Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square in China. In preparation for this anniversary, China has blocked about a dozen major websites, including Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr. The blackout of information about what happened 20 years ago continues to be so absolute that many young Chinese students do not know it happened. The event has been erased from textbooks and banished from the media.
I tried to think about what it would be like to find out that the U.S. Government had censored an event like Tiananmen Square so absolutely that I didn’t know about it. Of course, the irony there is that if the government was doing that, I’d never know because it would be censored, but I have a feeling that people living in China don’t have too much trouble imagining their children not knowing about a major event. One of the questions posed in my forum group last week is whether I felt lucky to be protected by the First Amendment. I said I did, but now that’s even more amplified. The First Amendment protects against this type of blanket censorship.
I wonder what it would feel like to be a young Chinese traveling outside the country and finding out for the first time about something so significant to your country, something that much of the rest of the world already knows at least something about. And I wonder how the Chinese government has managed to keep something so huge suppressed for so long. There are hints in the articles I read: intimidating reporters, jamming outside newscasts, using powerful filters to block out certain words, and creating uncertainty that leads to self-censorship.
The blackout is not complete, of course. Foreigners travel in and young Chinese travel out. But the censorship on information available inside China is almost staggering in its completeness. For me, it is a powerful reminder of what could happen if people stop fighting for intellectual freedom.
2 comments:
What an interesting post! I am a history fan so I found this post especially intriguing.
The blocking or censoring of information says a couple of things. First, the Chinese government is still very sensitive about this event. You would think that twenty years later they would be able to discuss this tragic event or at least publicly acknowledge it happened.
Second, the blocking of the information shows how powerful the written word is.
Reading this made me also think of another student's blog posting a few weeks ago on how President Obama decided not to release photos showing prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers. While the censorship in that situation is not nearly as blatant as in China, it still shows even the U.S. struggles with government censorship.
I wrote about this this week as well. ONe of the articles I read said something along the lines of(and this isn't a direct quote) "you would think that the people in government today, who had nothing to do with the events 20 yrs ago would be ready to make changes" I agree, but I think that the entire situation has been created and fostered in secrecy and it's going to be very hard to break that secrecy.
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