How Chinese people bypass Tiananmen silence – online
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Search for ‘Tiananmen Square’ on Chinese social media and you will usually draw a blank. But China’s online community have adopted unconventional strategies to talk about the massacre 25 years ago.
You are unlikely to find anything under the search term ‘Tiananmen Square’ when trawling through China's biggest social networking site, despite it being 25 years since the massacre, writes freelance journalist Suswati Basu. In fact, any combination of numbers and words resembling 4 June 1989 has been blocked on China's Twitter-like site Weibo.
That is because the country's vast Internet censorship machine has been scrubbing clean any record of the event from social media sites down to its main search engine Baidu. Even on the 25th anniversary, the Communist party has continued its long-running campaign to force the Chinese public to forget the moment when People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on civilians in Beijing after months of protests in Tiananmen Square.
Consequently, al...
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