Chinese censors block ‘Tiananmen’ image of athletes hugging

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to World News@lemmy.world – 542 points –
Chinese censors block ‘Tiananmen’ image of athletes hugging
theguardian.com
77

A photograph of two Chinese athletes hugging after a race has been censored on Chinese social media because the women’s race numbers inadvertently formed a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

How fragile is their regime if it is threatened by race numbers?

That wiki page is complete nonsense. Take a look at the talk page, no reliable references.

Hardly evidence of a draconian regime.

Yeah, about that whole "USA not being authoritarian" thing...

What about it? Please explain, show your work.

ITT: Teenagers who don’t know what “authoritarian” means.

It has the highest per-capita incarceration rate and rate of police killings.

It's a highly flawed democracy which gives too much power to the police and military which is abusing said power.

Don't forget the corruption abused by companies and the wealthy

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I guess it is more like an demonstration of power to censor even just two random numbers.

This may sound stupid, but from the view of a government this is actually advantageous. Better censor something before it can be used by the resistance as an identification mark that flies under the radar than to let it gain relevance have your late censorship get even more public attention than it would have otherwise.

They are own goaling their economy with these counter productive pencil pusher jobs that provide zero or negative input to the economy.

Real estate crisis, reduction of jobs especially in the younger population, lack of investment from overseas because of zero covid for too long forcing companies to move supply chains and that's before picking a fight with everyone causing uncertainty which makes it less investable.

Cutting down the "private" sector which provided the majority of the jobs because that would threaten pooh bear.

It'll make China weaker in the long run, but the people in charge won't care, they'll be long dead before then. All the people in the top powers are all multi billionaires, even if they lost 95 percent of their wealth they would still live extremely comfortably.

As for the general populace, I like to use the Kim Jong Un anology - a fat man within a nation of skinny men. Not really of importance to the ruling elite.

Huh? Do you think America doesn't have pencil pushing leaches?

They're called business degrees...

At least talk about their over production of housing or something.

Well let's see, I don't know because I don't live there. Not everyone/everything lives in/revolves around America.

In any case I'll bite then. Everyone I know who's in business degrees are of minimum big 4 or in an investment bank at a minimum, the smarter ones have their own small business.

Are you seriously saying those are less productive than someone who censors information and makes it harder for people to conduct business?

And to your second point the overproduction of housing is two fold, firstly it's one of the very few investable resources there and second the local government needed to sell the housing to raise taxes and needed to build despite demand or lack of due to keeping people in a job.

Yes, they're unproductive leeches by definition, because they don't produce anything of value.

Glad we cleared that up.

So if small businesses aren't what you call producing anything of value then what would you consider would be something that does produce something of value? Out of curiosity.

Because those small businesses are providing services to the community/other businesses which wouldn't be able to function without them. That's not the case with the censorship pencil pushers the businesses there would be able to function better without the extra layer of bureaucracy.

And big 4 accounting and investment banking is required, they fill a market in outsourcing by providing expertise where it doesn't make sense for every company to have a full time employee on it. Good for short term projects the places I worked in all use them. Investment banking well you have to spend money to make money so yes they're providing value by providing the investment for other businesses to grow.

How fragile is their regime if it is threatened by race numbers?

Yes.

How desperately will the western media scrape the barrel to find something/anything to criticise China for.

This type of censorship seems like a pretty valid thing to criticize even though it's pretty minor.

Lol, the Asian Games have been a roaring success in Hangzhou for nearly two weeks. From a spectacular opening ceremony to the joy of the athletes competing in an open and friendly environment, it been studiously ignored by the so-called global media yet they wallow in this like pigs in shit.

You all love to call anyone who is vaguely pro China (or anywhere else US/Nato doesn't like) shills but the whole of western corporate media are nothing less.

https://youtu.be/HXyqXsDmVNs?feature=shared

Have fun with the video then downvote me like the free person that you are.

"Sports games are successful therefore don't care about the censorship" is not the sound argument you think it is.

Anything that could possibly show China in a potentially positive light is routinely ignored. That is censorship.

I see. So one kind of censorship is bad and another kind of censorship is good. How do I tell when it's the good kind of censorship?

I didn't say censorship was good, I said western media will pick up any shit it can find in order to bash China while ignoring anything positive that might come from there. It's not just China, they do the same for everywhere that US/Nato doesn't like. A small handful of corporations controlling everything you know about the world.

So because the West says bad things about China, China can't be criticized for censorship?

criticized

In this case trivial shit motivated by fear, jealousy and hate spread by US government friendly media organisations and amplified by bots and shills eager to get their percentage of America's $300,000,000 anti-China propaganda budget.

Of course the US doesn't censor news, they don't need to when a compliant media simply doesn't report things their leaders don't like.

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i wasn't aware about that number, now i am, thanks china

6-4 (June 4th)for those not reading the article.

China incorrectly places the month before the day as well?

Wikipedia says China uses Year, Month, Day exclusively, so they do place month before day.

Oh shit yeah ISO 8601, that’s cool.

Thought it was like the stupid M/D/Y thing.

Wow ok. Do they do that in practice? Like in Australia we measure everything in metric... except for all the things we measure in imperial.

Live in China, yes it's consistently applied. But they also spell it out, i.e. today's date would be 2023年10月4日 (year-month-day / nian-yue-ri), so the order is unmistakably.

So one of the only countries that does it correctly. (Day Month Year is just as wrong as Month Day Year)

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June Fourth incident is how they refer to it.

Which incident China? I thought "nothing happened" that day.

Seems silly censoring a date that nothing happened on.

/S

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Imagine a government being so weak and thin-skinned that they have to censor two digits next to each other

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I worked for a software company that had a customer in China. Our system had a standard set of emoji that included the world flags. In order for us to keep them as a customer we had to give them a special build without Taiwan's flag because it was illegal.

I would not be surprised if the Chinese government just skipped from June 3 to June 5 and made June 31 days long.

29?

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Remember China disappeared Naomi Wu

Wu has been absent from social media since June 2023, reportedly after receiving a police visit due to her public criticisms of Signal and Chinese keyboard apps.

She's a public face. For every Naomi Wu there are a hundred others that get disappeared every day, for equally benign thing. Fuck the CCP. Fuck Tankies.

I'm pretty sure China disappeared a LOT more people than just her.

Something something streisand effect

Doesn't work that well when most of your Chinese cousins also act mad for this disgraceful and disrespectful act.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of maintaining a dystopian totalitarian shithole”

Do stacks of items only go up to 63 in the Minecraft Chinese release?

Why is 6/4 a refence to the 4th of June when China doesn't use that date format?

In Chinese, we usually read out a date with year first, month latter and days after it. For example, if it's 4/6/1989 , we would say 一九八九年六月四日 (year 1989, June, day 4). I think there's not any relation with date format we use.

I mean yeah ok "silly china" but, god that sucks for Wu.

Not good for anyone when someone gets disqualified.

I thought it was customary to just restart the race when there's a false start.

Ah yes, I wonder if anything happened on the 65th day of April, in the square close to the place which the sun rises...

Nothing happened. That's why nobody is ever allowed under any circumstances to reference that day, because there is nothing to say about a day which never happened. Perfectly logical and not suspicious at all.

Like idk. Doesn't the censorship of that specific location and day specifically draw people's attention and make it more fascinating?

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Lin Yuwei and Wu Yanni, China’s entrants in the women’s 100m hurdles final, embraced after the race at the Asian Games in Hangzhou.

Internet censorship in China, particularly of images, is often done on an ad-hoc basis with human monitors deciding which posts to restrict.

In 2017, Weibo, one of China’s biggest social media platforms with nearly 600 million monthly users, said it employed 1,000 “supervisors” to report on “pornographic, illegal and harmful” content.

That Wu had been allowed to run at all prompted concern that race officials were reluctant to disqualify one of China’s star athletes, regardless of sporting rules.

Mark Dreyer, a China-based sports analyst who was in the stadium for the event, wrote afterwards: “It just felt like the local officials needed to find a way to let Wu run”.

On Weibo, posts from ordinary netizens showing the greyed out squares of Wu and Lin’s “6/4” hug, the comments were more muted.


The original article contains 431 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

These summaries are usually decent from what I’ve seen but this one misses out some important information. The fourth and fifth paragraphs of the summary make no sense without the context that the athlete was disqualified for a false start and then still allowed to run.

Yeah this one is a terrible summary... it doesn't say what the article is about, at all.

Can't be right all the time though.