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Sporting News, The, July 23, 2001 by Dave Kindred

The first thing anyone should do in Beijing is walk to that spot in the street where the young man in a white shirt danced with the tank. A quick step left, then right, staying in the tank's path whichever way the tank driver thought to move, the young man dared the steel to crush his bones. If ever we saw human majesty given form, it was in that young man whose identity is yet unknown all these years later.

He stood on a city street at Tiananmen Square and dared the war machine to roll over him. Behind that tank, more tanks: a parade of tanks, the spacing made uneven as tanks clanked to a stop behind a lead tank brought to bewilderment by a single human being whose only weapons were those that matter most. He was armed with courage and dignity.

On June 4, 1989, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese people were massacred by their nation's soldiers firing rifles and machine guns in Tiananmen Square. Four years later, on a night in July, two sportswriters frolicking on a trip around the world, playing golf all the way, left the Palace Hotel and walked for a half of an hour through Beijing's side streets to reach the mammoth city-center gathering place where so many people had died for the crime of demanding democracy from their government.

The square was lit with globe lamps atop tall poles. Tom Callahan would write of that night: "Kids had come there to kiss; littler kids to Rollerblade and crash skateboards. Toward one boundary of the square, in the Chinese version of Lenin's Kremlin Kooler, the warty remains of Mao lounged in the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall."

Alongside the Monument to the People's Heroes, where a uniformed sentry stood at ease, we read a warning printed in English: "No spitting, throwing cigarette ends, waste paper, fruit skins and cores. No urination in the area." The sign said nothing of spilling blood, though we stood on concrete once red with blood, and I wondered aloud, "That one student at the tank, where did he stand?"

We guessed at a spot.

We walked to it.

We stood there.

Though we'd come to Beijing, eccentrically enough, to play golf, we also had set up an interview with the Beijing Olympic Committee, even then working to bring the Olympic Games to China's capital.

On the road from the airport to midtown in the summer of 1993, billboards shouted, "A More Open China Awaits 2000 Olympics" "A Billion Warm Hearts Welcome the World" and "Peace, Progress, for a Better World"

Those words betrayed the truth of Tiananmen Square, where blood remained visible in memory if not in fact. With ineffable irony, Callahan said, "We owe these killers an apology"

We met with Zhou Minggong, vice chairman of the Media and Publicity Commission, who said, "In 1991, a survey among Chinese people showed 91.6 percent supported Beijing's bid. In May this year, 98.7 percent supported the bid. China is a special country. (Brave lot, those 1.3 percent dissenters.) Very spaceful. Large population--22 percent of the world.

"Very kindhearted. Hospitable people. What better place to publicize the spirit of the Olympic movement? What better opportunity for the world to see us and know us, to share in our long history of civilization and culture, to improve world peace? We need each other. Your technology. Our big market. It's something good"

Afraid such blather might go on into the night, I asked the only question I cared about: "What effect should the Tiananmen massacre have?"

Our translator, a Myrna Loy look-alike named Xie, passed along the vice chairman's answer: "Since the Tiananmen accident in 1989, different people have different opinions. As time is passing, history itself will answer this problem. At the time, some Western media had exaggerated reports. I have friends in the United States and France who tell me that, when the Tiananmen accident is talked about now, perceptions have already changed."

"So what is the truth? Hundreds dead, thousands injured? How many pro-democracy demonstrators jailed? And how can it be reconciled with any ideal such as the Olympics?"

"But the Tiananmen accident (Xie went on) should be totally separate from Beijing's Olympic bid. Some people stick to the problem of the human record of China. They say one thousand are in prison because of the accident. This is not true"

"Accident?" Callahan said to the translator. "Do you mean `incident'? You can't mean `accident'"

Xie folded her hands into her lap, lowered her head. "It's a difficulty of language," she said, so softly the vice chairman might not have heard.

Now, eight years after our visit, 12 years after the Tiananmen Square "accident," no one yet knows what happened to the young man who dared the Chinese tanks. Timothy Brook, a professor at Stanford University and the author of a book on the Beijing democracy movement, has said, "I fear that the Chinese government has identified him and has removed him, and we may never know who it was."

To be removed by the Chinese government, as millions of Chinese have learned, is to be gone from home a long, long, long time.