Tiananmen Square anniversary recalls the 'Great Firewall of China'

The struggle to find information about the events of 4 June 1989 online within China is indicative of the State's continued determination to censor sensitive information.  Experiments conducted by RSF showed the country's most popular search engine, Baidu is tightly restricted in the results it produces for searches of '4 June'.  Only the official accounts of the event can be read, whilst the search for photos results in the message, "The search does not comply with laws, regulations and policies."  Searches within China on Yahoo and Google.cn produce equally evasive reports and users attempting to search through google.com are automatically redirected to Google.cn.  However, Chinese readers outside of the country can find abundant amounts of information and coverage of the events, including videos, on the Chinese-language version of the search engine.  

In recent months, press reports from Hong Kong have observed that the mainland authorities have sporadically blocked social networking websites including Google's free blog service Blogger.com and YouTube. "Many are assuming it is related to political sensitivity" regarding 4 June, the South China Morning Post reported on 20 May. Six days later, the Hong Kong Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy reported that 6,000 online discussion boards had been closed down or restricted.

In the intervening twenty years, internal printed and broadcast media has received enormous investment and impetus from the Chinese state, to the extent that all legal forms of media are state controlled and political comment is heavily censored. China Central Television (CCTV) operates on a tight leash. Authorities closely monitor the activities of foreign reporters, particularly their relationships with foreign dissidents, RSF confirms.  In recent weeks, several foreign TV crews have been barred from broadcasting in the Square, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China reported. Today, on the anniversary, BBC correspondents have reported that the majority of foreign journalists have not been allowed to roam freely in the Square. 

However, the internationality and sophistication of the web are developing beyond the reach of the authorities.  Web adept Chinese are increasingly managing to climb over the 'Great Firewall of China' to access foreign news websites. China's estimated 70 million bloggers are censored by private Internet service providers such as Yahoo China and Microsoft and an Internet censor operates as an army of a believed 40,000 people.  However, according to media analysts, a significant amount of politically sensitive material continues to circulate in Chinese blogosphere, as some private companies interpret the censor guidelines at their discretion. Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor and co-founder of the China-based English-language media blogging site Danwei believes that "the media and the internet has been a huge part of fairly real gains of individual freedom in China."  

In an interview with Reuters following the media blackout, Tiananmen dissident and exile in Los Angeles, Wang Dan sees the Internet and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which were also victim to the recent shut down, as a liberating force for the Chinese people:

"The government has already lost control of activities of civil society on the internet - that's the hope".

Sources:  Reporters Sans Frontieres,
               BBC online
              Mail&Guardianonline