links for 2006-05-23

• Holding the watchdog blogs to account - The Net - Times Online
  "Bloggers wield increasing power against established institutions, but not all are practising what they preach."
  (tags: blogs blogging WEBCRED journalism globalvoices gv-press media wemedia)
• AsiaMedia :: China's faustian bargain -- for some
  James F. Paradise takes on two new documentaries about China's past and future, and it's unspoken social contract
  (tags: china politics freespeech humanrights)

Comments

[mahathir_fan]

I saw a little bit of The Tank Man, didn't watched the whole thing.

I think it is one of the most striking photographs to prove the restrain of force. In that photograph a bystander stood in front of a tank. The Tank Man refuses to overrun the bystander with his tank. The Tank Man didn’t even try to threaten the bystander by pointing his pistol at him. Instead he tried to meneuver around the bystander several times. Finally, another bystander pulled the bystander away.

The great restrain of force shown by the Tank Man in not overruning the bystander proves that the Chinese government must have given very strict orders not to use force. The Tank Man did not even pull out his gun. In say the US, the police would have pulled out their gun and pointed at suspects and shouted, “Hands up in the air”. The Tank Man could have pulled out his gun and said “Move aside or you will be under arrest or I will shoot”.

To this day, we still don’t know who the Tank Man is according to the documentary. This must be a lie. It should not be too difficult to figure out the identity of the tank man. He is the front driver of that batallion of tanks. A quick call to the PLA office should be able to identify the battalion that group of tanks belonged to. Then it becomes a case of just narrowing down a list of 8 or so names.

[mahathir_fan]

Critic of the Tank Man video:

I only concentrated on part 3 which is the massacre section.

=========================
At 1:38,

The bald man said, "A lot of people went down, 30-40 people went down...."

The film footage at 1:48 and the surrounding footage did not show any dead bodies lying on the ground. Only bicycles.
=========================

At 2:25, the bald man said, "Suddenly there appears an ambulance....and they rushed in amongst all the people on the ground, and the soldiers open fire again and mow them down."

The footage begining at 2:36 showed the ambulance crashing into a traffic light followed by a loud bang.

This is an auto accident. It is unlikely that the driver was shot because if you look at the crowd reaction, the crowd were not running away from the soldiers. They would have started running if there were gunshots.

This appear to be a wrong accusation.
==========================

General critic, theere should be more graphic footage of dead bodies. IT is not quite useful to quote number of deaths because even at the Haj in Mecca, more than 1400 people died in 1991 merely from crowd stampede. The real question is how many actually died being shot at. With estimated protestors in the number of millions, one could easily attribute the deaths to crowd stampede. If I were to make such a documentary to convince the world about the evilness of the CCP, I would put more graphic film footage, footages of people being injured (gun shot wounds) so they know they died from gun shots, not from crowd stampede or accidents.

[mahathir_fan]

The timing footage i quote above were taken from part 3 of the free online versio at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/

which was quoted in the 2nd link that Rebecca posted.

[e.r.]

"The restrain of force"

http://glutter.typepad.com/glutter/2004/06/beijing_june_4t.html

What a disgusting immoral idiot are you, M.F... what a shame.

[mahathir_fan]

You don't know the circumstances in which they died. For example, I was told that the protest was peaceful and the soldiers resorted to violence in order to clear the square. However, in part 2 of the documentary at 16:46, you can clearly see protestors throwing stones at the PLA.
So it wasn't peaceful protests.

I ask that the next time you are stopped by a police officer, to not stop your car and let him chase you down for 1 mile or so. Then stop your car, and get out of your car and pick up a stone and throw at the police officer. Do you think the police officer will open fire at you? Very likely.

In a free society, we must have an open mind when analyzing these data. If we already made up our mind about what happened based on other people's conclusion, then freedom of thought or freedom of information is useless.

Part of the reason why I suspect Tiananmen is still a taboo subject in China is because people have yet to develop the open mindedness needed to reach an impartial conclusion. If the CPC conducts a special commission and that investigative commission finds that the violence in Tiananmen were provoked by the protestors, how many people are willing to accept the conclusions of that commission? This is clearly a no win situation for the CPC so it is better to not talk about it. Either the commision had to report that the CPC is at fault for Tiananmen or the people will accuse the commision of biasness.

We have a lot of eyewitness accounts, but as I pointed out earlier, there seem to be a lot of discrepancies between eye witness accounts and actual video footage. For example, when people hear gunshots they assumed the soldiers were shooting at them and they report that soldiers shoot at them. But it is entirely possible those are simply warning shots which would explain why the soldiers appear to be firing in random directions (part 3). Many of these eyewitness accounts still require cross examination to be reliable. But we won't have any such thing happneing until people develop and open mind to be willing to accept whatever verdict is the outcome.

[e.r.]

Shame on you, little clown.

[mahathir_fan]

I would appreciate better if you would watch the Tank Man video footage on the pbs website and rebut me with facts. I have shown that eyewitness accounts can be unreliable. video footages contradicts the eyewitness accounts.