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"Society was more free then than it is now"

The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre the other day again highlights and puts a focus on freedom, or perhaps the lack of it, in China.

Wei Shi is the founder of Boxun.com, a site dedicated to fighting the abuse of human rights and freedom of expression in China. Today he lives in the US.

Writing on The Observers, he says:

"Most people, especially the young, have no idea what happened on June 4, 1989. The web, and search engines in particular, are sufficiently censored to make it very difficult to access reliable information about the event. Of course, if you're really motivated you'll find a way around it. Automatic filters for example are more efficient in Chinese than foreign languages, so if you type the key words in English on Google China we get a few pages coming up with the real story. Web users have also found a way to avoid prohibited texts getting picked up by moderators on discussion forums. One of the techniques is to write so that read from left to write (which is the normal way to read Chinese), the text says nothing, but if read from top to bottom is about the massacres.

Some of the press said the censorship was slackened a bit during the earthquake crisis. I had the same impression at first, but really it was just that the government was overwhelmed by the event. The first photos of dead people and debris came from blogs and unofficial online press. But then when we started talking about the way shoddy schools had collapsed, the authorities quickly tightened their fist again. Web users noticed very quickly that out of 40,000 of the dead almost a third of them were children, and some of them started saying that it was because money supposed to be for construction materials for schools actually ended up in the pockets of local councillors. This debate about corruption, which played a big part in the drama, could never really take off online because most messages were deleted soon after they were posted."

Read on here - and also see photos of the fateful day.

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