The art of getting Tiananmen Square crackdown onto Chinese social media, from a rock star to a line of rubber ducks
- Dr Fu King-wa’s Weiboscope project is a collection of censored pictures that have appeared briefly on China’s ubiquitous social media platform
- Display highlights the cat-and-mouse game between increasingly creative Weibo users and ruthlessly efficient mainland Chinese censors
On a wall inside the century-old Elliot Hall at the University of Hong Kong hang hundreds of pictures, including photographs of Chinese rock singer Cui Jian, candles, a bouquet of flowers and a row of rubber ducks approaching a miniature figure of a man.
Each by itself seems innocuous. All have been crossed with red markers.
What they have in common is that all these pictures appeared briefly on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo before disappearing.
Dr Fu King-wa, an associate professor at the university’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, said they were censored by Chinese authorities who decided they were visual protests related to the June 4 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
He said mainland Chinese netizens, determined to remember the events of 1989 despite the authorities’ efforts to black out news and block discussion of the protests and bloody crackdown, have kept coming up with creative ways to bypass the censors with photographs that send a message.
So the four rubber ducks and miniature human figure recall Tank Man, an iconic photograph by American photographer Jeff Widener showing a solitary man standing in front of an approaching line of tanks.
The candles signify a memorial to those who died in the crackdown, echoing the annual vigil at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, while the images of Cui are a reminder that he visited the student protesters at Tiananmen Square.
As part of his Weiboscope project, Fu has been collecting the censored pictures, and recently put them on display at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre to mark the 30th anniversary of the crackdown.
Since 2011, he and his team of researchers have been tracking 50,000 Weibo accounts they considered influential, including those of mainland Chinese journalists, lawyers and academics. Another 50,000 accounts were randomly sampled.
Using a computer program, the team identified more than 700,000 posts that were taken down or censored for various reasons, including 1,256 pictures related to June 4, 1989.
“These pictures represent a unique voice of Chinese people who continue to speak against the state’s discourse, even though their voice is eventually suppressed,” he said.
These pictures represent a unique voice of Chinese people who continue to speak against the state’s discourse, even though their voice is eventually suppressed
He said mainland censors comb through Weibo and routinely remove all obvious references to the 1989 protests and crackdown.
Also censored are posts and pictures mourning former Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, whose death in April, 1989 sparked the student-led protests against corruption and demanding more democracy.
But he has also found over the years that while Weibo users have become more creative in posting visuals, the censors have also kept up by screening more closely.
While computer programs can pick out obvious words and elements related to June 4, Fu believed some of the censoring had been done manually because it would take knowledge of key events and well-known scenes from 1989 to spot photos with a message that might not seem objectionable at first sight.
He compiled the censored photos and published them on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.
He said internet users in mainland China had used these posts to signal they disagreed with the central government’s portrayal of the June 4 crackdown as a move by the authorities to stop an “antirevolutionary riot”.
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And some put up these posts knowing that they would be removed.
Fu said: “Aren’t they scared of suppression or negative consequences? After analysing the censored posts, I believe it is not only a matter of bravery. Many people still remember and are angry, and they are willing to speak to the public.”
He expects to publish more from the Weiboscope project and will continue to monitor censorship on Chinese social media platforms.
“I believe my job – and that of many others in Hong Kong – is to help marginalised voices be heard,” Fu said.
