There were tanks in Tian An Men, but I have not seen any evidences that tanks crashed people. All known leaders of students are alive today and they are mostly in the US. I also believe that Chinese government has to face the issue instead of avoiding to talk about it.
Chinese government officially has banned torture for long time although I believe that torture still occurs in China. I can not give any comments about the special case mentioned in the BBC report because I have not read anything other source.
Yes, when one sees the skyscrapers, one should not have illusion that China is a country without problems. There is no doubt that China is a country with enormous problems. However, exaggerating the problems is also disgusting. I really dislike the rhetoric used in the BBC report such as China is a country with "astonishing growth, combined with astonishing greed, where wealth means power, and without power you are nothing." In UK, the homeland of the BBC reporter, isn't wealth means power? In an article that I read a few months ago, a man with asset of several hundreds of millions of dollars was executed by lethal injection in China because he committed a murder crime.
The following article from The New York Time gives much more intellectual discussion about various problems in China than the BBC article given above
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/ma...&_r=1&ref=asia