PBS Frontline - The Tank Man

I was just watching Frontline on PBS, and caught the The Tank Man story some way in. They were talking about modern China, and definitely painted a picture that sounded like 19th century America or Britain, with an odd mix of the 21st Century West.

I don't think it's controversial to say that in the last few years, all of the above countries have spent much time fretting over immigrant labor. I'll take it a step further and posit that this is a direct result of the post Regan/Thatcher era of strike busting and privitization, just to take a gratuitous jab at the right-wingers.

The interesting thing about the report was the discussion about the treatment of migrant rural Chinese workers moving into the affluent coastal cities. The establishment needs the migrant workers for cheap manual labor, but they cities strictly regulate the residency of the workers in the city. I could hardly manage to hear a difference between the discussion of this dynamnic versus the discussions currently happening here about illegal Mexican aliens. Only in this case, they're all technically citizens of the same country.

Perhaps the most interesting bit, in light of the kerfluffle raised by Yahoo and Google conceding to the Chinese government demands of censorship, is the actual discussion of The Tank Man.

They pointed out the fact that the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 were significantly fueled by the classic protester class, the college students. They then pointed out that a significant chunk of current Chinese college students are the children of the privileged elite.

Significantly, the four college students they interviewed were completely unfamiliar with the images of The Tank Man, and they explicitly asserted that "most people under the age of 20 have probably never seen the images." (I'm curious to see what the results would be if you showed the same picutres to American students of the same demographic. This was not addressed in the segment.) They then segued into a segment in which they pointed out that google image searches for "Tiananmen Square" in the West return copious quantities of results that most of us who are over 30 would recognize in a second, while the Google China results return none.

(Note: I need to watch the segment again, however. Even though the Chinese-speaking students were alleged to not recognize the picture at all, I could have sworn they said that the male student said "1989?" early in the interview. It sure seems odd that 1989 would come up if he didn't have some idea of what he was looking at.)

The main point I'm trying to make here is that we certainly hear enough about the liberalisation of China in the last 15 years. And as much as I don't want to see American workers lose their jobs to globalization, I can certainly understand the argument that it's time for the rest of the world to share in the benefits of industrialization. But there's clearly still an argument that there's some chilling excesses of the Gilded Age-style excesses that benefit the wealthy few at the expense of the common man.

(/socialism) (I still haven't figured out how to make blogger ignore pointy-brackets)