Sometime around three or four last Sunday morning I caught most of Frontline’s recent production The Tank Man and highly recommend it. The show starts and ends with an in depth look at what happened across the city of Beijing, and not just Tiananmen Square, in 1989. I had no idea just how widespread the protests were, and that the participants were not just students, but came from every sector of Beijing society. There is some speculation in the show that the Tank Man himself was not a student, but rather an older, professional man on his way to work, who had finally seen enough. Anyway, the show uses 1989 as a springboard for examining the rapid changes that have and have not taken place in China since then. Some of the interviewed analysts and journalists postulate that certain sectors of Chinese society have been granted economic freedom in exchange for not agitating for governmental and human rights reform. I have no idea whether this is accurate, but they make a compelling case. The show also features quite a bit of smuggled video of rural villages being destroyed by hired thugs to make way for factories that will produce goods designed and consumed in America and Europe. Yahoo’s recent complicity in several political arrests is also highlighted. What I’m getting to, is that the show is worth a watch and quite timely. The whole show is available on line here. Watch it if you can spare a few hours.

So what would you like to babble about, incoherently or otherwise? This is an open thread.