Wednesday, June 3, 2009

China: Tiananmen Square clampdown



Propaganda poster of Mao Zedong, architect of a dictatorship (themarxistleninist).

BEIJING, China (AP) – Foreign journalists were barred from Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Wednesday as an Internet clampdown that blocked Twitter expanded to include more blogs on the eve of the 20th anniversary of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

In a further sign of the government's unwavering hard-line stance toward the protests, the second most-wanted student leader from 1989 said he had been denied entry to the southern Chinese territory of Macau.

Police monitoring visitors on 5/29/09 at Tiananmen Gate in front of portrait of former leader Mao Zedong. On 6/2/09, Chinese authorities rounded up dissidents and shut down Internet sharing sites in an apparent clampdown ahead of the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of 1989's pro-democracy protests (AP/Andy Wong).

In exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, Wu'er Kaixi traveled to Macau on Wednesday to turn himself in to authorities in a bid to return home. Immigration officers at Macau's airport pulled him aside and demanded he fly back to Taiwan.

Authorities have also shut photo-sharing site Flickr and confined dissidents to their homes or forced them to leave Beijing, as they ramped up efforts to prevent online discussions about or commemorations of those who died in the military assault on demonstrators on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

The sweeping measures have been imposed even though there were few signs of efforts to mark the protests within mainland China, where the government squelches all discussion of them. More>>

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