{"id":183873,"date":"2015-05-29T16:11:32","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T23:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=183873"},"modified":"2021-09-14T20:44:34","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T03:44:34","slug":"chinese-governments-new-censorship-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Times Accidentally Plugs Open Letter on June 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chinese\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/minitrue-delete-global-times-commentary-on-overseas-forces-inciting-students\/\">censors recently removed a Global\u00a0Times editorial<\/a>\u00a0attacking an open letter recounting the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen pro-democracy protesters\u00a0due to the <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/413289\/the-chinese-governments-new-censorship-target-itself\/\">unintended publicity the editorial allowed the letter<\/a><\/strong>. At Quartz, Nikhil Sonnad reports:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"annotatable\"><span class=\"anno-span\">First, 11 Chinese students studying abroad in Australia, the US, and the UK wrote an open letter to the people of China, enumerating the horrors of the\u00a01989 Tiananmen Square Massacre\u2014which has its\u00a026th anniversary next month\u2014and calling upon the Communist Party to put\u00a0those responsible on\u00a0trial.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable\"><span class=\"anno-span\">Then, an official Chinese-government tabloid, the Global Times,\u00a0published an editorial demonizing that letter.\u00a0With typical propagandist\u00a0hyperbole, the editorial\u2014headlined \u201cHostile forces target younger generation\u201d\u2014said that the students had been \u201cbrainwashed in foreign countries\u201d and were trying to \u201ctear society apart.\u201d\u00a0It also claimed, unconvincingly, that \u201cChinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable\"><span class=\"anno-span\">The result? More\u00a0people learned about\u00a0the letter, and now censors\u00a0are\u00a0trying to purge the editorial from the internet. That is to say,\u00a0the Chinese\u00a0government\u00a0is censoring itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable\">[&#8230;]\u00a0As with most government-backed statements, the\u00a0Global Times\u2019 hysterical response was widely reposted across the internet by state-run media. That, no doubt, gave the letter more attention\u00a0than it would have gotten on its own. To make matters worse for the government censors,\u00a0the letter was posted as a Google Form, which allowed\u00a0readers\u00a0to add their names to the list of signatories, vastly increasing the letter\u2019s reach. [<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/413289\/the-chinese-governments-new-censorship-target-itself\/\">Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"annotatable\">Sonnad cites a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/minitrue-delete-global-times-commentary-on-overseas-forces-inciting-students\/\">CDT-translated censorship directive<\/a> on the Chinese-language editorial, and notes that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.globaltimes.cn\/content\/923528.shtml\">English-language version is still available<\/a> from the Global Times. For a <a href=\"http:\/\/chinachange.org\/2015\/05\/27\/on-the-26th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-massacre-an-open-letter-to-fellow-students-in-mainland-china\/\">full translation of the students&#8217; letter, see China Change<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable\">Esther Fung at China Real Time spoke with\u00a0<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/chinarealtime\/2015\/05\/29\/i-was-motivated-by-my-conscience-says-tiananmen-letter-author\/\">Gu Yi, a student at the University of Georgia who contributed to the composition of\u00a0the letter, about his motivation<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Why did you initially decide to write this letter?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I was motivated by my conscience of being a citizen in China and the aspiration to reveal the truth. For me, it\u2019s a kind of moral responsibility. A number of students who were just peacefully marching and protesting in Beijing were killed by brutal physical force in 1989, and history has always been covered up. No proof has survived. Some of them were imprisoned. Relatives have been generally forbidden to mourn their loss publicly. So I believe that we students overseas \u2014 with full access to all this blocked information, documents and reports \u2014 have the responsibility to reveal the history to people at home.<\/p>\n<p>There is proof backing up the facts mentioned in our open letter and other documents, including then-news reports, victims\u2019 blood-stained clothes, photos of dead bodies piled up for identification and testimonies of survivors and foreign observers. This abundance of evidence is what this open letter has been based on. The problem is that the authorities\u2019 attempts to remove or block every possible trail of the crackdown have made it difficult for many mainlanders to know the truth. [<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/chinarealtime\/2015\/05\/29\/i-was-motivated-by-my-conscience-says-tiananmen-letter-author\/\">Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chinese\u00a0censors recently removed a Global\u00a0Times editorial\u00a0attacking an open letter recounting the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen pro-democracy protesters\u00a0due to the unintended publicity the editorial allowed the letter. At Quartz, Nikhil Sonnad reports: First, 11 Chinese students studying abroad in Australia, the US, and the UK wrote an open letter to the people of China, enumerating the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1088,"featured_media":183877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116,14744,14745,14746,100,5],"tags":[53,6821,6300,5900,330,14106,5901],"class_list":["post-183873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","category-level-2-article","category-level-3-article","category-level-4-article","category-politics","category-society","tag-censorship","tag-global-times","tag-internet-censorship","tag-june-4th","tag-media-censorship","tag-open-letters","tag-tiananmen-square","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v23.9 (Yoast SEO v23.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Global Times Accidentally Plugs Open Letter on June 4<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Global Times Accidentally Plugs Open Letter on June 4\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chinese\u00a0censors recently removed a Global\u00a0Times editorial\u00a0attacking an open letter recounting the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen pro-democracy protesters\u00a0due to the unintended publicity the editorial allowed the letter. At Quartz, Nikhil Sonnad reports: First, 11 Chinese students studying abroad in Australia, the US, and the UK wrote an open letter to the people of China, enumerating the [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"China Digital Times (CDT)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ChinaDigitalTimes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-05-29T23:11:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-09-15T03:44:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/june.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"553\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"369\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Grace\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@cdt\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@cdt\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Grace\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Grace\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/#\/schema\/person\/c528efa816f4f8e766bc112a5d478256\"},\"headline\":\"Global Times Accidentally Plugs Open Letter on June 4\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-05-29T23:11:32+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-09-15T03:44:34+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/\"},\"wordCount\":501,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2015\/05\/chinese-governments-new-censorship-target\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/june.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"censorship\",\"Global Times\",\"Internet censorship\",\"June 4th\",\"media censorship\",\"open letters\",\"Tiananmen Square\"],\"articleSection\":[\"China &amp; 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