Twitter Inc.’s Internet social- networking service and Microsoft Corp.’s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing a day before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Internet users in mainland China have also lost access to Hong Kong-based Web sites including the newspaper Apple Daily and Yahoo! Hong Kong News, which don’t follow the Chinese government’s ban on mentioning June 4, 1989 publicly.
The Communist Party controls all domestic media and blocks access to Web sites criticizing it or publishing articles it deems unfavorable. That’s forced China’s estimated 316 million Internet users, the world’s largest online population, to employ code words on sites such as Twitter to memorialize the event without triggering government censorship.
“You’re seeing more of a restriction on the social media sites,” said : author of The Wikipedia Revolution and a former Columbia University professor who’s based in Beijing. For the government, social-networking sites are “where most of the concerns are in terms of people mobilizing or spreading information.”
Liu Zhengrong, the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau’s deputy director general, didn’t answer calls to his office today. The Chinese government bureau hasn’t responded to a faxed request for comment on Internet censorship sent two days ago.
Twitter, Hotmail
Twitter has “no information” on its Web site’s inaccessibility, Jenna Sampson, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mailed statement. Microsoft is “reaching out to the government” to find out why some of its services have been blocked for customers in China, Kevin Kutz, director of public affairs, said in an e-mail.
Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail service, which the company said yesterday was being blocked in China, was accessible today in Beijing and Shanghai.
Student demonstrators calling for government reform occupied Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing for five weeks in the spring of 1989. Between the eve of June 3 and the early hours of June 4 of that year, soldiers backed by tanks opened fire on civilians in and around the square.
Estimates of the number of deaths vary. Beijing’s mayor said in a 1989 report to the government that about 200 civilians died, while the U.S. Embassy in the city estimated that the death toll exceeded 1,000. Tiananmen Mothers, a Beijing-based group of family members of victims, has verified 195 deaths.
May 35th
Television broadcasts of CNN went blank today in Shanghai and Beijing while the station was playing a segment on the Tiananmen anniversary.
Messages have circulated on San Francisco-based Twitter in recent weeks asking Internet users in China to turn their Web logs gray to commemorate the crackdown, referring to it as “May 35th,” “535” or “VIIV” -- Roman numerals signifying June 4.
Users in China have been cut off from Google Inc.’s YouTube.com video-sharing site since March, coinciding with the circulation of a video on the service that allegedly showed Chinese police beating bound and handcuffed Tibetans. Aside from the Tiananmen crackdown, this year marks the 50th anniversary of Chinese rule in Tibet and the 60th since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
“We do not have any official communication about the block, so we have no information on its cause nor who is responsible,” Scott Rubin, a Google spokesman, said in an e-mail. “We have been working to restore the service to our users since then.”
China passed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest Web market by users in the first half of last year.
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本帖最后由 yahoog 于 2009-6-3 10:24 AM 编辑 ]
