This video has been long awaited by both those who went to China with me and those who heard about it afterwards. Let me give you some background on where this video came from:"
Location: Tiananmen Square, China
I was walking with my friends to visit the infamous location of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and I had my video camera out to fiml the whole thing. We never did find where the tankman photo was taken, though. Sorry about that.
As we were walking past the mauselium, we started to hear the happy birthday song coming from behind up. It's a very American tune, so we were all surprised. Beyond that, it sounded like the ice cream trucks you hear as a kid, so we all turned around to see where it was coming from.
To our horror, this is what we saw...
You might not be able to tell from the video, but you can hear us all talk about it a lot. What you see is a truck spraying pesticides over pedestrians and tourists into the trees alongside the road. Pesticides are bad enough, but look at the cloud that follows the stream and blows on down the street. Apparently our childhood jingles mean "DANGER" in Chinese.
You see the post here is labeled "Chinese Hypocrisy." There's a very good reason for this. We were instructed by our hotel to use little water and to recycle everything because "Beijing cares about sustainability." Because of the upcoming olympics in Beijing, there were signs literally everywhere telling people not to litter and to be concious of thier environment because "Beijing cares about sustainability."
A friend of mine got a photo of the truck-of-death as it rolled by, but no one else was willing to take photos or videos. There were soldiers and police officers everywhere around the square, so I put my camera away for a few minutes after I finished the video. I didn't like the way some of the soldiers were looking at me.
The gem of this story is what happened not three minutes later, though. With the truck still spraying away in the background, I walked to a trashcan to throw away a pepsi bottle. Immediately, a cop and soldier pulled me away from the trash and started yelling at me. In broken English, they shouted that I should never throw plastic away and should recycle instead (I didn't see the recycling bin behind the trash can) because Beijing and the Chinese care about protecting the environment.
No, I was not ballsy enough to point out the flagrant hypocrisy of saying that while a truck sprayed mutigens and carcinogens on the public behind them.
