What Happened To Andrew

On the morning of 5 June 1989, a lone figure stepped off the pavement on Chang'an Avenue in Beijing and into the path of a column of Type 59 tanks. He was wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, and he was carrying two shopping bags, as though he had simply been out buying groceries. The tanks stopped. He climbed onto the lead vehicle, appeared to speak to the crew through the hatch, then dropped back to the road and kept moving to block the column as it tried to steer around him. Less than a minute later two men ran out, one in a blue shirt, and pulled him away. What became of him afterwards is one of the most enduring unknowns in modern Chinese history, and it is the question that has followed the photograph ever since.

The Morning on Chang'an Avenue, Captured Frame by Frame

Contact sheet of frames showing the Tank Man standing in front of a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue in Beijing, June 1989

The images were taken in the hours after troops had cleared Tiananmen Square, at the close of weeks of student-led protests that had drawn hundreds of thousands of people into central Beijing. The man in the photograph was never formally identified. He was not arrested on camera, he was not named by any official account, and he was not seen again in footage from that morning. Over the following decades, a number of claims have circulated: that he was executed, that he served a long prison term, that he was quietly released, that he is still alive and has chosen anonymity. One name, Wang Weilin, has been repeated often in overseas reporting, but it has never been verified, and it may well be wrong. Chinese authorities have never issued a public account of his identity or his fate. That silence, layered over a single unposed moment, is what has kept the picture alive.

The Photographers Who Risked the Film to Bring the Image Out

Portrait-style news image marking the death of Charlie Cole, the Newsweek photographer who captured the Tank Man photograph in Beijing in 1989

The photograph survived because several photographers were watching from the balconies of the Beijing Hotel that morning. Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, Stuart Franklin of Magnum, Arthur Tsang of Reuters and Charlie Cole of Newsweek all shot versions of the same scene, each from a slightly different angle. Getting the film out was another matter. Cole hid his roll in a toilet cistern in his hotel room to keep it from being seized, and smuggled it out of the country afterwards — a decision that preserved a frame many editors would otherwise never have seen. He died in 2019, aged 64, in Bali. The image has since been reproduced on posters, in documentaries and in history books around the world, while remaining restricted inside mainland China, where the events of 1989 are officially described as a counter-revolutionary riot and are not open to public discussion. The man himself has become a symbol precisely because he has no biography. He is remembered not for who he was, but for the few seconds in which he refused to move.