China’s internet police spent yesterday in an unprecedented frenzy of censorship, locked in a minute-by-minute battle with the country’s 300 million microbloggers to stifle discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
In their paranoid zeal, the Chinese government censors deleted hundreds of thousands of blog postings, closed down individual user accounts and blocked essential words such as “today” from the search function of Sina Weibo, the country’s equivalent of Twitter.
As night fell on the 23rd anniversary of the notorious military crackdown on June 4, 1989, the lexicon of terms banned from the internet in China included anything that could be interpreted as a memorial of the date itself and words such as “that year”, “recall”, “candle” and “square”.
But just as the censors might have felt the day was edging towards a triumph of whitewashing, the Shanghai stock market served up a conspiratorial and completely coincidental signal of support.
In a twist that left even the most hardened traders agog, the Shanghai Composite Index of shares — the equivalent of London’s FTSE 100 — ended Monday’s session 64.89 points lower.
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It was a confluence of figures that meant the taboo date presented in the Chinese manner flashed boldly on trading screens and on the display boards of the Shanghai bourse, prompting many to tweet that “even the Shanghai stock market weeps at the memory”.
Within minutes of the market’s closing bell and the emergence of the banned number, the phrases “Shanghai Composite Index” and “Shanghai stock market” joined “suppress”, “mourn”, “massacre” and “redress” on the official list of words deemed too sensitive for use by ordinary Chinese.
Weibo users and analysts agreed that the efforts of the censors had been palpably enhanced from previous years. Since 1990 the Tiananmen anniversary has set the Chinese authorities on edge.This year’s event comes at an especially sensitive juncture: in a few months’ time, the Party will select the next generation of leaders to guide the country through the next decade — a process that Beijing dearly hoped would be free from trouble.
Those ambitions have been dashed by events this year and the party is more visibly split than at any time since 1989. It is reeling from the scandal surrounding the disgraced Chongqing chief, Bo Xilai, and is fighting to maintain legitimacy in an era in which online social networks ensure that the State no longer controls how millions of Chinese see and interpret the world.
In response to each new restriction, Weibo users determined to mark the anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests evolved new vocabularies to trick the censors.
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At one stage, the Chinese character meaning “dot” appeared on thousands of tweets because of its supposed resemblance to a tank crushing people. The character was censored when its use became clear to the unseen sentinels.
When The Times wrote to Sina to question the ban on the word “today”, it received the response: “dear user, an adjustment to the system has caused a search abnormality. It is expected to return to normal in one or two days.”
The Communist Party’s traditional annual assault on dissenters and critics was also in full swing yesterday. People on the authorities’ very considerable blacklist of potential troublemakers — from prominent dissidents to small-time provincial petitioners from the provinces — were either prevented from leaving their homes or observed oppressively.
Hu Jia, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, who was released from jail this time last year, said that conditions of his illegally imposed house arrest had been tightened even further around the Tiananmen anniversary. “A dozen new plain-clothes men went on duty from the morning of June 3. Their whole purpose is to prevent me leaving and stop anyone from visiting me,” he said during a brief phone call.
Police efforts to prevent any gatherings in Tiananmen Square appeared successful last night.