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.”
