Ironies of the great firewall continue: We can now access information about Tian’anmen, but still can not directly get onto wordpress. Does this mean that whatever else he has done with or without Jiang Zemin’s blessing, Wen Jiabao looks good in Tian’anmen press? Or perhaps Tibet and Hu Jintao’s role in the March 5 Lhasa crackdown (also in 1989) remains more sensitive than Jiang Zemin’s role in the June 4 crackdown because so many leaders and members of the Han public continue to refuse to discuss 1959?
That said, nevertheless, today I’m feeling hopeful: we can baidu 六四!
I just tried June 4 Tiananmen in English, and all sorts of things came up on Baidu. But I’m in Hong Kong — don’t know if that’s why.
We can baidu 六四 in Shenzhen. The ironies are of course that the Center is now coming down on “rumors”, which can lead to arrest. At present, all of the extreme right and extreme left websites have been shut down. So it’s almost as if they’re no longer focusing on content per se, but more explicitly on contentious political views.