Tiananmen Square

Chinese officials blocked video cameras from filming at Tiananmen Square on Wednesday... with umbrellas. Reporting from the square, CNN's John Vause was chased around by plainclothes Chinese officials who placed open umbrellas between CNN's cameras and shots of Tiananmen Square. As Vause points out, the men with umbrellas are wearing walkie-talkies and are members of China's vast security network guarding the square during the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.

The results of a Google search may vary greatly in different locations around the globe. Above is a search for tiananmen massacre – once on Google international Chinese, and once on Google China – in reference to the Chinese protests culminating in violence 20 years ago today. You will get similar differences when searching for Chinese phrases like June Fourth Incident.

This is due to Google having agreed to censor the China results when they decided to further move in the country with their technology in the years 2004 (starting with Google News) and 2006 (organic web search and other services), a compromise which they suggested they hope to be for the better, overall, but to which they do not provide many details to the outside world. “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

Tank Man

Fearing his work would be confiscated, Newsweek’s Charlie Cole put the roll of film on which he’d captured his version of “The Tank Man” — that image seen in so many newspapers of a young man who walked in front of a tank and stood, bringing the tank to a halt — “in a plastic film can and wrapped it in a plastic bag and attached it to the flush chain in the tank of the toilet” in his hotel.

Tank Man — his identity has never been determined — shot to worldwide fame that day for stopping those tanks, hours after they had brutally crushed student-led protests on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Hundreds — possibly thousands — died in the early-hours protest on June 4, 1989, an event that still remains a forbidden topic in Communist-governed China.

Pictures of Tank Man's courageous efforts and other information about the crackdown are still officially censored in China. But now, 20 years on, modern technology and the wide reach of social networking sites like Facebook are providing curious students with the information they were previously denied. "For 20 years, more than a few have entered the political arena who are the real villains, hypocrites who put on a false show of great peace and bury their consciences in a fiery pit.