On June 4, 1990, one year after Chinese soldiers massacred protesters in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government dispatched a police convoy to pacify hundreds of demonstrators at Peking University in northwest Beijing. Instead of directly criticizing Deng Xiaoping, the students smashed little bottles intended to symbolize the Chinese leader (in Chinese, the pronunciation of Xiaoping sounds the same as the words for "little bottle").
Over the last several years, commemorations of June 4, 1989 in China have been much smaller in scale, but the oblique forms of protest remain: a newspaper publishes a cartoon that looks suspiciously like the famous photo of Tank Man, for example, or a netizen makes jokes about May 35 -- the date that's four days after May 31 if you don't skip to June. This year, one popular Weibo post shows four giant inflatable yellow ducks (the original is an art project sitting in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor) in place of tanks in the Tank Man photo. And some are drawing renewed attention to the 1989 photo that surfaced in March (and was quickly censored) of President Xi Jinping's wife Peng Liyuan singing for troops in the square after the crackdown. The Shenzhen-based blogger William Long tweeted a screen grab of the Sina Weibo social network blocking the search for the word "today," noting drily that "today is a big day." (China Digital Times has a good roundup of the mini-protests.)
The Chinese government, which no longer needs to seal off an entire district, as it did in 1990, has also used more subtle (OK, not always so subtle) methods to prevent the anniversary from being observed.
This year, for instance, Chairman Mao's Memorial Hall, which sits near the center of the square, just happens to be closed for construction from June 2 to June 5, according to ABC News -- presumably to reduce foot traffic to the popular memorial. And the popular Weibo candle function, often used to commemorate death, has been quietly disabled.
In 2012, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index -- China's most-watched stock index -- fell 64.89 points (a number that could also be read as 6/4/89). Coincidence? Probably, as manipulating it would have been "exceedingly difficult," according to Reuters. Whatever the cause, Chinese censors blocked searches for "stock market" on Sina Weibo.
In 2010, the culprit was Foursquare, the popular location-based social network, which Chinese authorities reportedly blocked on June 4 because people were using it to "check in" to Tiananmen Square.
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