{"id":1194,"date":"2014-06-04T05:01:18","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T05:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2014-06-04T05:01:18","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T05:01:18","slug":"chinas-mandatory-tiananmen-amnesia-has-been-incredibly-effective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/chinas-mandatory-tiananmen-amnesia-has-been-incredibly-effective","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s mandatory Tiananmen amnesia has been incredibly effective"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Lily Kuo @lilkuo June 2, 2014<\/span>
\nCovering up the past. Reuters\/Ed Nachtrieb<\/p>\n

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Chinese government\u2019s violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, a new veil of online censorship has been lowered onto the country. In addition to the dozens of activists that have been detained in order to ensure their silence during the contentious day, a slew of English and Chinese-language news sites and internet services\u2014including Google\u2014have been blocked.
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\nChinese president Xi Jinping \u201clike his predecessors, is on futile mission to control discussions about Tiananmen and broader issues,\u201d Human Rights Watch said last week. But contrary to what some activists might have hoped, the state-mandated erasure of the incident has been extremely effective. Only 15 out of 100 university students in Beijing recognize the iconic picture of \u201cTank Man\u201d a demonstrator blocking the path of a line of tanks, according to The People\u2019s Republic of Amnesia, a new book on the topic by NPR correspondent Louisa Lim.
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\n\u201cThe education system and the vast apparatus that censors the Chinese media and Internet have done such a formidable job at eliminating references to the events of 1989 that many young people are unaware of what happened or have only a faint notion of what happened,\u201d Danwei\u2019s Jeremy Goldkorn, whose site monitors Chinese media, told AFP. \u201cThe result is that many young people who do not remember 1989 themselves would need an unusual degree of curiosity to look for information about what happened.\u201d
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\nScouring the Chinese internet for references to June 4 has become an annual event for the government\u2019s censors, but this year\u2019s efforts have gone further than ever before.
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\nAll Google services in China, including gmail, are now being blocked on the mainland. That\u2019s according to GreatFire.org, a nonprofit group that monitors censorship in the country. Google had previously been accessible through its Google.hk domain, as well as several other workarounds, but authorities have chosen the days leading up to the anniversary to tighten the screws\u2014perhaps because they feared new encryption tools that enabled Google users to hide their search queries from the authorities.
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\n\u201cIt is not clear that the block is a temporary measure around the anniversary or a permanent block,\u201d GreatFire writes. \u201cBut because the block has lasted for 4 days, it\u2019s more likely that Google will be severely disrupted and barely usable from now on.\u201d (Google has not responded to queries from Quartz.)
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\nAs in previous years, even circuitous mentions of June 4 on social media\u2014including the Chinese characters for six and four together, for the date of June 4, the search term \u201cfour, open fire\u201d or \u201c25 years\u201c\u2014 are being swiftly deleted by censors. China\u2019s version of Wikipedia, Baike, has no entry for the entire year of 1989.
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\nThe end result is a Chinese student population that wasn\u2019t even born when the Tiananmen protests took place, and wouldn\u2019t even know to look for more information about them if they wanted to. When the AFP asked a 20-year-old student at Peking University about the events of June 4, his response was: \u201cI don\u2019t know what you are talking about.\u201d
\nFrom http:\/\/qz.com\/215581\/chinas-mandatory-tiananmen-amnesia-has-been-incredibly-effective\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Lily Kuo @lilkuo June 2, 2014 Coverin … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[94,101],"views":798,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}