The Chinese state has closed Tiananmen Square just before the twentieth anniversary of the protests and subsequent massacre of civilians by the Chinese military.
China has a ban on public assemblies and discussions of the Tiananmen incident. Citizens have been gathering on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to discuss and remember this flashpoint in recent Chinese history.
But the government has shut down access to these Web sites and others, 111 in total, in the week leading up to June 4. CNN has also been blacked out.
Tiananmen Square has been cordoned off by metal fences and is being patrolled by plainclothes police.
On April 14, 1989, 100,000 people gathered in the square to mourn the death of the pro-democracy General Secretary of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang. People at the protests expressed frustration with authoritarianism and talked about democratic reforms.
On June 4, the PRC military moved lines of troops and tanks into the square and attacked the nonviolent protesters. It his hard to know the scale of the massacre, but it’s estimated that a few thousand died and several more thousand were wounded.
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