The Tank Man

Unfortunately, studying for the bar got in the way of blogging today. I did manage to catch Frontline's program on "The Tank Man." The documentary was first aired a few years ago but they showed it again in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Tank Man was an anonymous protester who became internationally known when he was photographed standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. The version here is from Jeff Widener of AP.

The whole program is available online.

On a related note, check out this post from Matthew Yglesias on China's new requirement that all PCs include internet-censoring software.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.