Permanently Deleted
My thinking on the firewall has shifted a lot over time. Imagine what a massive problem it could be if every Chinese person was on Facebook, for example - blocking that as an protectionist move and allowing Weibo to grow as the Chinese-owned and -operated alternative was absolutely the right move. And when you consider the censorship that it enables, consider that western corporations do a lot of censorship too - but the difference between western and Chinese censorship is that the Chinese censors are democratically accountable to a larger degree than the western ones, who just happen to own the website in question.
It would be one thing if it was solely protectionist. It’s entirely different; their blocking of websites like archive.org, duckduckgo, and the New York Times shows they’re after far more than protectionism. There’s also no protectionist argument for the banning of all information pertaining to Tianamenn Square and similar events. For all of America’s faults, at least we can read about COINTELPRO and the various coups we’ve orchestrated (although the US government would probably do something you change that if they could).
banning of all information pertaining to Tianamenn Square
There is no ban on information pertaining to the June 4th incident, the ban is on spreading anticommunist propaganda about it. Like any other internet censorship operation however, China relies on an algorithm to nuke suspected propaganda posts, which means that some non-propaganda posts get caught in the net.
Ok I just tried looking up stuff about Tiananmen Square on baidu.com to see what comes up
Found stuff like this and this, which seem to be a timeline of events leading to and directly after the riots. What stuck out to me is that they don’t really offer an in-depth explanation of what happened on June 4th beyond just a couple sentences.
In the early hours of 3 June, some PLA martial law troops were ordered to move in to secure some key targets in the city of Beijing.
At 4.30am on 4 June, the martial law forces began to clear Tiananmen Square. At around 5am, students began to evacuate the square and the martial law forces moved into Tiananmen Square at the same time. By 5.30am, the whole clearing process was over.
3 June The unrest created by a small number of people in Beijing over the past month develops into a counter-revolutionary riot. In the early hours of the morning of the 4th, the martial law troops stationed around the city were ordered to quell the riot by clearing the area and moving into Tiananmen Square.
I tried mixing up the keywords more like “June 4th Incident” “1989 Riots” etc. and found basically the same kind of stuff. Granted, it’s also fucky as shit that no matter what I looked up I couldn’t find any kind of pictures of the events, or at least a more in-depth description, though that might just be because I don’t speak a lick of Chinese and I have no idea what I’m supposed to look up lol. Still pretty damn freaky
