Chimerica

A photograph is projected onstage. In it, a man in a white shirt carries shopping bags and stares down a line of tanks. This is the “Tank Man” photograph, an image that would become famous from the moment it hit international news after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

In 1989, young American photographer Joe Schofield is in a hotel in Beijing to cover the Tiananmen Square protests, which have just turned into a massacre. While on the phone with his boss in New York, Frank Hadley, Joe sees a man facing down a line of tanks outside his hotel room. He frantically captures a photograph of the scene before Chinese soldiers force entry to his room and beat him.

In 2012, Joe is now a well-established photographer. On their flight to China for a work trip, Joe and his colleague Mel Stanwyck meet Tessa Kendrick, an English market analyst. Tessa and Joe share an instant connection when he holds her hand to soothe her nerves while the plane is taking off. In Beijing, Joe meets up with his old friend Zhang Lin, a Chinese native who also lived through Tiananmen Square. They drink with Zhang Lin’s brother Zhang Wei, who jokingly calls Zhang Lin by his family nickname “dog-face.” Zhang Wei asks Joe to look out for his son Benny, who recently moved to New York. Joe agrees easily. As the three men talk, it becomes increasingly clear that Joe is obsessed with the identity of the man he photographed in 1989. When Zhang Lin accidentally reveals that he knows who the Tank Man is, Joe presses him until Zhang Lin tells him that the man he’s looking for is named Wang Pengfei.

After their trip, Joe and Mel try to pitch Frank an idea for an article about uncovering the Tank Man’s identity. Because it’s an election year, Frank is resistant—until Mel spins the idea as a piece about democracy and the American dream. Later, Joe goes out to dinner with Tessa, who’s recently moved to New York. She tells him that she wants to feature one of his photos of children fishing in a polluted river on the credit card her company is developing. Joe recoils, and as the dinner devolves into a heated argument, it’s revealed that they had sex on the plane to Beijing.

Meanwhile, Zhang Lin spends his days watching TV and takes little interest in his own life—aside from his neighbor, Ming Xiaoli, whose rattling cough he can hear through the walls of his apartment every day. After Zhang Wei nags him to do something, Zhang Lin starts recording the story of his participation in the Tiananmen Square protest on his laptop. As he speaks, an apparition of his late wife Liuli emerges.

Back in America, Joe and Mel run into their old acquaintance Maria Dubiecki, a Democratic senator, at the first presidential debate. Frank calls Joe with a lead on the Tank Man story: at a strip club, he met a woman named Mary Chang who got fired from a Beijing newspaper after she unwittingly ran ads mourning the Tiananmen Square casualties and naming Wang Pengfei a “hero” of the day. Joe and Mel pay Mary a visit, and she tells them that a woman named Feng Meihui placed the advertisement.

Joe makes amends with Tessa, offering a folder of his other photos she could use for the credit card. Meanwhile, he continues his search for Wang Pengfei. Joe and Mel interview Feng Meihui and her daughter at their fish stand in Chinatown, and Feng Meihui reveals that she was paid to place the ad about Wang Pengfei by a florist who goes by Jimmy Wang. Joe and Mel florists’ shops across the city until they find one where a florist named Pengsi and his wife work. As an old poster of Hillary Clinton watches from the wall, Pengsi tells Joe that Jimmy Wang “doesn’t live [there],” which triggers Joe’s suspicion. He takes a photo of Pengsi and sends it to Zhang Lin, who immediately calls him in a rage. Zhang Lin reminds him of the danger of sending a message that can be surveilled by Chinese authorities so easily and pointedly reminds Joe to reach out to Benny as he promised. In Beijing, Zhang Lin continues to record his account of the Tiananmen Square protest, still haunted by his memories of Liuli.

As the American presidential debates progress, Tessa’s mention of 2008 candidate Hillary Clinton reminds Joe of the poster at the florist’s and gives him the idea to search the donor database to find Jimmy Wang. He decides to go to Maria Dubiecki for help accessing the confidential donor information. Frank tells Joe that because their newspaper’s parent company is borrowing money from Chinese investors to expand, they can’t risk publishing a story about the Tank Man anymore. Joe is furious with Frank, but he presses on without his or Mel’s help. When Maria refuses to breach donor privacy by giving Joe access to the database, he blackmails her with an old photo of her half-naked and snorting cocaine.

Meanwhile in Beijing, Ming Xiaoli dies. Zhang Lin blames the Party’s failure to address or acknowledge the high air pollution levels that caused her illness for her death. Feeling angry and powerless, he starts writing an article exposing their cruelty and incompetence. The Chinese Public Safety Bureau arrests Zhang Lin shortly thereafter, and when he refuses to sign a retraction, they torture him.

On the night of the 2012 presidential election, Joe and Tessa have sex, and he asks her to go to dinner with him and Benny the next night. Just before the dinner, Joe gets the information he needs from Maria, and it leads him back to the florist’s shop. Invigorated by this lead, Joe pushes Pengsi and his wife to explain their connection to Wang Pengfei. When the encounter escalates into a physical fight, Pengsi admits that Wang Pengfei was his brother, and that he is the Tank Man—but not in the way Joe thinks. Rather, Wang Pengfei was the one driving the tank, who refused to kill the man in the street and was executed by the Chinese government for his disobedience. Pengsi’s neighbor, hearing raised voices, calls the police, and everyone gets taken into custody. At the station, Frank and Tessa both visit Joe. Frank, whose professional relationship with Maria has been ruined, fires Joe and cuts ties. Tessa dumps him, noting how far he is from the man who held her hand because she was scared.

That spring, Zhang Lin speaks at protests, and Joe’s photos are featured at an exhibition. There, he runs into Benny, whom he never ended up meeting, and Zhang Wei. Zhang Wei rebukes Joe for his abandonment of Zhang Lin and hands him an iPod with Zhang Lin’s recordings on it. When Benny lets slip that he grew up calling the Tank Man “dog-face,” Joe realizes that Zhang Lin has been the Tank Man all along. Shaken, Joe calls Zhang Lin, but they only talk for a few minutes before Zhang Lin is arrested by the PSB. In a flashback to 1989, Zhang Lin suffers the loss of Liuli and their unborn child in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Holding bags full of her jewelry, Zhang Lin faces the tank.