Behind The Wall - tiananmen-square

Jun

2012

12:14pm, EDT

China censorship: Shares fall 64.89 points on June 4, 1989 protest anniversary

Bobby Yip / Reuters

People take part in a candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park on Monday to commemorate those who died during the military crackdown of the pro-democracy movement at Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

BEIJING – Government controls many aspects of life in China, but for today at least the invisible hand of market forces proved too strong even for the country’s ruling Communist Party.

In an apparent coincidence, Shanghai’s local stock market, the Shanghai Composite Index, opened trading this morning at 2346.98 points. Read backwards, it looks like the date, June 4, 1989 – this day 23 years ago when the Communists brutally cracked down on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in the capital.

Even more bizarre? By the end of trading in the afternoon, the market had lost 64.89 points.

PhotoBlog: Thousands remember Tiananmen Square crackdown

The significance of the numbers might have passed without comment had authorities not tried to censor discussion of the anniversary by preventing users on Weibo - China’s equivalent of Twitter – from posting terms such as “six four,” “candle” and “never forget.” With users abuzz over the Shanghai Composite Index numbers, censors had to widen the list of banned terms to include the Chinese word for ‘Index’.

Hundreds of students and other civilians are estimated to have been killed in 1989 as People’s Liberation Army soldiers entered the capital to clear the streets of protesters. The topic of the crackdown is taboo in this country and little discussed aside from sanitized official accounts in textbooks that call the event a “political disturbance.”

Security around Tiananmen Square is typically boosted before the anniversary and censors work to keep discussion to a minimum.

June 4, 1989: NBC News reports as Chinese soldiers crush demonstrations.

State Department deputy spokesman, Mark Toner, issued a statement on Sunday urging the Chinese government to "release all those still serving sentences for their participation in the demonstrations; to provide a full public accounting of those killed, detained or missing; and to end the continued harassment of demonstration participants and their families."

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Weimin, called U.S. statements on the June 4th incident a “crude meddling in domestic Chinese affairs.”

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Dec

2010

5:48am, EST

WikiLeaks could fuel old paranoia

By Adrienne Mong

We wrote a couple of days ago that there hasn’t been much popular fascination in China with the U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.

But there does appear to be gathering interest in forthcoming documents.

As some folks have noted, the WikiLeaks site showed there are China-related cables dated June 3, 1989, and June 5, 1989. These could shed new light on the Tiananmen Square protests that were violently crushed by the People’s Liberation Army 21 years ago – revelations that Beijing’s leadership will not welcome over an incident that’s still not up for public discussion.

It’s also believed that in the coming days another release of cables will include “secret memos exchanged between Taiwanese and U.S. diplomatic officials, perhaps giving the public a firsthand look at the fragile relationship,” reported the Taipei Times.

Tiananmen Square and Taiwan comprise two of the three highly-sensitive T’s in China; Tibet is the third.

So Beijing’s damage control, which we referenced a couple of days ago, comes as no big surprise.

At another regularly scheduled press briefing today, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson again refused to comment on the leaked cables, only referring to the contents as “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

An editorial published Wednesday in the state-run Global Times newspaper went even further, suggesting the WikiLeaks cables are all part of a ploy to destabilize China: “Is there some understanding between the Web site and the U.S. government? It may be worth asking. And what does it mean to other countries that are on the radar screen of WikiLeaks?”

In a sharp piece, ChinaGeeks’ C. Custer argues that the Global Times editorial might be part of a preemptive strike for those cables still to come – which might be more directly damaging to Beijing:

“[B]y tying Wikilinks [sic] into their ongoing narrative about Western imperialism, U.S. aggression, and anti-China forces, they’re assuring whatever they can’t scrub – and whatever leaks through in the future – is discredited.”

But there’s a strong possibility this line might be more than just government spin.

Analysts here in recent months have been talking about the ascendancy of the Chinese military point of view within the leadership – one that is rooted in old-school suspicions about the U.S. and its “encirclement policy” vis-à-vis a rising China.

Click here for complete coverage of the WikiLeaks story