Recently in Tiananmen Massacre Category

By Brian Womack - Bloomberg.com
21 July 2009

The Chinese government restricted access to more social-networking sites in the past few days, escalating a clampdown that started about six months ago, said Xia Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.

The sites that are inaccessible or aren't working properly include Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa and Jiwai, said Qiang, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley in California. Those sites work like Twitter, allowing users to post information quickly before editors can review their submissions, Qiang said.

"It turns out one of the very interesting functions of those sites is the news and opinions is getting circulated very quickly," Qiang said. That makes it much harder for authorities to keep control, he said.

Internet users in China had difficulty logging on to Facebook and other social-networking sites earlier this month following ethnic clashes in western China that left more than 150 people dead. Access to Google Inc.'s YouTube, a video- sharing site, and the Twitter messaging service also has been limited.

When accessed from San Francisco, the Digu and Zuosa Web sites said they were closed for maintenance today, according to postings on their home pages. Fanfou wasn't available as of 11 a.m. San Francisco time. The Web site of Jiwai appeared to be working.

Bing, Twitter

Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing in June, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Facebook, the most visited social-networking site, continues to receive reports of users having problems accessing the site in China, Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, said today.

>> Original report

Agence France-Presse | The Washington Post
June 06, 2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday she sees no progress in China on human rights, regretting that neither economic reforms nor U.S. pressure are making Beijing budge.

Pelosi, who visited China last week, said Beijing is still holding prisoners for taking part in the Tiananmen Square democracy protests 20 years ago.

"Just our advocacy didn't accomplish any freedom in China. So somehow or other we have to find a way to do that," Pelosi said at the Brookings Institution.

Pelosi said she praised China's leadership in her meetings for lifting millions out of poverty, calling it a "remarkable" achievement.

"The problem I have is that -- people say, 'Well, look at Taiwan, look at [South] Korea, different places' -- economic reform leads to political reform," she said. "What I see in China is that economic reform is being used to suppress the political reform."

Pelosi rejected perceptions that she had softened her stance on human rights during the recent trip.

She said that her position as speaker allows her to raise human rights concerns at the highest level and that she directly petitioned President Hu Jintao to free jailed rights activists.

Pelosi said she has no regrets about angering Beijing's leaders in 1991 by unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square in tribute "to those who died for democracy in China."

>> Original source

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN and JEREMIAH MARQUEZ, Associated Press Writers
via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
04 June 2009

BEIJING - In Tiananmen Square, police were ready to pounce at the first sign of protest. In Hong Kong, a sea of candles flickered in the hands of tens of thousands who vented their grief and anger.

Two starkly contrasting faces of China were on display Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the military's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators -- from Beijing's rigid control in suppressing any dissent, to freewheeling Hong Kong, which enjoys freedoms all but absent on the mainland.

Tiananmen Square was blanketed by uniformed and plainclothes security officers who were ready to silence any potential demonstration, and there were few hints that the vast plaza was the epicenter of a student-led movement that was crushed on June 3-4, 1989, shocking the world.

Police barred foreign journalists from entering the square and threatened them with violence, even barring them from covering the daily raising of China's national flag.

Chinese and foreign tourists were allowed in Tiananmen as usual, although security officials appeared to outnumber visitors.

Dissidents and families of victims were confined to their homes or forced to leave Beijing, part of sweeping government efforts to prevent online debate or organized commemorations of the anniversary.

But in Hong Kong's Victoria Park, a crowd chanted slogans calling for Beijing to own up to the crackdown and release political dissidents. Organizers estimated its size at 150,000, while police put the number at 62,800.

"It is the dream of all Chinese people to have democracy!" the throng sang.

Hong Kong is one of the few places in China where the events of June 1989 are not off-limits, because the territory -- returned by the British 12 years ago -- operates under a separate political system that promises freedom of speech and other Western-style civil liberties.

"Hong Kong is China's conscience," Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker Cheung Man Kwong told the demonstration.

In the candlelight, speakers recalled the terrifying events in Tiananmen, where a military assault killed hundreds who had gathered for weeks in the square to demonstrate for freedom and even erect a makeshift statue of liberty. Those killed were eulogized as heroes in the struggle for a democratic China, their names read aloud before the crowd observed a minute of silence.

"Hong Kong is the only place where we can commemorate, and we have to repeat this every year so our younger generations don't forget," said Annie Chu, 36, a Hong Kong tourism worker who says she has attended every vigil for the last 20 years.

Earlier in the day, the central government ignored calls from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and even Taiwan's China-friendly president for Beijing to face up to the 1989 violence.

The extraordinary security in Beijing came after government censors shut down social networking and image-sharing Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr and blacked out CNN and other foreign news channels each time they showed stories about Tiananmen.

"We've been under 24-hour surveillance for a week and aren't able to leave home to mourn. It's totally inhuman," said Xu Jue, whose son was 22 when he was shot in the chest by soldiers and bled to death on June 4, 1989.

Police were also stationed outside the home of Wang Yannan, the daughter of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the pro-democracy protesters, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. Wang has never been politically active.

But Zhou was celebrated in Hong Kong. Tape recordings of Zhou recalling Tiananmen, used for his recently released posthumous memoir, were played over loudspeakers next to his portrait. One former student leader, Xiong Yan, stirred the crowd with predictions that "democracy will arrive in China."

Another student leader from 1989, Wu'er Kaixi, was forced to return to Taiwan on Thursday after flying to the Chinese territory of Macau the day before in an attempt to return home.

In Washington, Clinton said Wednesday that China, as an emerging global power, "should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal."

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou urged China to lift the taboo on discussing the crackdown. "This painful chapter in history must be faced. Pretending it never happened is not an option," Ma said in a statement.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang attacked Clinton's comments as a "gross interference in China's internal affairs."

"We urge the U.S. to put aside its political prejudice and correct its wrongdoing and refrain from disrupting or undermining bilateral relations," Qin said in response to a question at a regularly scheduled news briefing.

Qin refused to comment on the security measures -- or even acknowledge them.

"Today is like any other day, stable," he said.

Beijing has never allowed an independent investigation into the crushing of the protests in 1989, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed. In one famous moment of resistance, a lone man holding shopping bags defiantly stood in front of a column of tanks on a street near the square.

Young mainland Chinese know little about the events, having grown up in a generation that has largely eschewed politics in favor of raw nationalism, wealth acquisition and individual pursuits.

But the issue still resonates with Hong Kong's younger generations.

"It's time for China to take responsibility for the killings," said Kin Cheung, a 17-year-old Hong Kong student who attended the yearly vigil for the first time Thursday. "They need to tell the truth."

Bodeen reported from Beijing, Marquez from Hong Kong. AP Writers Min Lee and Dikky Sinn in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

>> Original source

By Michael Wines and Andrew Jacobs | THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 3, 2009

China's government censors have begun to block access to the Internet services Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Micarosoft's live.com, broadening an already extraordinary effort to shield its citizens from any hint of Thursday's 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

People in China who tried to gain access to the blocked Web sites on Tuesday instead encountered an error message saying the sites' servers had unexpectedly dropped the Internet connection -- a standard indicator that access has been blocked.

Weeks earlier, censors blocked Chinese users from viewing all videos on YouTube, and in recent days some television viewers have reported that BBC World News reports related to the Tiananmen anniversary were being selectively blacked out of broadcast programs.

Government censorship of political material on Internet bulletin boards and Web sites is common in China, but this is the first time Twitter has been blocked. Some well-known political activists, unable to post comments on Chinese blogs or chat sites, had switched to Twitter in recent months as an uncensored outlet for their views.

A number of foreign-based sites that have hosted Chinese bloggers, including blogspot.com and the Chinese-language version of wordpress.com, have also been blocked in recent weeks.

The South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper based in Hong Kong that has frequently featured articles on Tiananmen and other sensitive issues, has also seen its distribution on the Chinese mainland curbed in advance of the anniversary on Thursday. And some Beijing readers of last weekend's edition of The International Herald Tribune discovered that an inside page of the newspaper with an article on the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, was missing.

The anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, in which army troops killed hundreds of student demonstrators, workers and ordinary citizens, is one of a series of politically sensitive dates this year that have provoked sweeping security measures by Chinese officials.

In recent days, the government has detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period, including one who had released an open letter complaining about economic hardship visited on former Tiananmen demonstrators who were jailed after the crackdown.

The dissident, Wu Gaoxing, was seized Saturday at his home in Taizhou, a coastal city south of Shanghai, according to the New York advocacy group Human Rights in China. Mr. Wu was among five men, all once jailed for their roles in the Tiananmen movement, who released a letter last weekend charging that former prisoners have been singled out for economic hardship long after their prison terms ended.

Human Rights in China said Mr. Wu was taken away and his computer confiscated about an hour after the letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders, became public.

Mr. Wu, a writer and former educator, was taken into custody in 1989 and imprisoned for two years after he joined protests in his home province of Zhejiang against the military crackdown on Tiananmen demonstrators. "In this society that claims to be harmonious, we have become 'citizens of the three have-nots waiting to die': we have no regular jobs, no pensions, and no health insurance; if we get sick, we can only wait to die, and all this just because 20 years ago we were sentenced for political reasons," the letter says.

The men, among them a former Communist Party member and a factory worker, said they had been denied pensions, health care and regular employment since taking part in local rallies that were inspired by the protests in Beijing. One of the signers, Mao Guoliang, said he had been fired from 17 schools since he served a four-year term for "counterrevolutionary activities."

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