It's June 4: Remember Tiananmen

 tiān'ānmén: 天安门 - Gate of Heavenly Peace 

[from:  https://contextualchinese.com/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6]

I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for a year to teach at Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Tiananmen had happened barely a month before.

In May of 1990 I took a group of Hong Kong students to Beijing at the invitation of the Ministry of Personnel to learn about Chinese Civil Service Reform.  One student couldn't come because his father thought it was too dangerous.  We had planned the trip so we would be back in Hong Kong well before the one year anniversary.  

This is a picture of the Forbidden City in May 1990 from Tiananmen Square.  Here's a post with more pictures of that trip.

Just as the Trump regime is busily erasing government information and history that's not supportive of their ideology 

• Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites
• Trump administration purges websites across federal health agencies
• The Trump administration is deleting government data. From infant deaths to hunger, here are five ways it’s hurting Americans
• Trump Erasing Black History An Urgent Crisis

China [is] Erasing Tiananmen Massacre Memory As 37th Anniversary Nears

But in this digital world, information can't really be suppressed forever.  Individuals, organizations, in the US and around the world, are and will be the preservationists of US history.  

And the same is true for Tiananmen.  

From The Guardian

So this post is my contribution on this 37th Anniversary of Tiananmen to keeping the memory alive.  

Here's a link to an old post about the iconic photo of Tankman.

Travel Day As I'm Getting Better Acquainted With Judge Matthews' Redistricting Decision

We got up early enough to watch the sun rise from the ferry from Bainbridge Island to downtown Seattle.

SeaTac has a program where you can reserve a time to go through security. Last time we did that, there was no one in line anyway.  This time there were more people, but not too crowded, but our line sent us directly to the front.  

We are spending the night with friends just south of San Francisco - good friends that go back to when some students from my public administration class in Hong Kong went on a study tour with me to Beijing.  It was May 1990 - a year after Tiananmen.  We went in May so that we wouldn't be there on the one year anniversary.  Even so, one of my students couldn't go because his parents were worried about what might happen to him.  D is now a professor of marketing and dean of his department here in the South Bay.  

This tree was across the street from the community center where his son was taking a video class.  We'll go into San Francisco tomorrow and stay with an old Peace Corps Thailand friend.  The impetus of the trip was visiting our grandkids, the youngest one turned five yesterday and got her first COVID vaccination.  

Meanwhile I'm working my way through the 171 page ruling Judge Matthews wrote on the Redistricting Board trial.  

Near the end of the trial, the Board's attorney was giving his closing argument.  I raised some issues I had with what he said and in other appearances earlier in the trial.  In his closing, after about five or ten minutes he said something like, "Well that's pretty much what I wanted to say, but I'm a lawyer, so I'll keep on talking."  As I listened I thought about the old saying - "Better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to speak and prove it."  Singer isn't a fool, but he just kept talking and I thought he was being pretty loose and that he wasn't doing himself any good.  

The judge wasn't amused.  I'd like to give you specific quotes, but the PDF isn't searchable, and while someone told me there are tools to make it searchable, I haven't found them.  

Singer did tell the Redistricting Board, at their meeting yesterday (Wed) that the judge had "made new law" and that was the reason that the Board needed to appeal, to make sure the Supreme Court could rule on this "new law."  

One of my goals in reading the case is to find what Snger calls 'new law."  Here's my list of possibilities so far:

The Proclamation Plan offered 30 days after the Census data arrive should include Senate pairings as well as house pairings. (I missed the part where the Board claimed they had Senate districts because the third party plans had them.  In any case, the Board didn’t know the third party plans would have Senate pairings when they adopted their Proclamation Plan

• Importance of public voices - Board members don’t have “discretion to make decisions based on personal preference when that preference is directly contrary to the overwhelming majority of public testimony” “Board must make a good-faith effort to incorporate the clear weight of public testimony.”   Need to take “a hard look and [make] a good faith effort to incorporate public testimony into its decisions.”
• Need to have senate pairings in the proposed plan in 30 days

I'm not sure that the Judge made 'new law' as much as enforced the Constitution here. The Constition requires the Board to take their proposed redistricting plan to the public to get comments for six weeks.  The Board flew all over the state for twenty some odd meetings.

If the Board doesn't take their comments seriously, what is the point of gathering their opinion?  I don't think this is new law, so much as it's law that hasn't actually been tested in court and Matthews is saying that requiring public testimony means the Board must pay attention to the public testimony it gets.  

On the other point he's also clarifying that when the Constitution tells the Board to make a draft plan, it includes Senate pairings as well as the house districts.  Why does the judge think this?  Because the constitution doesn't mention either House districts or Senate districts when it talks about the draft plan.  But when it talks about the final play, it includes both.  

And, if the public is going to meaningfully testify on the Senate pairings, they have to see them.  

I'm tired.  It's getting late.  And all this is initial thinking about what I'm reading.  Below is the Table of Contents of the Judge's decision.  There's time to read it fully.

Our friends have an old cat

I.  Introduction

II.  History of Legislative Reapportionment

III.  HISTORY OF THE BOARD'S WORK

        A.  Make up of the Board

         B.  Board Meetings 

[In history of Board Meetings, doesn't mention the public outcry over v1 SE maps plucking incumbents out of their districts

p.14 Sept 20 Meeting "It was at this meeting that the Board contends it adopted proposed senate pairings through the AFFER proposed plan.122

IV. Legal Proceedings

    A.  Parties in the Case

    B.  Pre-Trial Proceedings

    C.  The Record Before the Court

    D.  Trial Proceedings

V.  JURISDICTION AND STANDARD OF REVIEW

VI.  APPLICABLE LAW

    A.  District Boundaries (Alaska Const. art. VI §6)

    B.  Public Hearings Requirement (Alaska Const. art. VI, § 10)

    C.  Equal Protection (Alaska Const. art.I § 1;  U.S. Const. amend.14)

    D.  Due Process (Alaska Const. art. I, § 7)

    E.  The Hickel Process

    F.  Voting Rights Act

    G.  Open Meetings Act (AS 44.62.310-19)

VII. PRACTICAL LIMITATIONS

VIII.  THE EAST ANCHORAGE CHALLENGES - Senate District K

    A.  Article VI Section 6

    B.  Article VI Section 10 - East Anchorage

    C.  Equal Protection

IX.  THE HOUSE DISTRICT CHALLENGES

    A.  Mat-Su and Valdez Districts 20, 30 and 36

    B.  Calista Redistricting Challenge

    C.  Skagway's Redistricting Challenge

X.  HICKEL PROCESS

XI.  PROCEDURAL CHALLENGES - Due Process and Article VI, Section 10

    A.  Applicable Legal Standard

    B.  This court looks to the debates from the Alaska Constitutional Convention to ascertain the goals of redistricting

    C.  Legislative history from 1998 amendments likewise informs this Court's view of the Board's intended role and the purpose of public hearings

    D.  Federal case law applying the Administrative Procedure Act to formal agency rule making is instructive on the question of what it means for an agency to take a "hard look" when public hearings are required

    E.  Precedent, reason and policy considerations for interpreting "reasonableness" in light of the Article VI, Section 10 "public hearings" requirement and other changes from the 1998 amendments

    F.  Regional Applications

    G.  Constitutional Deadlines in Article VI, Section 10

    H.  Other Due Process Issues

XII.  OPEN MEETINGS ACT

    A.  The Open Meetings Act

    B.  The Redistricting Board's use of Executive Sessions

    C.  Vague Motions Relating to Executive Sessions

    D.  Due Process/OMA Challenge by East Anchorage

    E.  Open Meetings and Attorney-Client Privilege

XIII.  SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

A June 4 Repost: What's An Iconic Photograph? Thinking About Tank Man

 I posted this five years ago.  Since then, the most iconic 'photo' was actually the video of George Floyd,  And probably some photos of the January 6 insurrection.  (Yes, that's the term that I think best describes what happened even if the majority of Republicans think (or say, even if they don't believe it) it was just a boisterous demonstration.)

 A lone student protestor blocks Chinese army tanks near Tiananmen Square. 

In 1989, when this photo was taken, most people still believed in the power of a photograph to tell the truth.  With digital photography and Photoshop people are still taken in by the apparent 'truth' of a photograph, but many people are also much more skeptical.

PetaPixel writes about this photo:

"AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century."

 Though Business Insider says that Stuart Franklin's image is the iconic image,

". . . Franklin's image is arguably the most iconic, having appeared in Time and Life magazines, and winning him a World Press Award."

There were actually four photographers who managed to smuggle their film out of Beijing that day, all shooting from balconies or rooms at the Beijing Hotel about half a mile away:  Widener, Charlie Cole, Franklin, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. A fifth photographer, Terril Jones, got shots from ground level, but did not publish them until the 20th anniversary in 2009.  He wasn't aware of what he had until the film was developed several weeks after the events.  There were also two videos made of the event that got out.

My questions today, 27 years later, are about what makes a picture 'iconic,' what story does it tell, and  how close is the story to what really happened (assuming anyone can even know that)?   I'm afraid I'm only going to make some quick stabs at answers, and perhaps raise more questions about how we interpret what we see.   

1.  What makes a picture iconic? 

Wikipedia's definition is similar to many others I found:

An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is typically a painting depicting Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, which is venerated among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and in certain Catholic Churches. Icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick.

The term has evolved to have a more generic meaning which is appropriate to the idea of an 'iconic photo'  (from Oxford online):

"A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something: 'this iron-jawed icon of American manhood.'"

So, what exactly is the tank man photo a symbol of? 

2.  What does the picture tell us? 

Here's how the New York Times interpreted the photo in 2009:

"The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."

Charlie Cole, one of the photographers on a balcony at the Beijing Hotel, says it this way (from the same NY Times article, in which  he also gives a detailed account of what happened and how he got his film past the Chinese Public Security Bureau):

"I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers." 

For people outside of China, this is probably the story we give to and take from this photo. [Yes, 'give to' because all interpretation is based on how our brains relate the meaning based on what we already know and expect.] 

For Chinese officials, I suspect it represents the restraint of the Chinese government which patiently bore months of demonstrations.  It also showed the compassion of the tank drivers who didn't run over this man.  We get a hint of this in a 1990 interview Barbara Walters conducted with then Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

"Walters : Yes. Do you have any idea what happened to him ?
Jiang : I think the picture you mentioned just now shows exactly that the
person stood in front of a tank and the tank stopped. Why did the
tank stopped ? Did the child stop the tank ? It's because the tanks--
the people in the tanks -- didn't want to run over the people
standing in the way. But I think this picture just proved that."  (Emphasis added)
(Transcript of the interview are from a Google Group forum.)

I'd add one more interpretation.  I arrived in Hong Kong for my Fulbright at Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1989, barely a month after Tiananmen.  I met a number of people who had been in Beijing during those times, and ended up taking a group of students to Beijing the following May.  It was a trip we had to schedule well before the first anniversary of Tiananmen, because the parents of my students didn't want them in Beijing during the anniversary.  One student wasn't allowed to come at all because his father thought it was potentially too dangerous.

But I'd like to highlight here just one story.  I had a student who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  He'd spent time in a mental hospital and had either thought about or actually tried to commit suicide (I don't recall exactly.)  He told me his interpretation of this picture, which went something like this:

"I wanted to be Tank Man.  I could end my life as a hero."

I'd say this was a version of what in the US is called suicide by cop.  When he told me this, he had a wistful smile on his face.  He considered this the perfect way to go.  This was his reaction to this photo.  [As I write this, 27 years later, I realize that I don't know if he had a wistful smile.  I've seen him with a wistful smile, but did he really have it when he told me that?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm just writing this to remind folks not to trust people's old memories.]

We could spend days studying what this image means to different people and whether it has any meaning to people in China at all?  The photo was suppressed in China.  Given the scope of the internet today, I'm not sure how many people have since had access to this picture.  But as I was working on this post, I came across a  Japan Times story on a photoshopped version of this picture from 2013 with Tank Man standing in front of a line of giant, yellow rubber duckies.  The article said

"Internet searches for 'big yellow duck' were blocked by Chinese censors, but the image went viral on social media overseas."

But let's move on to the more concrete aspects of the picture.  What does it factually tell us?

3.   How close is our understanding of the content of the picture to what actually happened?

Here's how Wikipedia describes the photo:

"Tank Man (also Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide."

Did you catch that?  June 5.  June 4 is the date of the so called Tiananmen Massacre.  The photo was taken the day after.  I didn't realize that until I was working on this post.  If you google Tank Man Tiananmen, you'll see a number of pictures.  This one is very closely cropped.  Others show a long line of tanks.  And here's one from the shots taken by Stuart Franklin (you can see it and more of the original slides and about Franklin's story here.)

Image from Business Insider

This is an image of one of the original slides that Stuart Franklin took that day from a balcony of the Beijing Hotel. 
The green arrow was on the image I copied.  It points to Tank Man walking into the road.  I've added the yellow circle.  It shows Tiananmen Square, which continues to the left of the circle beyond the photo.  The tanks are headed away from Tiananmen Square.  In the bigger scheme of things, I don't think that means all that much, except for the way we in the West, most of whom have never been to Tiananmen Square, associate this with atrocities in Tiananmen Square itself.  Knowledge gained since June 3, 4, and 5, 1989, seems to show that most of the people who died did not die at Tiananmen Square, but at other locations in Beijing.  And most of the deaths were workers, not students.  Again, I think those are details that don't change the meaning of all this, but I am simply trying to discuss the difference between people's perception of the facts and the facts of the photo.  And how cropping
a photo can take away the context of the image. 

Again, the images (since multiple images of this event  shot from the same location were published and now we can see many more that weren't originally published) have a meaning that goes beyond what happened that day. 

And now that we've discussed the photo and questions about what it means, here's some video footage of the event that also gives more context (though it doesn't show the people walking Tank Man away.)



 


And, here's another take on the image.  Stuart Franklin talks about another image he took during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in spring 1989, that he would prefer symbolized Tiananmen demonstrations. 

From Business Insider

"This is an image that changed everything because, for me, it crystallized the spirit of revolt. The uprising in Tiananmen Square was one of the most moving events I’ve witnessed. It was a tragedy to see unarmed young people shot down in cold blood. It was a movement for freedom of expression, for basic rights, and against the outrage of official corruption. It ended badly, a stain on the reputation of a great country. The facts should not be denied, but discussed, so that people can move on. A lot of things were misreported on both sides. A lot of outside actors were involved that may have worsened the situation for the students and their protest. I want this photograph to be available to people for whom this is an important memory. It symbolizes the courage of the time. What it doesn’t show is the bloodshed. I am best known for the image of the tank man. That is called an ‘iconic’ image, but what such images sometimes obscure, with the passing of time, is all the other pictures that lend explanatory power to the story. I’m interested in history, and this landmark event changed my life.” — Stuart Franklin

An ironic twist I can't help but mention, TechDirt reports that a Chinese firm now owns the rights to the Tank Man photo.

And finally, I'd note that Tiananmen 天 (tian) , 安 (an) , 门 (men)  means, literally, Heaven+Peaceful+Gate (Door)

A Thinking Break

So, does that mean a break from thinking?  Or a break so I can think?  More the latter, but it's the thoughts invading my brain more than my deliberately saying, "Whoa, I need to stop and think a while."

So this post is just a brief (yeah, that's always my intent) overview of the action taking place in my brain, in hopes of not forgetting the many loose ends.  [And it didn't stay brief so I'm adding an overview so you don't get lost in the meanderings.]

• OLÉ classes - Project Innocence and the Fairbanks Four  and a proposal for police to have Devil's Advocates keeping them from straying after the wrong suspects
• OLÉ classes - Homelessness 
• The Struggle for Modern Tibet
• Dan Sullivan and the tension between loyalty and the rule of law and Profiles In Courage

I've bolded these highlights and enlarged them so you can scan on down to the ones you're most interested in.  Or just quit right here.


Thursday I went two OLÉ classes:  The Innocence Project and the Pebble Mine class.
Friday was State and Federal Courts in the morning and Homelessness in the afternoon.

I'm also reading ahead for my December book club meeting - The Struggle for Modern Tibet, by Goldstein, Stebeschuh, and Tsering.  It's Tsering's story and the other two helped him getting written down in English.  He's a Tibetan, from a peasant family, who gets to Indian and works with the Dalai Lama's older brother and then manages to get a scholarship to the US.  He feels the Tibetans in India who follow the Dalai Lama are basically supporting the old Tibetan class system and he feels appreciation for the Chinese who are interrupting that and bringing roads and schools and hospitals to Tibet.  He wants to help with bringing Tibetan culture into the modern world (he was partly influenced by reading medieval Western history in the US and thinking they had the same kind of religiously dominated class system then too, but were able to modernize yet keep their distinct cultures.  Everyone thinks he's crazy to go back, but he does and gets sent by the Chinese to a    that is training Tibetans to be teachers and to go back to Tibet.  It's the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and gets to go on a field trip to march before Mao at Tiananmen Square.  That's as far as I've gotten.  I'm still waiting to see how it ends up.  (Well, I know he got back to the US somehow and with the two co-authors to write the book.)

Tibet was one of about three or four topics that my Chinese students were united and unbudging on:  China saved the Tibetans from a slave culture run by the Dalai Lama and the ruling class.  And Tshering gives support for this interpretation.  So I'm challenging my own Western take on Tibet by even reading this book.

So what else am I thinking?

The Innocence Project - Thursday was the last class.  The executive director and until recently the only employee, Bill Oberly, is the main speaker, sometimes backed up by Board president, Mark Johnson.  Thursday, Bill finished up the reasons people are wrongly convicted and then chronicled the Fairbanks Four trials, the one case the the Alaska Innocence Project has overturned and gotten the wrongly convicted freed.
As he told the saga, he illustrated the reasons for wrongful convictions he'd just finished.  The problems included:

• false confessions
• false eye-witness testimony, 
• misuse of forensic pattern identification (in this case using bootprints to 'prove' a suspect's boot was involved) (I did a blog post on this topic a week or so ago)
• false informant testimony
• police misconduct (intentional and unintentional)

In fact, all of the problems as Oberly tells it (and I don't doubt him, but he's my only source) seemed  to stem from police misconduct - from how they got the confessions, how they pressured a witness to tell their story even though it was different from the witnesses original and then later story, and the coached testimony of a prison inmate who said one of the Fairbanks Four had confessed to him in prison.

This issue is one that's been rummaging through my brain and has come up with the idea that police (and probably many other types of government, and for that matter private companies) need to have some form of Devil's Advocate involved in murder and other felony investigations.  The Devil's Advocate would be there to challenge the lead investigators when they seem to be caught up in confirmation bias (seeing the facts that confirm their suspicions, and not seeing ones that challenge their theory of the case).  The Devil's Advocate's job would be to put pressure on the investigators when their not following proper procedures for interrogating suspects (no lawyers, no parents even for minors, planting false scenarios (in this case on pretty intoxicated suspects who couldn't remember anything from the previous couple of hours), etc.

We have people who do this sort of work after the fact - Ombuds offices, Inspectors General, etc.  But if this work had been done on the front end, innocent people wouldn't end up spending five, ten, fifteen, and more years in prison.  And the actual murderers wouldn't still be loose killing other people.  And overzealous cops and prosecutors would be checked early, and perhaps disciplined or terminated before doing more damage.

Would this cost more?  Cost isn't supposed to be a factor in getting to justice.  But trying innocents suspects costs way more than the cost of a position of Devil's Advocate.  And if the victims are able to sue and win a wrongful conviction case, well, there's money that would have funded a dozen Devil's Advocates.

I've not given details of this case yet and won't today.  So it's hard for readers to feel the injustices done in this case.  But I've recommended several times already that readers here watch the Netflix short series When They See Us about the Central Park Five.  All the reasons for wrongful convictions are clearly illustrated in that case.  It's heartbreaking, but compelling viewing.  And all five have been exonerated and released.

Tied to all this is a notion of written about professionally on corruption.  There's a natural tension in all of us between following our human social value of loyalty and the value of following the rule of law.   We all have genetically built into us a loyalty to our 'group' whether that be family, team, school, profession, work group, whatever.  And that notion of loyalty is reinforced by our society and every other society.  Studies show that loyalty is a more important value for political conservatives in the US than for liberals.  We can see that playing out in Washington now as the Republicans are being held tightly in control by the president, despite their private misgivings.  It's the power that mafia bosses and platoon leaders and sports coaches have.   They are far less likely to vote, as the Democrats did with Senator Al Franken, to give up one of their own because of a violation of principles.

The idea of rule of law is, in part, to counter blind loyalty so that people are treated fairly and equally.  While loyalty can work in concert with the rule of law, it can also thwart the rule of law.  In police and military and corrections organizations unwritten "Codes of Silence" or "The Blue Wall" will keep police and corrections officers from reporting crimes within their ranks.

This loyalty vs rule of law tension also got me to thinking about one of my Senators - Dan Sullivan.  While he has said he did not vote for Trump, he's since been caught up in the loyalty to the Republican Bully in Chief (sorry conservatives, that characterization is pretty accurate - just look up any literature on bullying and the spell they hold on those around them).  He even signed Sen. Graham's letter condemning the House impeachment investigation.  (My other Republican Senator did not.)

So I've been wrestling with how to reach out to him - not to attack him, but to find ways to open his brain to alternative ways of seeing all this.  He's a Marine (still in the reserves) and their values are all for courage.  But they are also indoctrinated into a loyalty to the Marines that means not following orders to run into danger takes less courage than not.  So while he might have tremendous physical courage and be willing to risk his life on the battlefield, the moral courage to break with his loyalty to the president and the Republican Party is much more difficult.

So how can someone talk to him about that?  I've started looking at John Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage (it's available at the link online.)
 Kennedy wrote about six US Senators who stood out by overcoming all the pressures weighing dow US Senators.  Maybe that would help, but I doubt it.

I'm also pondering all the data we've gotten on homelessness.  The Municipality of Anchorage is participating in a data gathering and management plan based on a nation wide data system, Built For Zero. It tracks monthly:

• newly homeless (and where they come from in terms of previous housing)
• current homeless
• exiting homelessness

 The intent is to always have enough beds so that zero people spend the night homeless.  It involves collecting and sharing data on all the homeless, why they're homeless, what level of services they need, etc. so that they can find the right level of help for people in different categories of need.  And always making sure there are enough beds.   The plan they have addresses most of the questions the class raised the first week.   Here are some links - though they don't quite deal with some of the programs and data we've seen in class:

• MOA Housing and Homelessness Page - the basic Muni page on homelessness with links
• Data Dashboard - some numbers on the Anchorage homeless population

That's just a smattering of the activity going on in my skull.  When things get so busy, it's hard to sit and write something that doesn't meander a bit.

Thoughts On Hong Kong [Updated]

I'd been to Hong Kong various times for short visits, but in July 1989 I arrived for a year long stay. As a Fulbright Scholar, I would be teaching public administration at Chinese University of Hong Kong.  July 1989 was barely a month after Tiananmen Square crackdown ended the student and worker demonstrations for democracy in Beijing.

The Chinese government has done its best to erase that event from Chinese consciousness.  The median age in China is 37.3 years.  That means half the population today was seven years old or younger, or not yet born.  And of those who were around, never knew much about what actually happened.  And prosperity has meant that many people would rather spend their time pursuing consumer goods than dwelling on Tiananmen.

1989 was eight years before the British lease on Hong Kong was about to end and Tiananmen really shook up the residents of the British colony.  Another disturbing thing that happened around that time was people's discovery that the words "right to abode" were not in their renewed British passports.  That meant that although Hong Kong residents were technically British subjects the right to move to Britain had evaporated.

A giant liberty statue had been created and was featured in demonstrations at that time.

The truth of the matter was that Hong Kong was not really much of a democracy.  My university students knew very little about how the Hong Kong government worked or what their rights were. When I asked them to contact government agencies, you'd have thought I'd asked them to jump from the tenth floor.  There was no democracy, not even the semblance until after Tiananmen.  From a 2010 article called "Hong Kong's Elite Structure, Legislature and the Bleak Future of Democracy under Chinese Sovereignty"  (this will get you to an abstract, you need access through a library to get the article free.)

Since Hong Kong was ruled by Britain's designated governor during the colonial period (1841‐1997), the government has been commonly described as executive-led. This means that the colonial governor had all the power and authority to exercise policies and legislations in the territory. Appointed by the governor, the Executive Council (ExCo) merely gave advice to the governor. Established in 1843 under British rule, the LegCo had contained no democratic seats until 1991 when 18 out of 57 members were directly elected. Before that, the LegCo was, to quote Sing (2003 Sing, Ming. 2003 29), “a place for mild politics and perceived simply as a ‘rubber stamp’.”. 

There were dozens of periodicals on sale whose key purpose was to help people find ways to emigrate from Hong Kong.  Botswana had full page ads in the South China Morning Post enticing people with $250,000 I believe, to get citizenship in Africa.  There were any number of scandals revolving around diplomats from different countries selling citizenships.  Vancouver was known as Hongcouver.

Here to give you a sense of how opaque the bureaucracy was, is a sample of questioning about such emigration hustlers in the Legislative Council about the time I got there in July 1989:

"Oral answers to questions     -   Consumer protection against emigration counsellors
1. MR. PETER WONG asked: Sir, will Government inform this Council what consumer protection measures, if any, are taken to protect Hong Kong people who wish to seek assistance from emigration specialists who hawk their skills and wares for reward in Hong Kong?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, this is an area of consumer affairs where the guiding principle must be Caveat Emptor, that is, buyers beware.
The Hong Kong Government neither encourages nor discourages emigration consultants setting up business in Hong Kong, nor does it encourage or discourage Hong Kong people from using their services. The services available vary from filling forms outside consulates to mapping out an investment strategy to qualify as an investor. The decision on whether to consult, on what to consult, and how much it is reasonable to pay for the services provided, must be one for the individual to make.
    Sir, I can only suggest that the best advice can probably be provided by the
consulate of the country concerned.
Of course, if there is any evidence of a criminal act such as fraud or deception, then a report should be made to the police.
MR. PETER WONG: Sir, the "caveat emptor" answer given by the Secretary suggests that the Government does nothing to protect Hong Kong people in this hour of their need. Does this mean that the Securities and Futures Commission, the Registrar General's Department, amongst others, allow the flood of advertisements in the newspapers to go completely unchecked?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, in the famous words of one of our illustrious former Financial Secretaries, "the Hong Kong Government believes that if something is not broken, do not try to fix it"; and this is an area falling into that classification. From 1 January 1987 to date, the Consumer Council has only received 11 complaints and this shows the size of the problem.
MRS. LAM:  Do consulates in Hong Kong accept responsibility for the actions of
immigration specialists from the countries they represent?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I have no knowledge of what the consulates do with respect to particular immigration consultants.
MR. DAVID CHEUNG: Sir, many of these immigration specialists are lawyers specializing in the immigration laws of their own countries. What measure of supervision, if any, does the Law Society or the Government of Hong Kong exercise over their activities?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I believe we are now wading in the area of foreign lawyers. I wonder whether I should not defer to the Attorney General?

After Tiananmen, with less than ten years to go before Hong Kong would officially be given back to China, things got really tense.  Negotiations between England and China to establish an agreement about the handover was a major concern for Hong Kong residents.  The Joint Declaration came out in 1984, but then the Chinese came up with "The Basic Law" in 1990, a pretty touchy time.  Hong Kong might not have had much democracy under the British, but China's legal protections, punctuated by Tiananmen,  augured even worse under the Chinese.  

From a Hong Kong government site in 2008:

"The Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (The Joint Declaration) was signed between the Chinese and British Governments on 19 December 1984. The Joint Declaration sets out, among other things, the basic policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) regarding Hong Kong. Under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems", the socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and Hong Kong's previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years. The Joint Declaration provides that these basic policies shall be stipulated in a Basic Law of the HKSAR.
The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (The Basic Law) was adopted on 4 April 1990 by the Seventh National People's Congress (NPC) of the PRC. It came into effect on 1 July 1997.

The Document
The Basic Law is the constitutional document for the HKSAR. It enshrines within a legal document the important concepts of "One Country, Two Systems", "a high degree of autonomy" and "Hong Kong People administering Hong Kong". It also prescribes the various systems to be practised in the HKSAR.
The Basic Law consists of the following sections -
a. The full text of the Basic Law which comprises a total of nine chapters with 160 articles;
b. Annex I, which sets out the method for the selection of the Chief Executive of the HKSAR;
c. Annex II, which sets out the method for the formation of the Legislative Council of the HKSAR and its voting procedures; and
d. Annex III, which sets out the national laws to be applied in the HKSAR."

The current demonstrations were sparked by a new law that allows extradition to China for trial for Hong Kong residents.  Just imagine Trump allowing extradition for trial in Russia in the United States.  When the extradition law was withdrawn temporarily, the demonstrators were not satisfied.  The people of Hong Kong have come a long way since my students' shyness.  (But also consider that to get into Chinese University of Hong Kong, my students had had to toe the line and not ever cause any trouble.  They were not representative of their peers in Hong Kong.)

China does, of course, hold most of the cards.  When the British left, the removal of 'the right to abode' from people's passports was an indicator that Britain had no real concern for the people of Hong Kong.  They were principally concerned about British held property, 'real' British citizens, and appearances.  Fighting China over Hong Kong was never an option.  While they won that fight a century earlier with in part by addicting the country to opium, China now had the upper hand.  

And there is no way the US is going to fight to protect the rights of Hong Kong residents.  Even if Clinton were now president, the US simply has no way to got to war against China over 400 square miles in the south of China.  And Trump doesn't seem to even want to use it as a bargaining chip in this trade discussions.  

So I don't see this ending well.    The only danger to China is that its own population might see Hong Kong demonstrations as a model for more freedoms in China.  China appears to be doing a massive propaganda campaign to its own mainland population,  making the demonstrators appear to be criminals and thugs and American backed haters of China.  I suspect they'll succeed.  I know when I was teaching in Beijing in 2004, there were three things that my students believed religiously - Tibet was better off under China, that it's population had been slaves to the monks before China took over;  the Japanese were evil; and Taiwan was part of China.  But that said, they were great students, and once the trusted me not to punish their active participation in class, they had lots to say and were very curious and creative.

I suspect the government is working hard now to make sure their views on Hong Kong are similarly loyal and unmovable. But the size of Hong Kong's demonstrations should give China reason to pause and reconsider how much it changes the Basic Law.  China has blindspots when it comes to challenges to its control.  China's way of handling this in Tibet has been to simply ship enough Han Chinese there that the native Tibetan population becomes a minority.  They could try something similar in Hong Kong.  In fact there already are a lot of mainland Chinese in Hong Kong.  

But with that said, let's remember that the US has serious ideological blinders when it comes to China too.  And that China has 1.4 billion people.  

That means that the smartest 10% is 140 million people.  The same is true for the richest 10%.  And the most athletic 10%.  And while those groups will overlap somewhat, they make up more than 50% of the US population.  Ten percent of the US population is 3 million.  

If China unleashes the potential of its top 10% there's no way anyone else can beat them.  Especially now with Trump destroying the potential of the US through ethnic and cultural war.  

I'm not a China expert.  My serious interest in China is about 25 years old now, and even then it was limited to a very narrow focus.  So consider these musings based on experience and some serious research once upon a time.  

[UPDATED August 21, 2019 - Here's an opinion piece in the LATimes today by a Chinese researcher at Human Rights Watch, using his own experience as a student in the US to  explain why overseas Chinese students are anti-Hong Kong protesters.  It's consistent with what I wrote yesterday, but adds more detail.  It also causes me to see Americans in the same pattern - unable to give up their ingrained beliefs, even in the face of the obvious.  One's identity is caught up in these beliefs.]

Six Four - Tiananmen 30th Anniversary

Tiananmen May 1990

June 4, 1989 is just called by the date in Chinese.  Like 9/11.  It's 六四  liù sì.  It's the date the Chinese army cracked down on the Tiananmen Square (and much more of Beijing) protests.

Here's a new article by the then LATimes Beijing bureau chief.

I watched the 1989 Tiananmen uprising. China has never been the same

"From the windows of a deserted coffee shop at the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards east of Tiananmen, I could look toward the square and see several hundred soldiers forming lines across the capital’s broad main street. In front of the hotel was an angry and brave crowd of a couple thousand Beijing residents. These protesters were furious at the army for shooting its way into the city center, tanks and armored personnel carriers smashing obstacles, soldiers spraying bullets at crowds blocking its advance. Now I watched as the soldiers periodically fired into this crowd.
For me, what the Chinese call simply “June 4” — a date that fundamentally shaped today’s China — had begun the previous evening.
I was the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief then, and had overseen the newspaper’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests since they began in mid-April. The Times’ team had been taking turns staking out the square, and my shift was to begin at midnight. Before leaving home late on June 3, I learned that the army had begun smashing its way through crowds several miles west of Tiananmen."

You can compare Steven Holley's account with others on the scene at the time in this post I did three years ago about the meaning of the term 'iconic photo' that examines the context of the Tank Man photo, which Holley discusses in this article.   Holley's account seems pretty consistent with what I found out doing that post.

I'd note that I arrived in Hong Kong for a year's sabbatical about one month after Tiananmen and was able to talk to several people who had been in Beijing at the time.  I didn't get to Tiananmen until May 1990 when I took a group of Hong Kong students for a study tour.  We had to go in May because people were worried that something might happen on the first anniversary.

Here's a very different recent China story I found the other day and put into a draft post until I could find some related posts.

China reassigns 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in bid to fight pollution

"China has reportedly reassigned over 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in a bid to combat pollution by increasing the country's forest coverage.
A large regiment from the People's Liberation Army, along with some of the nation's armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on non-military tasks inland.
The majority will be dispatched to Hebei province, which encircles Beijing, according to the Asia Times which originally reported the story. The area is known to be a major culprit for producing the notorious smog which blankets the capital city."

Living In A Construction Zone

Furniture out, workers' tools in

My mom's house isn't big - about 1200 square feet, three bedrooms, one full bathroom and one with a sink and toilet.  But when my parent's bought it back in 1956, they did a great job with the location.  Since my mom died in 2015, we've spent a fair amount of time cleaning things out, giving things away, selling a few things, donating lots.  It seemed like however much we pulled out, the closets didn't seem to get emptier.  Then there were drawers and cabinets and, drum roll, the garage.

I'm not complaining.  My mom knew where things were and she always had something to use for whatever situation, whether it was gift to take when visiting someone, a bag to hold something in, the old waffle iron, and on and on.  She didn't want us moving things around because then she wouldn't be able to find them.  She did say, repeatedly, "When I'm gone, you can do what you want."

So the last two and half years, our trips here were focused on cleaning things out.  People have been telling us to to rent it out while we're not here - most of the time - and so we are required to get it

more up-to-date - like getting rid of the popcorn ceiling and painting pretty much everything.  There's now a dishwasher and dryer after all these years of washing by hand and hanging the laundry out to dry in the sun.  We've go a new deck in the backyard - which was getting bedraggled because of various droughts.  The gardener keeps things from getting overgrown, but not from dying.  So what long ago used to be a lawn in the back had become a patch of dirt.  The deck takes away that eyesore and adds an outdoor room.  All this has happened in the last two weeks and we've been living in the middle of it.

When we head out this week, the carpet will come off the living room floor and the old hardwood floors will be sanded and polished.

That means we've been getting everything into the garage so the floors will be cleared.  We still have a little table in the kitchen (no hardwood there so that's ok) and an air mattress bed that we can move out ourselves before we leave.  Bathrooms have been in and out of service as they get various upgrades - new grout, paint, and fixtures.  One bathroom got a whole new vanity.

I'm still finding things I didn't know were here.  An old cream and sugar set was wrapped in old
newspaper.  Not sure why they had the Chicago Sun Times from June 6, 1989 - two days after the Tiananmen massacre.

I couldn't remember Li Peng being shot back then and when I googled Li Peng assassination most everything - including bios of Li Peng - omit mention of an assassination attempt.  There was one book - Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China -  I found where a Chinese student talks about his participation in Tiananmen protests and he writes,

"After we had hung up our poster, we heard news that Deng Xiaoping had suddenly died and that Premier Li Peng had been wounded in an assassination attempt.  That afternoon firecrackers were popping all over campus to celebrate Deng's death.  But we soon discovered that these "news reports" were baseless rumors.  In fact students from Jaotong University had not been run over by tanks, Deng Xiaoping was alive and well, and Li Peng had not been wounded."

Publishing unsubstantiated rumors, as this headline shows, isn't new.  But neither is attempting to fool the public with false stories.  Yellow journalism was taught in the American history classes I took in high school.  But there's a new sophistication in the creation and spreading of the new brand of fake news we see today.



We try to drive as little as possible - J walks and I ride the bike all I can.  But if you need to go far or fast or carry a lot, you need to take the car and traffic can be frustrating.  Public transit is ok for a few destinations, like the airport.

Some of my old bedroom furniture was snapped up by a young man with a square beard and tight jeans who was excited about picking up 'mid-century' stuff for a token price.  I was happy it was going to an appreciative home.  Various people have been leaning on me to get rid of, or do, this and that.  I think they are mostly right, but I don't want a generic house in the end so I'm holding my ground on some things.  And listening to reason on others.




And we are in LA, where the weather has gone from nice to rainy to very nice.  And we've eaten lots of good food.  As we were coming home from house-related errands we stopped on a block of Venice that had a Brazilian cafe, a Caribbean place, a Thai place, and a Himalyan place.  We ate at Tara's in part because of the garden like setting on a busy street.

Domo Plate at Tara's

And yesterday when it got into the eighties (F) even at the beach, we decided we needed a break.  J walked and I biked the two miles to Venice Beach.

After playing in the surf with my granddaughter when she was here in December, I was seriously thinking about catching some waves.  I watched the few would-be body surfers not catch anything and I remembered our bathtub was out of commission while the resurfacing dried.  But I did go into the water part way and it felt great to have the surf rushing between my legs.  The water didn't feel terribly cold (about 60˚F).


There's still work to do when we're gone - the floors, and when that messy job is over, new blinds will be put into most of the windows.  We're headed to see our Seattle granddaughter before touching base again in Anchorage and then more Seattle time before coming back here to see what we still have left to do.

... was out getting garbage and recycling into our cans and two neighbors' cans.  Neighbors up the hill have moved into their house about a year after we moved into this one.  The neighbors to the south moved in much more recently and became very good friends with my mom.  And the LA sanitation department picks up bulky items like carpet and sinks if you call a day ahead - and they were open Sunday to take my call.

What's An Iconic Photograph? Thinking About Tank Man

 A lone student protestor blocks Chinese army tanks near Tiananmen Square.

In 1989, when this photo was taken, most people still believed in the power of a photograph to tell the truth.  With digital photography and Photoshop people are still taken in by the apparent 'truth' of a photograph, but many people are also much more skeptical.

PetaPixel writes about this photo:

"AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century."

 Though Business Insider says that Stuart Franklin's image is the iconic image,

". . . Franklin's image is arguably the most iconic, having appeared in Time and Life magazines, and winning him a World Press Award."

There were actually four photographers who managed to smuggle their film out of Beijing that day, all shooting from balconies or rooms at the Beijing Hotel about half a mile away:  Widener, Charlie Cole, Franklin, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. A fifth photographer, Terril Jones, got shots from ground level, but did not publish them until the 20th anniversary in 2009.  He wasn't aware of what he had until the film was developed several weeks after the events.  There were also two videos made of the event that got out.

My questions today, 27 years later, are about what makes a picture 'iconic,' what story does it tell, and  how close is the story to what really happened (assuming anyone can even know that)?   I'm afraid I'm only going to make some quick stabs at answers, and perhaps raise more questions about how we interpret what we see.  

1.  What makes a picture iconic?

Wikipedia's definition is similar to many others I found:

An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is typically a painting depicting Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, which is venerated among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and in certain Catholic Churches. Icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick.

The term has evolved to have a more generic meaning which is appropriate to the idea of an 'iconic photo'  (from Oxford online):

"A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something: 'this iron-jawed icon of American manhood.'"

So, what exactly is the tank man photo a symbol of?

2.  What does the picture tell us?

Here's how the New York Times interpreted the photo in 2009:

"The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."

Charlie Cole, one of the photographers on a balcony at the Beijing Hotel, says it this way (from the same NY Times article, in which  he also gives a detailed account of what happened and how he got his film past the Chinese Public Security Bureau):

"I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers."

For people outside of China, this is probably the story we give to and take from this photo. [Yes, 'give to' because all interpretation is based on how our brains relate the meaning based on what we already know and expect.]

For Chinese officials, I suspect it represents the restraint of the Chinese government which patiently bore months of demonstrations.  It also showed the compassion of the tank drivers who didn't run over this man.  We get a hint of this in a 1990 interview Barbara Walters conducted with then Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

"Walters : Yes. Do you have any idea what happened to him ?
Jiang : I think the picture you mentioned just now shows exactly that the
person stood in front of a tank and the tank stopped. Why did the
tank stopped ? Did the child stop the tank ? It's because the tanks--
the people in the tanks -- didn't want to run over the people
standing in the way. But I think this picture just proved that."  (Emphasis added)
(Transcript of the interview are from a Google Group forum.)

I'd add one more interpretation.  I arrived in Hong Kong for my Fulbright at Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1989, barely a month after Tiananmen.  I met a number of people who had been in Beijing during those times, and ended up taking a group of students to Beijing the following May.  It was a trip we had to schedule well before the first anniversary of Tiananmen, because the parents of my students didn't want them in Beijing during the anniversary.  One student wasn't allowed to come at all because his father thought it was potentially too dangerous.

But I'd like to highlight here just one story.  I had a student who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  He'd spent time in a mental hospital and had either thought about or actually tried to commit suicide (I don't recall exactly.)  He told me his interpretation of this picture, which went something like this:

"I wanted to be Tank Man.  I could end my life as a hero."

I'd say this was a version of what in the US is called suicide by cop.  When he told me this, he had a wistful smile on his face.  He considered this the perfect way to go.  This was his reaction to this photo.  [As I write this, 27 years later, I realize that I don't know if he had a wistful smile.  I've seen him with a wistful smile, but did he really have it when he told me that?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm just writing this to remind folks not to trust people's old memories.]

We could spend days studying what this image means to different people and whether it has any meaning to people in China at all?  The photo was suppressed in China.  Given the scope of the internet today, I'm not sure how many people have since had access to this picture.  But as I was working on this post, I came across a  Japan Times story on a photoshopped version of this picture from 2013 with Tank Man standing in front of a line of giant, yellow rubber duckies.  The article said

"Internet searches for 'big yellow duck' were blocked by Chinese censors, but the image went viral on social media overseas."

But let's move on to the more concrete aspects of the picture.  What does it factually tell us?

3.   How close is our understanding of the content of the picture to what actually happened?

Here's how Wikipedia describes the photo:

"Tank Man (also Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide."

Did you catch that?  June 5.  June 4 is the date of the so called Tiananmen Massacre.  The photo was taken the day after.  I didn't realize that until I was working on this post.  If you google Tank Man Tiananmen, you'll see a number of pictures.  This one is very closely cropped.  Others show a long line of tanks.  And here's one from the shots taken by Stuart Franklin (you can see it and more of the original slides and about Franklin's story here.)

Image from Business Insider

This is an image of one of the original slides that Stuart Franklin took that day from a balcony of the Beijing Hotel.
The green arrow was on the image I copied.  It points to Tank Man walking into the road.  I've added the yellow circle.  It shows Tiananmen Square, which continues to the left of the circle beyond the photo.  The tanks are headed away from Tiananmen Square.  In the bigger scheme of things, I don't think that means all that much, except for the way we in the West, most of whom have never been to Tiananmen Square, associate this with atrocities in Tiananmen Square itself.  Knowledge gained since June 3, 4, and 5, 1989, seems to show that most of the people who died did not die at Tiananmen Square, but at other locations in Beijing.  And most of the deaths were workers, not students.  Again, I think those are details that don't change the meaning of all this, but I am simply trying to discuss the difference between people's perception of the facts and the facts of the photo.  And how cropping
a photo can take away the context of the image.

Again, the images (since multiple images of this event  shot from the same location were published and now we can see many more that weren't originally published) have a meaning that goes beyond what happened that day.

And now that we've discussed the photo and questions about what it means, here's some video footage of the event that also gives more context (though it doesn't show the people walking Tank Man away.)






And, here's another take on the image.  Stuart Franklin talks about another image he took during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in spring 1989, that he would prefer symbolized Tiananmen demonstrations.

From Business Insider

"This is an image that changed everything because, for me, it crystallized the spirit of revolt. The uprising in Tiananmen Square was one of the most moving events I’ve witnessed. It was a tragedy to see unarmed young people shot down in cold blood. It was a movement for freedom of expression, for basic rights, and against the outrage of official corruption. It ended badly, a stain on the reputation of a great country. The facts should not be denied, but discussed, so that people can move on. A lot of things were misreported on both sides. A lot of outside actors were involved that may have worsened the situation for the students and their protest. I want this photograph to be available to people for whom this is an important memory. It symbolizes the courage of the time. What it doesn’t show is the bloodshed. I am best known for the image of the tank man. That is called an ‘iconic’ image, but what such images sometimes obscure, with the passing of time, is all the other pictures that lend explanatory power to the story. I’m interested in history, and this landmark event changed my life.” — Stuart Franklin

An ironic twist I can't help but mention, TechDirt reports that a Chinese firm now owns the rights to the Tank Man photo.

And finally, I'd note that Tiananmen 天 (tian) , 安 (an) , 门 (men)  means, literally, Heaven+Peaceful+Gate (Door)

Climbing Prohibited or Aqua Pura MCMVI or Playing With Photoshop

How many buildings have climbing prohibited signs?


Here's the water tower in Seattle's Volunteer Park where climbing is verboten.

Actually, this appears to have been a favorite rock climbing site.    Mountain Project, a rock climbers website, has a "Rock Climbing Guide to 122,093 Routes", including a post dated in 2009 for the water tower.  They have pictures too.

"Description 
Three fun expanses of brick wall, separated by cement ledges. Brick is uneven with lots of little holds and pockets. Route will depend on which side of the tower you choose to climb. Watch out for the cement ledges, from underneath they look positive, but they are slopers!
You can also spend an enjoyable afternoon traversing around the base of the tower. 

Location 
The tower was built as a water reservoir in 1906, but is now empty. It is located in the middle of Volunteer Park in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Address: 1247 15th Ave. E
From the inside of the tower, choose your window & anchor spot & that will decide which side of the tower you'll climb.
We climbed the east facing side, just to the right of a tall, very leafy tree. 

Protection 
Climb the inside of the tower and rig an anchor to one of the fixed metal banisters. Feed the rope through the window grating onto the ledge & then use a stick to drop the rope over the edge. Belay from the top, inside the tower. Once the climber reaches the top they will need to be lowered down, as all the windows have grating."

Here's a post card of the water tower from 1909 that was part of the displays once you 'climb' the stairs to the top inside.   

And here's a June 4, 2010 report of an encounter with the police from a Cascade Climber forum:

"Ah, so the sun came out finally in Seattle. No time to make it to the mountains to climb, so thought I would go for a quick session on the water tower at Volunteer park. The tried and true training ground for the broke Seattle climber.  
I get a few laps in, when I hear "Sir! sir! Get down off of there!". I hop down (from a whopping 2ft) and am approached by a Seattle police officer (along with a parks employee hiding in his truck). The cop tells me that the tower is "private" (!!) property and that it is only to be used for its intended purpose. I tell him that I'm pretty sure its public property and that people have been traversing it for DECADES without incident. At which point he says, "Are you arguing with me? I am a POLICE officer, do you want to go to jail?". I say, "No.. I'm just trying to understand this. Why not put a sign up then? To notify people of the rules, because this is the first I've heard of this" To which he replies, "it wouldn't do any good, people will climb on it anyways" (um, OK!?). I head back to my car, while he sticks around waiting for me to leave.
I considered being arrested, just to see if any of this would hold up. Anyone have insight in to this? Are they justified at all? At any given day there is someone traversing the tower, are they for real?!
Anyone want to plan a water tower climb-off-protest in the near future...?"

Well, now they have a sign.  (Was the cop celebrating the anniversary of Tiananmen Square by harassing the climber?)

Now, More Pictures Of The Tower With Some Photoshop Help

Of all the updated programs I'm dealing with now that I have a new computer, Photoshop (CS6) is the one that's giving me the fewest challenges.  I'm not sure what exciting new things I can do with it, but what I do like is that all the basic functions I use all the time, work they way they did in the CS3 version I was using before.  In all the others - from Safari, to iMovie, to, well everything - the basic moves are all frustratingly different.  Photoshop is, so to speak, still in English.  

So here are some experiments I did with my water tower photo.  First the original.  

This is the original.   It's pretty boring, especially since the sunny parts are overexposed and the parts in the shade are underexposed.


In the picture of the tower way up above, I just did simple adjustments so the parts in the sun got a lower exposure and the parts in the shade got a higher exposure.  Oh, yeah, I added the spider.  I took a photo of a  spider I had, but because it was so small a photo, I touched it up to make it bigger.


But then I started to have some fun.







I did this one using curves under image adjustments.

This one used the 'glowing edges' filter.

I got this one with the gradient map  (in Image Adjustment) - using Yellow, Violet, Orange, Blue.


















My favorite is this one using the water color filter

Click here for help with Roman Numerals.