For a brief moment 10 years ago, a lone figure blocked the path of a giant tank in Tiananmen Square, and it seemed as though Chinese dissidents might be able to shake the pillars of power in that vast country and bring some semblance of democracy to China. In the wake of the pro-democracy protests, however, the Chinese government redoubled its crackdown on dissidents and crushed any hint of dissent. As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananment Square demonstration approaches, Chinese authorities seem more determined than ever not to allow even a hint of unrest to appear anywhere — including the Internet.
Early this week, journalists and bloggers in China started noticing that Twitter, the chat-style social networking application, was no longer available — and that users were also having difficulty accessing other popular websites and services such as Google-owned YouTube and the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website Flickr. Blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger (also owned by Google) were said to be unavailable as well. According to several reports, the Chinese authorities had also shut down message boards on thousands of websites used by college students.
Blocking and/or filtering services is nothing new for the Chinese government. Even widely-used and official services such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN Search are filtered by the authorities to exclude any reference to the events in Tiananment Square in 1989, and all of the major search engines have in the past supplied names of specific users to the Chinese government. As more and more official services have been blocked or filtered, the popularity of social-networking sites such as Twitter has increased. As a number of observers have noted, Twitter takes on even more significance in a country like China, not just because it allows people to exchange messages easily, but because the use of Chinese characters allows Twitter posts to include far more information than a similar English message.
As the Committee to Protect Journalists details in a recent piece, the Chinese government has been cracking down on virtually every form of media: newspapers published in Hong Kong that might mention the anniversary are blocked from delivery to mainland China, and radio broadcasts are interrupted by commercials if the topic comes up; even a former Communist Party leader’s memoirs are no longer available through official channels (according to the New York Times), presumably because they mention the events of June 3 and 4, 1989. Several prominent Chinese citizens associated with the demonstration were either detained or warned to leave the capital before the anniversary.
Despite the official crackdowns, however, Twitter users seemed determined to find a way around what Chinese dissidents and other critics refer to as the “Great Firewall of China.” As the blockage moved into its second day, users were exchanging tips on using so-called “anonymous proxy” software such as Hotspot Shield (which hides the IP address of a user who runs the software) and other similar technological workarounds.