24 years ago today

[Little-Acorn]

24 years ago today, on June 4, 1989, Chinese students and other citizens faced down large portions of the Chinese military at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and other locations throughout China. The Chinese people refer to them as the "June 4 uprisings", since they took place in more than 300 cities across China, not just in Tiananmen Square.

Due to the lack of information coming out of China's tightly government-controlled media, death toll estimates nationwide range from several hundred, to thousands.

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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BTW, today the Chinese government is frantically blocking internet searches for terms like "June 4", "uprising", "protest", etc.

Someone photoshopped the famous image of a well-dressed man with a briefcase facing down four Chinese tanks in the largest open public square in China, Tian An Men Square. The Photoshop artist replaced the four tanks in the picture, with four giant rubber ducks; and sent the altered photo out on Twitter as a joke.

And as a result, the Chinese government is even blocking searches for the terms "rubber duck" and "yellow duck"!

Leftist totalitarians can sure look stupid sometimes, here and abroad, when they try to enforce their agendas.

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Tiananmen Square online searches censored by Chinese authorities | World news | guardian.co.uk

Tiananmen Square online searches censored by Chinese authorities

Banned search terms include 'today', 'tomorrow' and date references in attempt to quell protest

Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 June 2013 08.55 EDT

Twitter image mocking Chinese censorship of Tiananmen Square, adapted from AP's 1989 photograph (the search term 'Big Yellow Duck' is banned). Photograph: Twitter/weibo.com/weibolg

It takes a very significant date for the word "today" to be deemed too sensitive to mention. But 24 years after the Chinese government's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, "today" is part of a long list of search terms that have been censored on Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblog.

Other banned words include "tomorrow," "that year," "special day," and many number combinations that could refer to 4 June 1989, such as 6-4, 64, 63+1, 65-1, and 35 (shorthand for May 35th).

Chinese Communist party authorities, fearing a threat to their legitimacy, forbid open discussion of the so-called "June 4th incident" in the country's media and on its internet. Yet internet users have reacted by using ever-more oblique references to commemorate the tragedy, treating censors to an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse.

Many of their posts have been embedded in pictures, which can often elude automatic detection: a girl with her hand over her mouth; a Lego man facing down three green Lego tanks; the iconic "tank man" picture with its tanks photoshopped into four giant rubber ducks, a reference to a well-known art installation in Hong Kong's Victoria harbour.

Most of these pictures, too, have since been scrubbed clean. By Tuesday afternoon, the term "big yellow duck" had also been blocked.

 

[LordBrownTrout]

We have our own version of white washing history here also.

 

[FA_Q2]

We have our own version of white washing history here also.

Not even in the same ballpark. Not even close.

 

[g5000]

We have our own version of white washing history here also.

It's more like self-imposed amnesia. You can't get outraged at someone if one of your own has done the same thing on an even bigger scale.

 

[Mr Natural]

There's at least one hard core right wing poster on this forum who considers China to be

the worlds greatest miracle; it cut the worlds poverty in half in just 30 years!!

 

[PoliticalChic]

Glad you posted that.


And, fifty years prior....here, in the United States, the President decided that the United States was not available to folks like this:
"Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


The SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, United States, after already having been turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, most of its passengers later died in Nazi concentration

 

[LordBrownTrout]

We have our own version of white washing history here also.

Not even in the same ballpark. Not even close.

That's correct but the fact that we have people here who whitewash history is disturbing enough.

 

[Sunshine]

We taught them well how to deal with civil unrest.

 

[g5000]

Glad you posted that.


And, fifty years prior....here, in the United States, the President decided that the United States was not available to folks like this:
"Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


The SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, United States, after already having been turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, most of its passengers later died in Nazi concentration

Yeah, a lot of people hated Jews back then.

And now we have the same kind of people who want to send the Mexicans home.

 

[Little-Acorn]

An interestng documentary, made in 2006. Some Chinese students from a university in Bejing, are showed that picture of the tanks in Tian An Men Square, with the lone guy with the briefcase standing in front of them (See OP).

They stare at it, look at each other, can't figure out what it is. They've never seen or heard of it. These are educated college students.



That was seven years ago. I don't know if that level of "education" is any better now.

 

[FA_Q2]

We have our own version of white washing history here also.

Not even in the same ballpark. Not even close.

That's correct but the fact that we have people here who whitewash history is disturbing enough.

Very disturbing. More so because it is in our system and we are subject to the fallout from such.

I don’t like the comparison though. Comparing what we face with the absolute control that the Chinese face is really misrepresenting the case. There big brother really is watching and he really will disappear you if you are not falling in line. China has one of the worst human rights record out of any industrial nation.