State Violence in East Asia

The world was watching when footage of the ""tank man""-the lone Chinese citizen blocking the passage of a column of tanks during the brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square-first appeared in the media. The furtive video is now regarded as an iconic depiction of a government's violence against its own people. Throughout the twentieth century, states across East Asia committed many relatively undocumented atrocities, with victims numbering in the millions. The contr...