Paranoid CCP Deletes Photo of Winning Athletes over Tiananmen Square Allusion
By, Tsering Choephel
DHARAMSALA, 4 Oct: A photo of two Chinese athletes’ unintentional reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre has been censored on Chinese social media, as reported by the BBC today.
The two female athletes, assigned to lane numbers 6 and 4 during their 100m hurdles race at the Asian Games, accidentally formed the number ’64’ as they embraced.
Within China, the number 64, a common allusion to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, is subject to censorship. Even number combinations such as 63+1 and 65-1 that could refer to that historical event are blocked as the month of June approaches each year, revealing the CCP’s paranoid fear.
A congratulatory post by Chinese netizens on Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms, for Ms. Lin’s gold medal victory had its photo deleted. It was replaced with grey squares, according to the report.
However, the report added that the photo hasn’t been completely scrubbed off the internet, with some Chinese news articles still showing the image of the two athletes.
If ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ the CCP’s struggle against history seems to be a struggle of erasure against remembering.
In 1989, hundred thousands of Chinese students and citizens staged a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square Beijing, calling for accountability, freedom and democracy. On 4 June, the CCP dispatched heavily armed troops and tanks and brutally cracking down on the protesters, killing hundreds and wounding thousands of its civilians.
The mention of June Fourth is a taboo subject in China, given the CCP’s sensitivity and its desire to whitewash or erase it from the memory of its citizens. Every year, Beijing deploys its full tentacles to enforce censorship, especially on the internet, to block any mention of the event.
Outside China, June Fourth is commemorated every year in Taiwan, the US and other countries where Chinese dissents live. Hong Kong’s annual commemoration of June Fourth (64) underwent heavy suppression following the CCP brazen takeover.
