Tiananmen Square: China Observes Internet Maintenance Day

In yet another display of its ruthless censorship regime, as Beijing pulls a blanket over the web in China for this week's 20-year anniversary of the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square, rebels have found a new way of protesting the notorious state censorship; they have started calling the crackdown on the Internet as, "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day".

Look at what Global Voices Online, which describes itself as a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists, says;

"Today, on 3rd of June, a large number of local websites, including Fanfou (Chinese version of twitter) and VeryCD (user generated resource sharing website), have put up system maintenance notices stating that the websites would be inaccessible until June 6. With all the blocking and system maintenance measures, June 4th has occupied the third most searched key term in google.cn (June 3 10:09pm), although netizens could not get much information from the result list."

Another Chinese rebel websites called Damwei has even given it sarcastic twist. In an entry under the headline "Chinese websites under maintenance", Damwei said,

"The administrators of Chinese websites are putting in a period of inaccessibility on their sites for a period of two to three days starting with the Tıаnanmen anniversary tomorrow (June 4).

Fanfou.com, China's knock-off version of Twitter.com, shows this maintenance message: "The Fanfou server is undergoing technical maintenance. Service is expected to resume before dawn on the 6th."

VeryCD.com, a user-generated service that allows users to download films, music and other material, is also under "technical repair" from June 3rd to June 6th. Dictionary Wordku.com is too, whose message thanks the support of their users, are also calling the period the "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day", probably mockingly."

Indeed Internet censorship in China is nothing new and over the years Beijing's phobia of freedom of expression over the Internet seems to have increased despite the fierce global condemnation of the country's censorship policies.

For instance China has now 60 Internet regulations, while the Middle Kingdom has over 30,000 Internet police. According to Amnesty International China "has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world."

China is also infamous for its Golden Shield Project, a system -- also known as the Great Firewall of China -- that blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through, and consists of standard firewalls and proxy servers at the Internet gateways.

But China's Internet censorship measures this week is perhaps one of its strictest. Beijing-the seat of Chinese administration- has not only blocked hundreds of popular local websites like wordku.com, hihicd.com, yeeyan.com, xiaonei.com (Chinese version of Facebook), tieba.baidu.com, douban.com and the likes. A blanket over global networking websites like twitter.com, blogspot.com, youtube.com, flickr.com, bing.com, and cmule.com has also been throww.

Reports suggest that the censorship has not been limited to the Internet, with some sensitive TV stations also experiencing blackouts. Besides China is turning away all Tiananmen dissidents -- who managed to flee China after June 1989 and trying to return to observe the anniversary -- at the airports. The police has also ordered house arrests on family members of many of the students massacred that day, in order to prevent them from visiting the Square.

What's worse, no one there is allowed to publicly talk or write about the date June 4, 1989.

Beijing's phobia over the anniversary observation of the Tiananmen Square massacre is not difficult to fathom. Ever since a fleet of army tanks mowed down hundreds or may be thousands of unarmed civilians on June 4, 1989, the Chinese administration has been trying hard to wipe out all memories and signs of the Chinese army's suppression of the student democratic movement.

No one knows exactly how many -- a number that Beijing has painstakingly kept under wraps -- died in that crackdown, as the administration has vehemently refused to recognize the movement as one for democracy. Instead, Beijing has always termed it "counterrevolutionary" and an attempt to overthrow the state.

Nevertheless, even as many consider China's heavy-handed censorship this week as one of the biggest violations of freedom of expression, for many software companies offering workarounds, it has been a period of brisk business.

E-mail encryption services masking identities of the sender and recipient are reportedly seeing an increase in use and so have proxy servers that enable viewing of blocked websites. Freegate, a software that specializes in moving around Chinese censor has reported a 20% increase in downloads as well.