Tiananmen Square continues to bleed hope for freedom of speech

Posted by DK

June 5, 2009

“internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” – EFF co-founder John Gilmore

2005, Yahoo provides information that helped Chinese officials convict a journalist accused of leaking state secrets. Apparently, Shi Tao, a 37-year-old writer for the Dangdai Shang Bao, released a “state secret” which contained a message to Shi’s newspaper warning journalists of the dangers associated with dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to the group. Shi admitted sending the e-mail but disputed whether it was a secret document[1].

Late 2005, Microsoft follows Yahoo and censors Chinese bloggers and restricts the use of words such as, “freedom”, “democracy”, “demonstration”, “human rights” and “Taiwan independence[2]. Microsoft took this a step further in early 2006, by removing Zhao Jing’s blog. The journalist had offended the Chinese government in some unknown way and Microsoft acted before China banned the address.

2006, Google’s launch of a new, self-censored search engine. Google argues it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether and says that in contrast to other search engines, it will inform users when access is restricted on certain search terms.[3]

Some may recall the Tiananmen Square Protests of June 4th 1989[4]. The protests were sparked by the death of a pro-market, pro-democracy, and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang. The Tinanmen anniversary was yesterday and marks a day of remembrance of that event over 20 years ago.

It’s also known as Chinese Internet Maintenance day. That’s because many Chinese services are facing so much pressure from the government to keep their users from talking about that bloody day, they are just shutting down comment boards, or claiming their services are closed for unspecified upgrades.

For instance, FanFou.com, a popular Twitter-like service, shut its doors for the week, and says it will re-open on June 6.

Meanwhile, the so-called Great Firewall of China is blocking Twitter, human rights groups’ websites and blogging services hosted outside of China[5]

MacKinnon, the former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN, noted that the top three hot queries on Google.cn were about the anniversary, despite Google’s willing censorship of search results[5].

But Google does better than the Chinese-owned Baidu search engine, which reports no results for an image search for “Tiananmen Square.” Baidu’s blogging service also searches draft posts for keywords, and forbids publication of posts with controversial terms[5].

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