Even when there are no sensitive anniversaries in the offing, using Google in China is difficult. Often it’s so agonizingly slow one is forced to first launch a VPN before utilizing Gmail, search, and Google Translate.
In recent days, slow has turned into inaccessible, as the government girds for the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. “In an effort to prevent the dissemination of information related to this event, the Chinese censorship authorities have severely blocked most Google services in China, including search and Gmail,” wrote Greatfire.org, a site that monitors the Chinese net, in an email to Bloomberg News. “Our gut feeling is this disruption may be permanent.”
Google confirmed that it was not responsible for the shutdown of services in China; the company has “checked extensively and there are no technical problems on our side,” Google wrote in an email statement.
Outside the virtual world, Chinese authorities are engaged in a much more frightening crackdown. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the June days when the government used tanks and guns against protesters, more than 50 people, including lawyers, intellectuals, journalists and rights activists, have been arrested, detained or are ”missing and believed to be detained,” according to Amnesty International.
Beijing is also experiencing an unprecedented police and military security presence (much of it directed at combatting possible terrorism, but aimed also more broadly at weiwen or “maintaining social stability.” Most mornings of late as I walk to the underground parking garage to get my car, scores of diplomatic compound security guards are bellowing chants and doing martial arts attack routines. On the road, an open jeep goes by with helmeted soldiers holding rifles, one of the new army patrols seen on the city’s streets. Helicopters buzz regularly over Beijing scouring the streets for any signs of trouble—the only other time helicopters have flown over Beijing since I’ve been here, was during the short few weeks of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Subway stations have vastly heightened security, so that lines of waiting commuters now snake above ground patiently awaiting their turn to pass through metal detectors and open their bags to be examined by subway employees. Police, including with bomb-sniffing German Shepherds, stand at the ready in stations. Checkpoints have been set up to inspect vehicles entering and leaving the city, and 2,000 safety inspectors have been assigned to the city’s busses, with 4,000 of the busses to be equipped with monitoring cameras by June.
Meanwhile, 100,000 Beijing residents have been mobilized to collect “safety and stability” information. As the China Daily puts it, they are “parking lot workers, newspaper stands workers, representatives of residential buildings and other grassroots residents.” Monetary awards for valuable tips are being offered. “Those who provide information on suspicious people, events, items and cars, can be awarded at least 40,000 yuan ($6,404) if the information proves to be helpful in preventing and solving major crimes,” the China Daily reported on May 30.
Meanwhile, professors, writers, lawyers and journalists who care about such things worry that even talking too much in one’s home about Tiananmen can get a person in trouble. A group of 15 people including academics, writers, activists, and the prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, met in a private apartment to discuss Tiananmen in early May, then a picture was posted online. Five of the attendees including Pu have since been criminally detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.”
“Twenty-five years on, Chinese citizens continue to be persecuted for trying to remember the events of 1989 when hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters were killed or injured on the night of 3 and 4 June after the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed civilians,” says a blog by Amnesty International’s China team.
Guo Jian, a 52-year-old China-born Australian artist, who once served in the Chinese army and was a protester in Tiananmen Square in 1989, was detained Sunday night after giving an interview to the Financial Times. “As an Australian citizen we’ll do what we can to release him if the case is he’s been detained,” said Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop in an interview with Sky News today.
Meanwhile some foreign reporters and their local staff have been called in by the Chinese public security bureau and shown videotaped lectures “dissuading them from reporting on the anniversary,” with some of them “warned of serious consequences should they disobey the authorities,” the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an emailed statement June 2.
Xin Jiang, a Chinese news assistant for Japanese newspaper Nikkei, is believed to have been detained by police and held incommunicado already for several weeks, on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” a catchall charge used with increasing frequency against those who run afoul of the government on issues of free speech and human rights.
“Reports that her detention was connected with an interview she had conducted with human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, himself now under arrest, raise the disturbing possibility that she is being punished for the routine discharge of her professional duty on behalf of her employer,” said the Foreign Correspondents Club of China in a May 30 email statement.
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