China’s endless game of censorship whack-a-mole—in which the mallet of takedowns is the country's massive censorship machine of choice and the moles are web-savvy citizens hoping to evade it—is especially busy on sensitive anniversaries. And none's more sensitive than today, the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.As in years past, the Great Firewall is making an effort to block any mention of the Tiananmen Square protests from the web. As of this afternoon in China, several dozen search terms have been blocked from Sina Weibo's 500 million users. Searching for “today,” "remember," "that day," "special day," and practically any combination of "6" and "4" will come up dry, as usual, China Digital Times reports.This year government censors appear to be refining their tactics. Last week, Sina, the country's largest web portal and owner of China's largest micro-blog (weibo) service, began experimenting with new filtering tactics that allow sensitive searches but cut out sensitive results, reported the censorship-tracking site Greatfire.org. Instead of getting the familiar censorship message when you search for a blocked term, like “六四事件” (June 4th incident), the results appear, but in edited form.That technique is doing nothing to stop Chinese citizens from commemorating the event; if anything, it’s only fueling the fire. Folks are taking to Sina Weibo to send out veiled references to Tiananmen, via code words and obscure images. To stay ahead of the censors, China Digital Times created a Google+ page for testing, collecting and publishing forbidden words, "Sina microblogging search for sensitive words open source project." And because a picture is worth a thousand words, let alone 140 characters, netizens are turning to memes to commemorate the anniversary.
By now you've probably seen the parody image of the iconic “tank man” photo, with four big yellow ducks superimposed in place of the tanks—playing off artist Florentijn Hofman's 54-foot blowup rubber ducky floating in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor. The image surfaced yesterday on Weibo, was picked up on Twitter, and quickly went viral. By this afternoon the term "big yellow ducks" had been added to the list of words blocked from Weibo.Several other parodies of the iconic image have been published—also a representative image of a praying mantis in front of a tire, posted along with a quote from the philosopher Zhuangzi: “Don’t you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it?”

Hundreds of Tiananmen-related Wikipedia articles were blocked as usual. But a recording of the harrowing English-language radio broadcast from Radio Beijing following the massacre in 1989 is circulating the web, via Shanghaiist.The game of cat-and-mouse continues on. When the Twitter account @64_black_shirt (64 refers to June 4) formed in Hong Kong to encourage people to wear black today to commemorate the anniversary, the term "black shirt" was blocked in China. (A translation of the Twitter account description says, "Today, we are deprived of language, or to express demands in peaceful demonstrations and civil rights gatherings.")At night China time, thousands of protesters attended a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong's Victoria Park to commemorate the annivesary. As a result, China's censors blocked the word "candle" and even the candle emoticon from Sina Weibo. When the emoticon was removed, a Type-64 pistol image sprang up in its place, the South China Morning Post pointed out.
The Chinese government's official stance on Tiananmen, referred to in China as "the June Fourth Incident," is to call it a counterrevolutionary riot and forbit any discussion or remembrance of the day. There are no official public statistics about the number of deaths, but the government has contended that 241 died, including soldiers, with 7,000 wounded; the Chinese Red Cross says that 2,600 people were killed.Today, the Global Times, an English-language Chinese tabloid owned by the Communist Party, ran an article defending internet regulation as beneficial for society:The Internet, to some extent, has been part of the process through which Chinese society seeks "democracy" and "diversity," in which it produces many effects that cannot be simply judged as right or wrong.Some claim that any regulation of the Internet is an anti-democratic effort. This deceptive voice has gained support from Western public opinion, which makes China's regulation of the Internet encounter more resistance than in other countries.China's mainstream society needs to form a firm consensus that such regulation is necessary for Chinese society.Indeed last year more than 12,000 Weibo posts were deleted in the four months leading up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. But even censorship on this scale may not deter citizens from finding the truth—provided they know what they're looking for. A recent study from Northwestern University found that China's censorship “actually has little impact on what people there read online, and Chinese Internet users aren’t particularly isolated, even vis-a-vis users in countries with unrestricted access.”As Ai Weiwei said last year, web censorship is like trying to damn a flood. “In the long run, they (the government) must understand it’s not possible for them to control the internet unless they shut it off – and they can’t live with the consequences of that.”
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