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A lone demonstrator stands down a column of tanks June 5, 1989 at the entrance to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The incident took place on the morning after Chinese troops fired upon pro-democracy students who had been protesting in the square since April 15, 1989.

In the years immediately following 1989, the anniversary of the deadly June 4 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing was marked by smaller memorial protests. At universities in the northwest of the city, students would distribute leaflets, sing the Internationale and break bottles in a show of disrespect to the then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, whose given name is a homophone for little bottle. In 1992, a protester unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square itself before being dragged away by police. But such public displays have grown rare. This year, on the 23rd anniversary of the crackdown by troops that killed hundreds, possibly thousands of protesters, the anniversary was marked online, on services like Facebook and the Sina Weibo microblog, and possibly even by the Shanghai Composite index.

The benchmark began the day at 2,346.98, which read backwards gives 89.64, the year, month and date of the Beijing massacre. As if to reinforce the point, the index dropped by 64.89 points Monday. There was no immediate official explanation for the historically symbolic numbers.This opening level is normal, an employee of the Shanghai exchanges media department told the Wall Street Journal. Opening levels are decided by appropriate regulations and todays opening level was normal. The Shanghai exchange has long been seen as a hub of insider trading and market manipulation, but this is the first time it may have been tweaked for political symbolism.

The Shanghai index numbers are likely a random accident, Reuters reported. Regardless, Shanghai stock market joined a long list of search terms banned on Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like microblog service. Other banned search terms include 64, as the Tiananmen crackdown is known in Chinese, Tiananmen, and even the Chinese word for today. The candle emoticon, used to express mourning, was also disabled from the service, as were searches for the Chinese characters for candle. So a few Sina Weibo users resorted to typing the English word candle. The popular services censors were busy deleted any messages even remotely connected to the massacre, but a few cryptic references survived. One message reposted more than 500 times Monday discussed the 228 Incident, when Chiang Kai-sheks Kuomintang killed thousands of civilians in Taiwans capital of Taipei in 1947. The Kuomintang ruled much of China for two decades before losing a civil war with Maos Communist Party in 1949, forcing the remainder of Chiangs armies to retreat to Taiwan. In 1995, as part of a process of ending its autocratic rule over the island, the Kuomintang apologized for the 228 crackdown. The Kuomintang had the courage to overturn its decision, wrote one person on Weibo, a message meant as much for a Communist Party that has refused to address its 1989 decision that the Tiananmen protests were a counterrevolutionary riot.

The specter of Tiananmen censorship also spread to Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous Chinese city where the 1989 crackdown is remembered in annual vigils. On Friday afternoon about 10 political activists including Legislative Council member Leung Kwok-hung saw their Facebook accounts disabled, says Charles Mok, chair of the Hong Kong branch of the Internet Society. Mok says that he was able to get in touch with a Facebook representative from the companys Washington, D.C. office and the accounts were restored by Friday evening. The social networking giant didnt offer a reason for the account closures, Mok says, though activists in Hong Kong suspect it could have been due to false complaints filed in an attempt to thwart organizing ahead of Hong Kongs June 4 memorial vigil.

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Amid Censorship, China's Tiananmen Crackdown Is Remembered Online

Google has introduced a new feature for Chinese users that will pull back the curtain on Chinese Internet government censorship.

This week the search engine giant Google kept a polite smile on its face as it stuck its shiv in up to the hilt, introducing a feature to its Chinese site that tells users exactly when the censors have blocked a search word for being too sensitive.

Beijing Bureau Chief

Peter Ford is The Christian Science Monitors Beijing Bureau Chief. He covers news and features throughout China and also makes reporting trips to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

The Chinese government keeps its list of banned search terms secret; Google is now revealing them. But not once did Google Vice President Alan Eustace mention the word censorship in his blog introducing the new feature.

Instead he noted that users in China are regularly getting error messages when they search for a particular subset of queries. He mentioned the word jiang as a case in point but did not explain why such a common surname that also means river should be a banned search term.

Its because jiang is the surname of former president Jiang Zemin, about whom the censors dont want Chinese citizens to find out much because most of what is written about him on the web concerns his allegedly poor health and his role in succession struggles within the ruling Communist party.

The problem for Google users in China, and Google, is that whenever a user searched for a banned word not only would the search yield only an error message, but the connection to Google would be lost for a minute or so, which is highly inconvenient.

No wonder that Google has only 16 percent of the Chinese search engine market, way behind local competitor Baidu, with 78 percent. Baidu self-censors, so its users have no problem searching jiang. Google has refused to self censor since 2010, when it withdrew from the mainland and based itself in Hong Kong.

Googles new feature, designed, says Mr. Eustace, to help improve the search experience in mainland China, will warn users when they are searching for a banned word that will cut their connection, allowing them to re-define their searchwords.

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Sly Google wields the knife in Chinese Internet censorship tussle

AFP Friday, Jun 01, 2012

YANGON - The tormentor-in-chief of Myanmar's heavily censored media will put down his black marker pen for good in a month, signalling the end of one of the world's most draconian press scrutiny regimes.

Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutinisation and Registration Department (PSRD), said he will release its iron grip on the country's media in the latest significant reform for a country emerging from decades of repression.

"There will be no press scrutiny job from the end of June. There will be no monitoring of local journals and magazines," he told AFP in an interview in his office in Yangon.

"I would say it is the right time rather than we are ready. When we have parliament and government working on democratic process, how can censorship work at the same time?," he said.

Stifling pre-publication censorship - applied in the past to everything from newspapers to fairy tales and the winning lottery numbers - was one of the key symbols of junta-ruled Myanmar, where even seemingly innocuous details were scrubbed from public discussion.

Sweeping reforms under a new quasi-civilian government have seen a lighter touch from the once ubiquitous censors, with less controversial publications freed from scrutiny last year.

Editors across the news media are now eager to have the same freedom. A more open climate has seen private weekly news publications publish an increasingly bold range of stories, including those about opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose very name was taboo in the past.

Tint Swe directed the PSRD for seven years, mercilessly changing headlines, slashing paragraphs or scrapping entire articles deemed critical of the military and its cronies.

"He had one of the worst jobs in Myanmar," said an editor at a news weekly who requested anonymity. "He was pressured from above by ministers, officials and powerful business people to keep stories out and pressured from below by editors to keep stories in."

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Media censorship in Myanmar to ease: Official

In its latest effort to squash efforts by Beijing to restrict online content, Google (GOOG) began warning people in mainland China on Thursday that certain keywords in searches may trigger the governments Internet blocks and break their connection.

Google, which has long fought against Internet censorship in China, launched this week a new feature on its search engine there that informs users which keywords are likely to trigger censorship blocks and cause a system outage for more than a minute.

- Google

The tech titan said it started reviewing the system after complaints by users on mainland China of spotty service. After taking a long, hard look at its system, it found no internal problems, but noticed specific keywords, such as the character Jiang, which is a popular surname that also means river, can cause connection problems.

The new mechanism includes a drop-down menu that appears under the search bar when problematic keywords are typed. The warning informs users that going through with the search may temporarily break your connection to Google, and ensures that that the interruption is outside Googles control.

Users can choose to either search anyway or edit search terms.

By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China, Google said in its official blog on Thursday. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.

Google appointed a team of engineers in the U.S. to review the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. They looked at multiple signals to identify disruptive queries, and then identified specific terms at the root of the issue.

Weve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts, Google said.

For example, Jiang, the surname and word for river, not only causes problems on its own in a search, but will break connectivity if also searched with Lijian, the name of a city in the Yunnan Province, or the Jinjiang Star hotel chain.

Originally posted here:
Google Wages Keyword Battle Over China's Censorship

BEIJING (AP) -- Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that suggests alternatives for search terms that might result in blocked results.

Google's announcement Thursday did not mention of Beijing's extensive Internet controls. But it comes after filters were tightened so severely in recent weeks that searches fail for some restaurants, universities or tourist information. Authorities were aiming to stamp out talk about an embarrassing scandal over the fall of a rising Communist Party star.

Google Inc. closed its China-based search engine in 2010 to avoid cooperating with government censorship. Mainland users can see its Chinese-language site in Hong Kong but the connection breaks if they search for sensitive terms.

The new feature will alert users in China if they type in a search term that "may temporarily break your connection to Google" and suggest alternative terms, Google said in a blog post signed by a senior vice president, Alan Eustace.

"By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China," Eustace wrote.

Google cited as an example the Chinese character "jiang," or river, without mentioning that it also is the name of former President Jiang Zemin, the possible reason the government blocks search results. It says the site will recommend users in China write their search terms without that character.

A Google spokesman in Tokyo, Taj Meadows, declined to comment on reasons for the feature or whether the company was concerned about Chinese government retaliation.

Google was allowed to keep a network of advertising sales offices in China that might be vulnerable if the communist government tries to punish the company.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, had 16.6 percent of China's search market in the first quarter based on use of its global and Hong Kong sites, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. It was in second place behind local rival Baidu Inc., which 78.5 percent, but ahead of other Chinese competitors.

Google is also promoting its Android mobile phone operating system for use by Chinese manufacturers. Chinese regulators approved Google's $12.5 acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a wireless device maker, last month on condition Android remains available to Chinese companies and others at no cost for five years.

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Google adds feature to help China searchers