managed to kind of trickle out

and definitely captured the world's attention, pulled the world's head out of its butt, as you would say. Yeah, so to tell this story, we need to go back in time a little bit and big thanks to our pal Dave Ruse for helping us out with this one. This is very good. In fact, it was on a different laptop

and I kind of forgot it was sitting in my folder when I had been in there for like a month or so, right? Yeah, it's been there a while. And then I saw it and I was like, oh, wait a minute, we got Tiananmen Square on the burner. So, yeah, Dave did a great job and we have to travel back in time to previous to 1989 when the sort of feeling among students in China

was that, you know what, this communism isn't working out so great and we wanna start making a little bit of noise and we're not saying to topple our government or anything like that, but we're saying let's get the corruption in check and let's maybe get some free speech going on and some free press and free expression.

And they thought they could get there, they thought they could get there, which is what makes this really, really sad among many other things. Yeah, and then even sadder than that to me is they almost got there. You know, like this was, I mean, this was close. This is like a hair's breadth away

where they brought this so much to the government's doorstep and laid this at their feet that the government had to at least consider if not openly to one another, at least, you know, to themselves, like do we just bow to the will of the people and just say, okay, we're gonna do things differently? Like it was a big, big deal.

It was a big deal and I guess preemptively we should say we're gonna do our best with some of the pronunciations of the names. They're really tough. They are tough and as usual, we'll do our best and probably fail and stop short of being perfect. I think we learned our lesson on the underground city. At least we're not gonna pronounce X like X.

Right, right? So the students had a little bit of wind in their sails because they're college students and that's what college students are like. That's why we love them. And they thought they had an ally who was a pro-reform leader and pretty high up in the Communist Party in Hu Yal Bang.

Sounds about right. Okay, he was forced out of power in 87 though and when he died in April, April 15th of 1989, the memorializing and the mourning of his death is what really kind of kickstarted this whole process that led up to June 3rd. Yeah and in the late 80s, what you call the president of China was named Deng Xiaoping

and he had been in charge for a while but in addition to the president in a communist country, you also have the leaders of the Communist Party. They're not exactly like lateral but they're pretty high up. You have like a prime minister, you have the leader of the party, the general secretary then you also have the president of the country

and Deng was the president of China at the time but within the party and within the leadership of the country, including Hu, and Hu was kind of the face of this movement, there was this idea that okay, the Maoist revolution happened, Mao was great but we can't run a country just living by these kind of lofty principles that Mao espoused.

We need to kind of get a little more loose gripped here at least economically and there was a whole contingent led again by Hu that basically said, maybe we should kind of ease up on the government planning a little bit and let a little bit of free market go and see what happens. We really think that like there's gonna be

a lot less starvation, a lot less poverty if we just let a little bit of this stuff into there. So there was this kind of progressive movement but then when Hu, when these protests kind of started in 1987, they basically showed Hu the door like you were saying, he was removed from office because he had kind of demonstrated that level of like loosening of the grip

on the people would lead to things like protests and demonstrations but it was too late, they had opened the door now and then like you said, when he died, that was kind of the lit match that got thrown under this powder keg. And I take it you're on a first name basis now because it's easier to pronounce?

Hu was actually his last name in China, they say the last name first, yes. So I'm getting away with it both ways. I'm having my dumpling and eating it too. Oh man, that's the best way to have a dumpling. So, and I learned something new today too. Thanks Chuck, that's basically why I wake up in the morning. So what happened is, he died on April 15th, 89,

bunch of students like thousands of students got together in Tiananmen Square to mourn his passing. And Tiananmen Square we should say is an enormous place, it's the largest public space in the world, right in the middle of Beijing, it is just, it's the town center unlike any town center in the world. Yeah, there's like no trees anywhere,

it's just flat and then edged by enormous public buildings, it makes you feel very small. Yeah, and it's also a perfect place to get like thousands and thousands and thousands of people together. And this is what happened during the funeral celebration in Tiananmen Square and it didn't go on for too long before students started to sort of use this as an opportunity to not only mourn someone that they believed

was going to champion their cause, but they said, we can use this now and let's just camp out and let's hold some speeches and let's sort of start giving our demands for political reform. Like throwing peace signs and just basically peaceful protest that you would imagine students from and most of them came from Beijing University,

which from what I understand is the premier elite university in the entire country. So these were like the children of the elites as it were. So there's definitely a measure of tolerance of this going on whereas had it been just a popular uprising or a popular protest from the start, they probably would have been treated a lot more roughly and it certainly would not have been allowed

to have gone as long as it had. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, you mentioned the sort of split and ideologies within the party, which is really interesting to think about now, but they were split about what to do about these demonstrations. This was the biggest civil protest longest running since communism had taken hold in 1949

and there were some people, it wasn't just like, all right, let's go in there and mow them down. There was a complete faction within the party that was like, you know what, these are students and they want what's best for us and maybe we should listen to them a little bit. Yeah, because it's like you said, they weren't saying down with communism,

down with the Chinese Communist Party, they were saying like down with corruption and we want a little more free speech, like some really basic stuff that didn't require the entire system to be overthrown, which was I think another reason why they were kind of allowed to continue. And then yeah, like you were saying,

there were sympathetic members of the communist party high up in the party who were like, no, no, we should just, you know, maybe hear him out or just let this thing fizzle out. But then on the other side was a guy named Li Peng and he was the antagonist in this whole thing. Most people paint him as the villain, but I read an article about how he's actually the fall guy

that it was really Deng Xiaoping, who was the president, who was the true architect of all of this and that Li Peng, while he gets all of the notorious credit, yeah, for this whole thing, he wasn't the architect of it, but he also didn't stop his boss, Deng Xiaoping, from carrying this out or from being the architect of it too.

So it's not like he was a good guy. He was easy to hate, I think, from what I read and it made him an easy target of the protest and then the aftermath as well. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, I think people, it's easy to paint a good guy and a bad guy in a situation like this. And he was painted definitely as the bad guy.

And again, we're not saying that he was some awesome person, but on the other side was the Communist Party General Secretary and his name was Zhao Ziyang. And he was the one that was, you know, more sympathetic to the cause, basically. Yeah, and so he was kind of holding back Deng Xiaoping's worst impulses and saying like, no, we just need to kind of like approach this peacefully

or whatever, and he got removed too, which I really think kind of highlights just how, how much crossing or opposing Deng Xiaoping where it would get you removed at best. And actually, Zhao Ziyang, he spent, when he was removed from office, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest because I mean, that's what happens

when you are removed from office there. They just say, go home and don't leave again. You're under political quarantine. Yeah, so, you know, they had seen this happening all around them. The Soviet Union was crumbling. They saw countries, communist countries, people just like these students kind of rising up

and saying that they've had enough. So they were nervous. And when Zhao Ziyang went on, he went out of town basically, went on to Korea on a state visit. This is when Li Ping said, all right, now is our time. This guy's out of the country. And he's like, basically, we can start the first piece to toppling these students.

And it wasn't initially a violent piece. It was an ad. It was in April 26th. It was an ad in the People's Daily, the state newspaper. And it was an editorial basically that just denounced the demonstrations and that was their first sort of shot fired. Was your friend is out of town?

Well, they didn't say that. But because he was out of town, they said, we're gonna run an editorial denouncing this. Yeah, and they basically said, look, these students are being misguided that the whole thing started earnestly as a memorial for Hu, but that it had been taken advantage of by probably outside agitators,

maybe even like plants from other governments who were fomenting like a popular uprising out of this genuine sorrow for this guy who was a real advocate for them. But regardless of how it started or what's going on, we can't abide this any longer. And if we do, there's going to be, I think they put it, we'll never have another day's peace

unless we act, they didn't say brutally, oh, resolutely, unless it's checked resolutely, they said. Which is- And then in the margin, it said see brutally. Right, exactly, I mean, like that's not, checked resolutely is against a popular protest is menacing stuff. Should we take a break?

More menacing stuff. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about the effect that this editorial had right after this. Stop, if you know, stop, stop, stop, you should know, know, stop. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with a Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All righty, so they ran this editorial. They said that the, they would be checked resolutely if they didn't disperse.

And they thought that that would do the job, basically. But all that, that had the complete opposite effect. Yeah. Like literally overnight, people all over China, 400 cities across China had people coming out and protesting because they were invigorated by these students and what they saw going on in Beijing. And I think it says, Dave had an estimate here

of one in 10 citizens took to the streets. And these were people of all social strata, all walks of life in China. Yeah, one in 10 in Beijing, but then tens to hundreds of millions of protesters all pouring out into the streets and cities across China. Like they had a huge problem overnight on their hands. Like they, they, people were like,

that was the, that editorial was the exact wrong move. Yeah, it was the wrong move. And things just kind of went on this way for a little while until I think about mid-May, when Gorbachev was coming to visit in China. So they said, this is the perfect chance. Let's stage a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. And this was not a good look for the Chinese Communist Party.

They were not happy that this was going on while Gorbachev was gonna pay the visit. Yeah, because I mean, you wanna do impress Gorby. He was probably the most popular guy in the world right then in 1989. Yeah, they lost face. And it was, it was a pretty well done move on the part of the students

who carried out the hunger strike. But that editorial that kicked all this off that really kind of changed things, there was a huge turn, there was a sea change in the entire thing when regular people started taking up this protest because it started out as a student protest. And now all of a sudden,

it was an everyday Chinese person protest. And that apparently changed the entire attitude of the government toward this whole thing. There was no longer paternal and kind of head patty and patient. It was like, wait a minute. I saw in this frontline documentary that somebody said it was like,

the workers are the ones who put the Chinese Communist Party in power. And now it suddenly looked like the workers were about to take the power away from them. And this scared the bejesus out of them. Because again, this is a very, they had an iron stranglehold over their population. And there were also,

there was a lot of corruption in the government too. So the whole idea of being removed from power had a lot more at stake than just losing power. Like there was, these people had done quite a bit that they might have to answer for after they lost power, you know? Oh yeah, big time, they were officially worried at this point.

You still had Zhao calling for cooler heads to prevail here, and this was before his removal just before. But Li Ping said, you know what? The only way to take care of this is by kind of cracking the whip in a hard, hard way. Martial law should be imposed. Students heard about this.

And this is when the big, big protest at Tiananmen Square, I think they estimated like over a million people, 1.2 million people. Students, there were police involved, there were some military that were protesting. And this is when everything really started to gain some momentum. And you know, what students thought

was the right direction, but it turns out was a bad move probably. Yeah, I mean, in hindsight. Although you can never, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like yeah, now, but at the time it was like, okay, we're gonna go to the mattresses rather than backing down.

They said, okay, we're gonna escalate on our end as well. If they're gonna amass troops and invade Beijing, which is what they did, we're gonna meet them and try to drive them out. And at first it actually worked. There was a first incursion into Beijing of about 300,000 Chinese soldiers. The Chinese military showed up in Beijing

in tanks, armored personnel carriers, troop transport trucks, the whole shebang. They can imagine 300,000 soldiers showing up in Atlanta and just basically being like everybody needs to go home. The thing is- Everybody would go home. This first, probably. This first, this first incursion, I guess, into Beijing

didn't actually make it to the city center because the people in the suburbs came out and swamped these army convoys and prevented them from moving forward and actually kept them there in gridlock of a sea of humanity for about four days, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was a huge victory kind of right off the bat.

They went after these personnel carriers and these tanks. They had children. They had older adults. They basically kind of paralyzed what they were trying to do and then decided to do a very kind of brilliant thing which was appeal to the good nature of these soldiers as human beings. Right.

I saw one article that kind of guessed that about 60% of the PLA soldiers were illiterate. They were uneducated. They were from out in the country and these Beijing city folks would approach them and they would bring them food and they would bring them things to drink and they would send their children out to talk to them

and say things like, you know, you should be defending us. You shouldn't be attacking us. You should join us. And some of them did. Some of those soldiers stepped down and kind of quit on the spot knowing full well that there would not end well for them and the majority of them obviously didn't.

Right, right, but even, you know, even if they didn't step down and quit, some of them did step down and mingle and talk and I saw footage of them when they finally left on the fourth day, they turned around and retreated away from Beijing. You know, a good third or half of the troops on these trucks that were driving away

were waving to the people of Beijing who'd just spent the last four days like feeding them and talking to them and basically trying to change their minds about this because I don't know if we made it clear when the people from the Beijing suburbs swamped these trucks, this is a big nonviolent form of resistance. It wasn't violent.

Oh yeah. It was a charm offensive. It was just straight up nonviolent resistance and it worked like it totally worked. On the one hand, it worked because the Chinese government hadn't given them orders to fire on anybody and probably gave them orders not to carry out any violence against the people

and that that's really why it actually ultimately worked because if you're being met with that kind of resistance and you can't meet that resistance with violence, it's not like the soldiers were gonna explain their position or the government's position to the Beijing residents and change their minds. There was nothing they could do but just sit there and then finally turn around and leave.

And so at first the residents of Beijing were kind of chuffed with themselves, you know? Like that really worked, this nonviolent resistance turned back 300,000 troops from China's equivalent of Arkansas who just showed up in China's equivalent of New York and kept them from invading basically. Yeah, so the government sees this happen and they're on high alert now.

They're fully worried and they see the writing on the wall that this could be the end of the Communist Party as we know it if we don't squash this thing once and for all. And so they said, all right, here's what we're gonna do. Let's send the army in again just like we did the first time except now you're going to get to Tiananmen Square and squash this uprising. If they come out and meet you in the suburbs,

take care of things however you need to to get to Tiananmen Square like full authorization to use deadly force. Yeah, and I saw again on that documentary they were saying like they were given guns and ammunition and the ammunition they were given were thumb sized bullets, the kind of bullets that from what I could tell they were, what's that kind that like turned into

like circular saws inside people? What's it called? It's like a really common word everybody knows. Hollow point I think. Anyway, they were meant for like combat the bullets they were using these weren't rubber bullets they weren't even regular bullets. They were like combat grade bullets

that the troops were given. And you have to remember to Chuck by this time there's nobody now cause Zhao has been removed. There's nobody arguing against this impulse at least not openly. And so this impulse is allowed to go and check. Nobody stopped and said, well, wait a minute, this is crazy, we're talking about going in

and slaughtering our own people. We have to find another way. Nobody was saying that. And in fact, Li Peng was at the very least keeping his mouth shut if not supporting this whole thing as well. Yeah, so, you know, the students get word that this is what's coming on basically a second wave. They were victorious in that first wave.

So they were like you said, they were chuffed. They were probably like, all right, bring it on. Well, let's do the, let's do the same thing again. We're gonna charm you again. Yeah, pretty much. And they did the same thing. They had these, they improvised these barricades at the entrance points, they blocked off roads

with people with buses, tire, like stacks of tires and stuff. And on June 3rd, the night of June 3rd, the tanks roll in, the personnel vehicles roll in. By this time there are some rocks being thrown and some Molotov cocktails and stuff like that. And things start to get a little unruly and the PLA just charged through. And at 9 30 PM, the first shots rang out

and it was very clear very quickly that they were just gonna mow people down. Yeah, but apparently even though it was clear to some people, to other people, it was so surprising and just so utterly unbelievable that it took way too long for it to sink in what was going on. Oh, I'm sure everybody was shocked.

Yeah, so some people I think just started running when they saw people falling and bodies starting to pile up but other people were still throwing rocks and it hadn't really sunk in yet. And then ultimately, eventually everybody got it and they started to turn and run. And then as they would turn and run,

the government or the soldiers would fire into their backs, keep firing into crowds that are running away, unarmed crowds, maybe have rocks, maybe a Molotov cocktails, set a bus on fire, but they don't have guns, they don't have machine guns. I was looking and apparently Chuck, China has one of the strictest gun policies in the world. Like if you're just an average Chinese person,

you are not armed. You could get a gun if you apply for one and the government gives it to you if you have like a real need for it, like maybe there's bears that live around your house that keep killing your livestock or something. But if you live in Beijing, you don't have a gun. And it makes me wonder like, would this have erupted

into civil war if Beijing was armed, or would it have been even worse? Would they have fought back a lot more if they had had guns? Who knows? But the fact of the matter is these people did not have guns and they were shot in the back running away by government troops from their own government,

from their own country. And this was just the first time this happened. This wasn't an isolated incident. Yeah. So I read this article, I think about three years ago, there was a sort of firsthand account from a writer from England named Sir Alan Donald. And it was declassified three years ago.

He wrote this account on June 5th. So we'll finish up on what happened June 3rd and 4th, but it was a very fresh account of what happened. He was over there and he got his information from a source who had spoken to a very close friend in China State Council who apparently previously had always proved very reliable, very even-handed, and very factual in the things that he would,

I guess leak out to his friend. And the account of what happened is just like mind-boggling that there were snipers shooting people on their balconies that weren't even not down on the street protesting. They said that there were snipers using street cleaners and things just sort of as target practice. There were young women who were begging for their life that were bayoneted through the chest.

There was one account of a three-year-old that was wounded and the mom was racing to try and help it and they mowed her down. They were hosing body parts and entrails into the drains of the street. It was just, they were mowing people down at like 40 miles per hour just running people over in these personnel trucks and it just can't be overstated

what a complete and utter massacre this was. Yeah, I mean, the end result of this was as on the high end, maybe 10,000 people, civilians almost to a person were killed overnight from June 3rd to 4th in the violence that took place and then on the next day, June 4th. Unarmed, many of them shot in the back, just killed. And including, yeah, like you say,

some people weren't even down on the street, they were in their apartment. They just had the misfortune of having an apartment whose windows looked out onto TNM and Square and who had caught the attention of a sniper on a nearby rooftop. Like it was just, just ghastly. One of the worst things that any government's ever done

to its own people, certainly in modern times, it doesn't really get much worse than that. Yeah, so 1.30 a.m. The army is finally in the heart of Beijing. They have surrounded Tiananmen Square. All of these, or not all of them, sure some people got out of there, but most of these protesters are still there.

They are ordered to leave. They opened fire again. I think at this point they sent in something called the 27 Army, which the best I could find is that just was a very loyal division, apparently, that they knew that would just obey the orders no matter what. And so now they're in Tiananmen Square.

They're throwing rocks. They're getting strafed by machine gun fire. And within a few hours, most of Tiananmen Square had empty out. They were down to about 3,000 to 5,000 students. They took a vote. The student union basically said, do you want to go or do you want to stay?

And most people wanted to stay, but the leadership said, no, we got to get out of here. Otherwise, we're all going to be killed, basically. Yeah, they just said, the go's have it. Let's go. And in retrospect, that was the smartest possible thing they could have done. There wasn't anything that would have been gained

necessarily by the slaughter, but they were all very surprised that they weren't just indiscriminately slaughtered themselves. Like they, you know, a lot of people have been killed in Tiananmen Square already and they were cornered by the military. But then rather than just mow them down,

like had been done to everybody else, they were given an ultimatum that they could either leave now and just drop the whole uprising thing, or they could be jailed, prosecuted and probably killed. So they decided to go. And it makes you wonder like, would it have had an effect if they had been killed? Because these must have been the very students

from the elite Beijing University who were the sons and daughters of the elite leaders in China at the time. So what repercussions would there have been had they died? But ultimately, it was the right move. It was the smart thing to do. And the best thing to do is for the leadership, these students themselves,

they were in their early 20s tops to say, let's, we should leave. And they did. Yeah. So, you know, Tiananmen Square itself gets all the press and the historical record kind of lies in Tiananmen Square. But it was, it was all over Beijing, June 4th. Like this was on June 3rd, on June 4th,

some say that that's where the most loss of life happened. And some of the bloodiest, I was about to say battle, but it wasn't even a battle. The bloodiest part of the massacre happened the next day in these surrounding streets. Yeah, for Tiananmen Square to have, like you say, all the press, very little actually happened there. It was mostly in the area around it,

in the rest of Beijing. But the street that actually runs in front of Tiananmen Square shun on, yeah, shun on Avenue. It got the most coverage and has the most record of what happened because there happened to be a high-rise hotel along shun on Avenue that housed a bunch of Western journalists who were surreptitiously recording and photographing

this whole thing and documenting it. Yeah, so that was very fortuitous because we'll get to Tank Man later. But on this Avenue, the protesters gathered and they started to get on the PLA troops, demanding answers. The Army said, all right, you need to disperse again or face the consequences.

And once again, just like in the other instances, the Army just opened fire and they just barreled down the Avenue and people were scrambling, they were getting out of the way, they were hiding behind trees and buildings and there would be a little period of calm and then people would gather up again. And this is what makes this also tragic

is the people would continually get the nerve to try again over and over. Yeah, and a lot of those people the next day on Shungan Avenue were the parents of these protesters who they wanted to get into Tiananmen Square to find out what had happened to their kids. They hadn't heard from them yet. They thought maybe they were dead in there.

So I think that might have been what drove them to come back over and over again, even after being fired upon. And I saw footage of this. There's like after that first wave, maybe even after the second wave, this whole thing went on a dozen or so times where the people would come back up

and confront the military, the military would open fire on them, they'd run away and then the people would like gather their courage up again and go do it again. At least after the first or second wave, there's an ambulance that's shown like rushing to the scene and they fire on that. And they seem to have either killed

or possibly injured the driver because it like it veers off course and runs into like a booth or some sort. So they were firing on ambulances that were coming to help the injured who they'd fired on just a few minutes earlier. Yeah, I saw one report that they, I'm not sure how it's split up,

but one troop fired on their own officer and murdered him because I think he had shown a little bit of resistance or maybe the way I read it, it was a kind of even just like, hey, what are we doing here? Like a little bit of self-doubt about their mission. And so they murdered him. Wow, man.

I mean, imagine this, like whether you're in America or the UK or Australia, like imagine your own army doing this to you, like showing up in your city and just opening fire. Like what a just nightmare situation that would be. Yeah, should we take another break? Yes. All right, we'll take another break

and we'll talk about Tank Man and sort of the legacy of the massacre at TNM and Square right after this. Stop, you know, stop, stop, you should know, know, stop. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So like I said, Chuck, there was about, on the high end, 10,000 residents of Beijing killed June 3rd and 4th of 1989. There were more. Yeah, oh, really? Yeah, I mean, the account from the one guy

said that it was at least 10,000. Wow. And that was from his supposed source from inside the Chinese government. And that's just killed. That's not killed or injured. That's not just total casualties. That's killed.

Yeah, that's, yep. The government of China, whenever they did acknowledge that this even happened, which we'll get to in a little bit, they said, I think it was like 241, like 200 something is what they said. And they included in that a lot of soldiers and officers.

And it is true that there were reports of some of these barricades that people had put up around Beijing where there were enough people that they overran troop like troop transports and killed soldiers on board. So there were some soldiers that died, but far and away, the most casualties were on the civilian side, unarmed civilian side.

Keep in mind. Yeah, I think I saw the Chinese Red Cross initially said 2,700, but that was quickly squashed. And that even seemed super, super low. Right, right. So that was June 4th, that the worst of the massacre happened. It was in broad daylight.

And then June 5th, things had calmed down some in the sense that there was not necessarily indiscriminate mowing down of people in the streets anymore. People had just basically resigned to give up and stay inside. The Tiananmen protests have been completely squashed. And it was, I guess, calm as calm as could be considering that there were still plenty of like tanks

and martial law in the area. And on Xiong on Avenue, like a column of, I think, eight tanks or a few tanks, I'm not sure how many there were, gathered into a line and sort of going down the Avenue. And then just out of nowhere, this one guy, Tankman, steps out of nowhere and just stands in front of the lead tank.

And eventually the tank just comes to a stop. And I guess there were, this is all right in plain view of the Western journalists of a lot of people who are watching this, waiting for the tank to just run this guy down or to just shoot him with the machine gun. Just basically treat him just like 10,000 or more other people had been treated in the last day.

And to everyone's great surprise, it didn't happen. Instead, the tank just tried to move. Yeah, so he stops the tanks. He's motioning, like kind of get out of here. He's kind of sweeping his arm around. And this footage is just remarkable to look at even today. The tank tries to go around him and like you said, then the guy gets in its path, the tank stops again.

The tank goes to the left. They're doing this just surreal dance of the tank moving and the guy moving in front of it. And then finally the tank stopped again, cut its motor and the guy climbs up on top of the tank and starts yelling at the soldiers. One of the dudes in the tank pokes his little head out and they start talking and I say little head.

I think he had a normal size head, but just from the vantage point of the footage, it was a little head. Or who knows, maybe he was a tiny headed person. It was smaller than normal, you can never say. So they start yelling at each other and having an exchange. And the guy gets back down on the ground, tank man does.

The tank starts this engine and he gets right back in front of it again. And that is when that very famous photo from Charles Cole is snapped. Of him just standing again with those shopping bags by his side, just as defiant as a human being's ever been. And I mean, this is after 10,000 of his fellow Beijingers had been killed in the street.

And this guy said, this is enough, like that's the thing. To me, the guy said, this is enough. I'm sick of this S, you guys need to go. That is very clearly what the guy was saying. But the beautiful thing about tank man is you can't hear what he said. You can't see his face nearly enough to even tell who he was.

There's no way anybody saw who this guy actually was, at least not from like a camera or anything. So you also couldn't read his lips or anything. So it's left up to you and your imagination what this guy was saying and what he was doing. And that actually comes through in the fact that China, right after this incident broadcast it on TV, but they broadcast it as clear evidence

of just how much restraint the Chinese military had shown in Beijing and how all of the casualties that had actually come out of it were the fault in the on account of these rebellious anti-communist uprisers and that the military had really done a good job with us. But it really kind of underlines like, you can put into tank man what you want,

but far and away the vast majority of the world because that Charles Cole photo quickly got out and we'll explain how in a second, the vast majority of the world was inspired by this guy showing courage that that's how they took it, that this guy was saying enough, you can do what you want to me, but I represent the real true feeling

of the people of Beijing, of the people of China, of all freedom loving people in the world. I represent how they feel about you in that tank and all the people who sent you here right now. Yeah, it was remarkable. So Charles Cole takes this picture. He is seen by some security officials that are on a rooftop across the street and he knows this

and he's like, they're gonna come for my camera for sure. So he very smartly pops this roll of film out and hides it in the water tank of his toilet in his bathroom. Yes, I would have keistered it. Oh, I don't know, I think. Can you imagine? I think the keister would be sought out

sooner than the toilet tank. I guess you're probably right. The first thing they did was probably bend him over and see what he had. So they did come and they did confiscate his camera and they confiscated a roll of film, but it was from the day before and he came back the next day

and that roll of film was still in the toilet tank. Yeah, he got it. Otherwise the world may have never seen this image. Yeah, no, I don't know that that's necessarily true because there's that video footage of it that shows the whole thing. Well, true. And did we say also that he,

have we gotten to the part where he's hustled off? Who Cole? Tankman. Oh, no. Okay, well, I just spoiled it. So I mean, there is the video of it, but yeah, that photo that the world got to see because of Charles Cole's quick thinking,

that became like the symbol of the TNM and square uprising, like Tankman just standing defiantly. I wonder if, do you know the release date of the video footage? No, I don't. I know that stuff leaked out pretty quick. I imagine that everybody was kind of like, oh, I'm just leaving Beijing for no good reason.

I'm a Western journalist just traveling to Shanghai to fly back to London for no good reason. You don't need to search me for anything and just got out of there as fast as they could. I just wonder if they released the footage after the photo had become released. I'm not sure. I know that there were a lot of journalists

watching that at the time, including just, you know, text journalists, when writers, I guess you'd call them, that were witnessing this and writing about it and memorizing it and documenting it. And the fact that they were left alive, let this idea get out because we'll see the Chinese government like squashed a memory of this.

This is a lot, it bears a lot of resemblance to the Tulsa race massacre. Yeah. You know, it just follows a lot of the same key points, but to sum up Tankman or to wrap up his story, after this, like you said, this weird dance goes on for a little while and he's just standing there and they're in a standoff.

It's between him and the tank. A guy runs, it comes up on his bike and you could tell he's just kind of like you, okay, you need to get out of here. This is not gonna go well for you. And that kind of cues up a couple of other guys who run into the frame of this video footage and just grab Tankman and hustle him away.

And there's some debate over who those people were and what became of Tankman. Some witnesses say, well, they were clearly, you know, members of the Communist party, you know, secret police and he was taken away and executed. But if you watch the footage to me, these are people who are getting him out of there to help him.

That's how I- That's what it looked like to me, yeah. Yeah. So they think the fact that the Chinese government did not parade this guy around, hold a public trial and probably a public execution to make an example out of him. And the fact that no one has any idea

what his name was and no one's ever said it was this guy definitively makes people think that he is still alive and hadn't told anybody that he made it out of there alive, basically. Yeah, I really wonder. I mean, there have been various accounts over the years of who they think it was. Some people have even named individuals.

Some people have said that no, he was executed. Some people said no, he wasn't. Some people said he was incarcerated, never to be heard from again. And we just, there's really no way of knowing. It is interesting to read though, all the accounts of what people think might have happened. Yeah, I'd like to go with that.

He was absorbed by a crowd and disappeared. Like to live, not disappeared, like disappeared like from the government's radar. Yeah, like at the end of Victory, the great World War II soccer movie. Oh, I never saw that one. Well, should I spoil it? Sure. I think I kinda did. They win?

All right, if you wanna see this movie, don't listen to this people. Okay. But the whole deal is, is they stage the allies, prisoners of war stage the soccer match against Germany. But the real plan is that they are to escape during a tunnel in the locker room. Oh, nice. This ragtag team of soccer players

that the prisoners assemble, featuring Sylvester Stallone as the lone American in goal. And they think that they can win the soccer game at halftime, so they don't escape. They decide to not go and to play that soccer match. What? And they win and it's amazing. And the stadium field is stormed

and they are absorbed by the crowd and you see images of them getting hustled off and having street clothes put on them over their soccer uniforms. Right. And that's the end of the movie. It's great. So they were very fortunate that the crowd treated them that way, but they didn't know that that was going to happen?

No. Then that was one of the dumbest decisions ever made by a group of human beings in the world. To try and win a soccer game instead of escape? Yes, because it doesn't matter. The soccer game doesn't matter. Oh, but it does. You're escaping to freedom?

That matters. That was so dumb. It's such a good movie, man. Is that based on a real life true story? You know, I have no idea. It's gotta be. I don't think so. It has to be. I hope so.

Okay, so anyway, we don't know what became of Tankman, but his image, they think or they say actually inspired a lot of those protests in Eastern Europe that had made the Communist Party so nervous for a while, Chuck, that they actually inspired those protesters to go all the way and actually led to the downfall of the USSR.

What he did not lead to the downfall of was the Chinese Communist Party, because they won. They went as far as they needed to go to make sure that they held on to power. Like they went far beyond like any reasonable point and engaged in, not civil war, a massacre of their own people

just to hold on to power and keep things the way that they were. But one thing that really changed that directly came out of this June 1989 popular uprising was a shift toward economic reform. That they had said, okay, you people, you want some economic reform, you want a bigger shot at life,

you want to make more money, you want luxury brands to build malls and open up stores here, we'll give you that. And they did, they opened up China to foreign investment. And I mean, we all know how that story went. This rise of China that we're seeing now and have been seeing for the last couple of decades directly came from the June 1989 uprisings

and the decision for the government to say, okay, we'll open up some economic reform. Yeah, and in the end, like we said, up to and perhaps more than 10,000 people murdered, at least 1,600 people imprisoned. God, I think it was much more than that. Oh yeah. But that's from a human rights group

called the Dai Hua Foundation. And, you know, imprisoned for, you know, crimes against the government, reeducation camps, life sentences. Supposedly in 2016, a man was supposedly the very last prisoner from the Tiananmen massacre to be released 27 years later, but who knows the truth? And a lot, I mean, a lot of public executions,

like making examples out of people scaring the bejesus out of the population, saying like, this is what happens. Look what happens if you're anti-government. But again, they were doing it in a way saying like there was just a few people who were really against the government. We know you would never do this.

And it really had this huge chilling effect on that. And so they said, we'll give you economic reform, do not ever ask for political reform again, because this is what happens when you do. We're in charge, we're keeping things the way they are, but we'll make it so you can have more money or whatever. And now China is basically like much wealthier. There's a huge middle class than there was before,

but there's also a tremendous amount of inequality that wasn't there before. But you can also say on the other hand, everybody was equally poor. Now there's a lot less people who aren't poor. And even a lot of the poor people are way better off than they were. But they still live under one of the most repressive regimes

in the world. And that was the trade-off. That was the bargain that was made. Yeah. And you know what? There's one thing that I think I really learned from this. And it was that you have to nip corruption in the bud before it takes true root.

Because if you let your government and your leaders get away with corruption, they're gonna try to get away with a little more and a little more and a little more. And then before you know it, corruption is so entrenched in your government and in your society that the people who are in charge have so much to answer for.

I have so much that they've done that they would not want people to know about that they can't ever afford to let go of power. And so they will do anything to hold on to power, including murder their own people who try to take them out of power. And I mean, this happened in China, but if it reaches that point,

you could make a pretty good case that this could happen anywhere. That's what I took from it. You cannot as a society, you cannot as a political group of citizens, a citizenry, put up with corruption, no matter how big or how small, in your leaders, in your government, you can't do it.

Yeah, it's, man, what a time. But like you said, it's a cautionary tale forever. Agreed. One more thing, Chuck, they showed a picture of Tank Man to some kids from Beijing University when that documentary was made in 2006. And either they pretended they didn't know who it was

or they legit did not know what they were looking at. Yeah, it looked real to me, man. Yeah, but you could also make the case like that this is such a taboo subject that like you would pretend on camera to some Western journalists with government minders sitting right next to them and you had no idea what it was, yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's Tiananmen Square, now you know. And if you wanna know more about it, there's a lot to read about it all over the internet, thankfully, as long as you live outside of China. Yes, but say all over one internet. Right, and since Chuck said one internet, it's time for a listener mail.

This is, which one should I read here? So you know what, let me read this. This was a, this one just came in. This was a listener mail prediction that puts Jared from Subway to shame. Did you read this one? No, I don't know which one that is. Well, just sit back then and hold on to your seats.

Okay. Hey guys, my family and I live in Oregon, have been in lockdown for the past 10 weeks. My husband is a firefighter paramedic, so we are really staying home so we can minimize the risk of spreading the virus because he has so much exposure due to his job. I am a substitute teacher and I'm not working right now,

but I'm homeschooling our kids age two, six and eight. We're very lucky my husband's job is essential though, because so we're not in the position that so many Americans are in with losing both of our jobs. And when I'm not homeschooling, I get to listen to as much stuff as you should know as possible.

So on to the reason I'm writing this, I was listening to the Globe of Death episode from December, 2017, and I went back and listened to this. In fact, maybe we should play this one again. The listener mail. The whole thing right now? Well, let me just read this and we'll see if we need to. We'll play the entire episode in this listener mail.

No, just the listener mail. Oh, gotcha, okay. The listener mail on this episode was really eerie. It's a woman who predicts the next global outbreak will be a flu pandemic and it calls on the government for cutting CDC funding to prepare for an event like this. It's very strange to be listening to this listener mail in this situation after being in quarantine.

I know you guys love it when your show predicts events, so I thought I would throw this out there. Thanks, you do, all that you do to keep me sane and that I'm able to hear other grownups talking about interesting topics. My kids are always asking what I'm laughing at and then asked to hear what Josh and Chuck are saying. Thank you guys.

That is from Tiffany Hallock. And should we play a portion of that? Yeah, we should. All right, well, here's the listener mail from 2017 and see if this sounds a little eerie to you. I'm gonna call this flu epidemic. Okay. This is from a master's of public health candidate in Atlanta

at Emory. Nice. And we spent a good amount of time discussing the flu. I remember you mentioning the Spanish flu and wondered if such an epidemic could happen again. Bad news is it can and it probably will, according to public health scholars that is. The culprit is our meat industry,

which keeps an overbundance of foul and pigs in tight unsanitary quarters. Because of the way this industry is growing and some might argue due to its lack of regulation, these unsafe conditions lend to the rapid mutation of the virus. This coupled with the ever decreasing CDC budget makes it harder and harder for vaccine scientists

to create accurate vaccines. On top of all that, the flu is seen as a low threat by most of our society, rendering us ill equipped and underprepared. Most people are scared of Ebola or other difficult to catch viruses. However, influenza is a rapidly mutating and highly aggressive virus that is easily transmittable

and is right here on our doorstep. Scientists predict the flu might be the next most deadly epidemic if we are not careful. My recommendation to our congresspeople, stop cutting the CDC budget. Prevention is key. I know it probably sound like a quack, not to me. For real.

But just wanted to spread a little knowledge and say hey to my favorite podcasters. Thanks for putting on such an amazing show. And that is from Jasmine. Wow. That was pretty eerie. Turned out to be Dr. Debra Berks herself. Well, thanks, dude.

That was a good listener of mail. And that was from Tiffany, you said? Yeah, that was from Tiffany. Thanks for that one. Tiffany, thanks, good catch. And thanks for letting us know that you guys are doing okay. Hang in there with the homeschooling.

And hang in there, everybody whose job was not essential. Who's on furlough or beating up the unemployment office website. Hang in there, everybody, because things are going to get better. And we will be here the whole time, too. Okay? That's right.

Okay. If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime to say hi or whatever, well, you can do it via email. How about that? Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.