Censored in China: ‘Today,’ ‘Tonight’ and ‘Big Yellow Duck’

BEIJING â€" Today. Tonight. June 4. Big Yellow Duck.

Type these seemingly innocuous words and phrases, in Chinese, into Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog with more than 500 million registered users, and this message shows up: “According to relevant laws, statutes and policies, the results of a search for ‘today is June 4’ cannot be shown.”

Today is the 24th anniversary of the crushing of democracy demonstrations in Beijing by the army on June 4, and tonight a large demonstration is planned in Hong Kong in memory of the dead, who number in the hundreds, possibly thousands (the government has never given a figure.) That explains some of the censored words. But Big Yellow Duck?

Here’s why:

The image, circulating on Twitter (which is banned in mainland China anyway,) is a reference to this:

The ducks are a reference to a a large open-air art work of a single duck that has been floating in Hong Kong harbor and drawing excited attention there and in mainland China. It’s all off limits, as the state tries strenuously to control any discussion - or activities - about the anniversary today.

But there are signs, nonetheless. Yesterday I wrote how universities are on high alert; how fliers were thrown from a bus on Tiananmen Square on Sunday. There is a campaign to wear a black t-shirt as a sign of protest, though it’s not clear how much that has caught on inside China:

Then there was this image below, from the Web site BuzzFeed, showing a Lego man stopping Lego tanks.

It came from China’s Netease Web site, BuzzFeed reported, part of a slideshow to mark Children’s Day on June 1. BuzzFeed said these reader comments were made about the image: “You are a brave editor;” “A great way to let our children remember our history;” and, “He was not run over by the tank that day. His name is Wang Weilin. No one knows what happened to him. They ‘evaporated’ him.”

“By the end of the day, the photo was removed from the slideshow, but not before becoming a minor Internet sensation,” BuzzFeed wrote.

For a few hours this morning, one reference to June 4 had survived on Weibo - the number 64. In the early morning it was the 16th most searched term, rising by mid-morning to the 14th; then it was suddenly gone. Not before being cached by GreatFire.org (the name references the Great Firewall, China’s very large and sophisticated system of Internet censorship.) Here’s the cached image, with ’64’ near the bottom:

Today, the Global Times, a newspaper belonging to the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily, published an article strongly defending Internet censorship. It cited a recent decision by Germany’s constitutional court against Google as evidence that “Many countries are trying to regulate their Internet services.”

“Some claim that any regulation of the Internet is an anti-democratic effort,” the Global Times wrote. “This deceptive voice has gained support from Western public opinion, which makes China’s regulation of the Internet encounter more resistance than in other countries.”

In China, “People already understand that free speech can not go against social order,” the Global Times wrote, though it did not cite any evidence. “Internet regulation is not only an embodiment of the government’s will, but is also laid on the foundation of the public interest,” it continued. “Internet regulation has to be carried out until those spreading adverse remarks fear the strength of the public interest.”

As one person tweeted: