Every so often I check this blog's statistics: it's a fun exercise to discover where in the world the readers are, how they got here, and what posts are of most interest to them. In recent days I've noticed a startling shift in readership demographics: where there previously was a rather sizable readership from China, there is now none. My guess is that this has something (or indeed everything) to do with China's 'internet blackout' ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary tomorrow.
Western sites like Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Wordpress, YouTube, Blogger and (just one day after its launch) Microsoft Bing have all been censored. Moreover, government agencies are banning delivery of foreign newspapers, and disrupting satellite news broadcasts. Access to Taiwanese news outlets, which have become quite open in recent years, has also been restricted. The Chinese media blog Danwei posted a link to this spreadsheet of currently unaccessible or otherwise blocked Chinese sites, to which one can no doubt add countless others. Even Tiananmen Square itself is closed to the public today and blocked by armed police (a chillingly ironic image, if you ask me). The 'blackout' is aimed at eliminating every possible reference to the 1989 pro-democracy student movement, which the PLA suppressed on June 4 of that year.
Unfortunately, such memory control has been quite successful in China, with the result being that only few young Chinese know anything about the so-called "June 4 Incident" other than the fact that it happened (and some don't even know that much). Hiding a nation's history from its own people is utterly repulsive and, indeed, cowardly. A stark juxtaposition to what is arguably one of the most powerful images of raw human courage in history: