Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion

There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.

The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.

New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.

  • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    “Never forget” is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of “never forget” lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the “never forget” was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      4 days ago

      “Never again”:

      • ❌ “We must never do what we did to the Jews in WW2 again”.
      • ✅ “We can never allow what we did to the Jews in WW2 to happen again to anyone”.
            • confusedbytheBasics@lemm.ee
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              17 hours ago

              You’re asking how two of the same thing are similar? Very strange. They share the same definition. They are similar in the ways that things with that label are similar.

              Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

              All of that is similar.