Rewriting History In China
At Global Voices, Frank Dai rounded up some thoughts from Chinese bloggers on the matter: "Under the party propaganda policies, no commemoration of the movement was allowed in public places and the newspapers and TV networks passed the day without any even implied mention of it." He extended criticism of the restricted media access to Western companies such as Google, which have submitted to state controls limiting access to certain information on the Web (i.e., the mysterious disappearance of Tank Man):
Like the popular columnist and blogger Lianyue once wrote when Google entered [the] Chinese market: "We (Google) guarantee: The day after June 3 must be June 5," the state-controlled media have just pretended that the event never happened 17 years ago, identical with the official history books' negligible claim of the movement as "a political incident in the spring and summer of 1989."Silence did not only [exist] in the media outlets but also on [the] Internet. The major websites are mute as much as their mainstream media counterparts. While many foreign media will run their stories of civil right groups, dissidents, and requests of groups like Tiananmen Mother -- who demand compensation and recognition of people who sacrifice their lives in the event -- a basic embarrassing fact is that the government will tighten the control of information online and offline…