Updated June 4, 2012, 8:25 a.m. ET
Talk of Tiananmen Muzzled on Chinese Web
On Anniversary of Crackdown, Blocked Searches Include Stock Market, 'Today'; Bizarre Numerology Echoes in Shanghai
BEIJING—China's Internet monitors have unleashed a broad clampdown on online discussion of the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, restricting even discussion of the nation's main stock market when the Shanghai Composite Index fell by 64.89 points—a number that made for an eerie allusion to the sensitive date: June 4, 1989.
Tiananmen Anniversary
ReutersHundreds of thousands of people participated in a candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park Monday.
The 23rd anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown drew tens of thousands of people to a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong. The WSJ's Deborah Kan speaks with Dow Jones' Jeffrey Ng on why it drew more mainland Chinese participants this year.
Censors minding China's popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo this weekend began blocking a number of terms that could refer to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, an incident often referred to as June 4 or 64 in the Chinese-speaking world. To break up the protests, the government ordered troops to fire on unarmed demonstrators. Hundreds are believed to have died.
Terms blocked by Sina Weibo included the Chinese characters for "Tiananmen," "square," and "candle," and even seemingly innocuous words like "today." It also included numbers that could allude to the event, including 23 as well as combinations of 4, 6, 8, and 9.
The clampdown spread to the business and financial world—where censorship is less often a concern—when the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index first opened at 2346.98, containing all the tricky numbers, and then ended it down 64.89 points. Sina Weibo blocked use of the terms "index" and "Shanghai Index."
Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesChinese stock investors monitor their share prices in Huaibei, east China's Anhui province, on Monday. The Shanghai Composite closed down 64.89 on Monday, evoking the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989, and prompting China's Web monitors to block discussion of the stock market close online.
A spokesman for Sina Weibo operator Sina Corp. didn't immediately respond to a request to comment. Because Chinese officials often pressure companies themselves to strictly regulate content, it is assumed the censors blocking the searches are Sina's own, but it was unclear whether the tighter reins of recent days were ordered up by Beijing.
The Shanghai Composite Index includes hundreds of Chinese companies and would be nearly impossible to manipulate to reach a preset figure based on stock purchases or sales. A media representative at the Shanghai Stock Exchange said trading opened normally on Monday. He declined to comment further. Reuters quoted the exchange's chief technology officer as saying the matter was being looked into.
At a daily media briefing, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said the nation had reached a "clear conclusion" over the Tiananmen Square crackdown, adding that since then China has enjoyed "continuous economic development, democracy [and] rule of law," and that "all of this reflects the common aspiration of the Chinese people."
Mr. Liu also rejected a Sunday statement from the U.S. State Department calling on China to respect human rights and to end harassment of participants in the Tiananmen protests and their families. "It is a gross intervention into China's internal affairs and a groundless accusation [against] the Chinese government. China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to that."
The Tiananmen Square anniversary has pushed the typical cat-and-mouse game between Internet and censors to new levels in a year of leadership transition when online companies are coming under increasing pressure to rein in sensitive discussion.
Both Sina and rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. 0700.HK -0.10% have been attempting to meet a government demand that all microblog users register with their real names, which analysts say is part of an effort to improve monitoring of online speech. Sina has also recently introduced a points-based system for measuring user behavior on Weibo, widely described as a warning to users to be careful about what they post.
"There's no question that the censorship is really being ratcheted up on social media," said David Bandurski, a researcher with Hong Kong University's China Media Project, adding that China's propaganda authorities have taken a particular interest in discussion on Sina Weibo.
"There are these groups of people who can use Sina Weibo to sort of wink at each other and say 'We know what this day is,' " he said. "You have a dispersed online population that share with each other through these hints and suggestions."
Censors seized on a number of seemingly anodyne terms and images, including the emoticon of a candle that is usually available to users. The clampdown also claimed "Victoria Park," the site in Hong Kong of an annual memorial to the event as well as the number 35 because users hoping to fool censors sometimes refer to the June 4 event as May 35.
"Say nothing," one user wrote. "Everyone understands."
In Hong Kong, tens of thousands protesters packed Victoria Park, including activist Fang Zheng, whose legs were crushed by a tank in 1989. Having flown in from the U.S., where he has been living with his family, Mr. Fang was moved to tears at moments during the event, calling candles held aloft by protesters a "sea of love."
There were no major signs of protest in Beijing Monday.
Despite the blocks, users of China's Internet still found ways to discuss the event. Some began quoting a poem by ninth-century literary figure Li Shangyin that includes the lines "A spring silkworm spins its thread until its dying day / A candle's tears do not dry until it has burned down to ash." The line is an apparent reference to the disappearance of the candle icon as well as the blocking of the term "candle," though the poem uses an older character for that word that wasn't yet blocked Monday afternoon.
"The candle has burned down to ash, but its tears have still not dried," wrote one user posting under the handle Futures Gambler, attaching a photo of candles arranged to spell out "6.4."
Another user posted a large photo of a single candle flame with the message "You understand."
"I understand," another user wrote in the comments under the post. "My face is covered in tears."
—Andrew Galbraith in Shanghai and Carlos Tejada in Beijing contributed to this article.
Write to Josh Chin at josh.chin@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared June 5, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Talk of Tiananmen Muzzled on Chinese Web.
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