China celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by shutting down the internets:
Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services today , two days before the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
The move came amid increasing pressure on dissidents, in a reflection of the authorities’ anxiety ahead of the sensitive date. Hundreds died as the army forced its way through Beijing to clear away demonstrators from the capital’s political heart in June 1989, but the issue is taboo on the mainland.
The photo-sharing site Flickr, email service Hotmail and other services were also unavailable this evening.
“Twitter is a tool which can put all the sensitive things and sensitive guys together, very quickly. That’s the very thing that the Chinese government doesn’t want to see in China,” said one blogger, Michael Anti, who had predicted Twitter would not be allowed for long.
“They needed time to figure out what it is and whether it needed to be controlled.”
In the digital information age, it’s hard to control the message – like the underlying physical layer, it only has an on/off switch.
Last year at this time I saw a documentary where a journalist visited Beijing University and showed some students that very photo.
Not one of them had ever seen it before, or knew what was going on in it.
Chris Parkes/
Don’t know if you know, but there has always been a lively attempt/discussion to find out the true identity of “Tank Boy” (as he’s been come to be known) and what happened to him. AFAIK his name has never been definitively narrowed down and the general consensus as far as they have been able to track his movements thru the penal system is that he has been/was “disappeared” and is presumed long dead. (As in, “why are we not surprised?”)