It’s the image of a protestor standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, China. The image is significant as it is very much an icon of standing up to overwhelming force, and China does not want its citizens to see examples of successful defiance.

It’s also an example of the human side of power. The tank driver stopped. In the history of protestors, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the tanks keep rolling- in those protests, many other protestors were killed by other human beings who didn’t stop, who rolled over another person, who shot the person in front of them even when they weren’t being attacked.

Nobody knows exactly why the protester was there. He got up into the tank and talked with the soldiers for a while, then got out and stayed there until someone grabbed him and moved him out of the way.

Given that the tanks were leaving the square, the lack of violence towards the man when he got into the tank, and the public opinion towards the protests at the time was divided (imagine the diversity of opinion on the ICE protests, if protesters had also burned ICE agents alive, hung their corpses up, etc.), it's entirely possible that it was a conservative citizen upset about the unrest who wanted the tanks to stay to maintain order in the square.