June 4, 2009

It was twenty years ago on June 4 that tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and troops opened fire on thousands of peaceful protestors, the vast majority of which were students. The world was shocked as the violence replayed on televisions around the world – scores of young students meeting a brutal death as bullets rained on the sea of protestors who had peacefully assembled for democracy’s sake. The tanks and military in Tiananmen Square killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, and sparked the turbulent initiation of China’s democracy movement.

Yet in today’s China, many students have no idea of what transpired at Tiananmen Square that fateful day. School textbooks simply ignore the event. Many school teachers act as though it never happened, offering only vague, limited references to a “counterrevolutionary” chapter in Chinese history. A young Chinese professional interviewed by CNN for an article on Tiananmen Square says that learning about the incident as a child proved difficult, if not impossible. After asking her parents about the incident to no avail, she turned to her teachers. "One of my teachers said something about it -- but just one sentence, that's all,” she recalled.

The silence about Tiananmen Square seems strange, almost eerie. In a world where information rules, the Chinese government is intent on keeping this dark chapter a secret from its own people. One Chinese government official at a foreign ministry conference recently referenced the day as a "political incident that took place in the late 1980s." It is routinely downplayed, intentionally ignored.

Breaking the Silence

As the Internet continues to grow in China, however, the government’s decades-long silence about Tiananmen Square has become more difficult to maintain.

Xiao Qiang of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the impact of the Internet on China’s politics and media. "You want to see where the freedom of expression movements are in China?” he told CNN recently, “Twenty years ago, it was on Tiananmen Square. Today it is on the Internet.”

Which might explain why the Chinese government employs thousands to monitor as well as block certain websites. The government tracks key words as “Tiananmen,” checking up on the curious and counterrevolutionary.

Today, June 4, China is especially busy cracking down on vast swaths of the Internet. After all, today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen. Blocking everything from Twitter to online blogging software, the Chinese government seems desperate to quash any relived memories of the event, and any commentary on its relevance today.

So just how hard is it for a Chinese citizen to uncover the truth about Tiananmen? Reporters Without Borders recently released a report illustrating the difficulties of finding uncensored information on Tiananmen Square on the internet in China.