Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Car Crashes, Burns in Tiananmen Square, Sina and Baidu Censor Searches Relating to Incident

On the afternoon of October 28, 2013, China's official news agency Xinhua published an article entitled "Three Die After Car Crash at Tian'anmen." Some excerpts:
A driver and two passengers were killed after a jeep crashed into a crowd of people and caught fire in front of the Tian'anmen rostrum in downtown Beijing on Monday, police said. 
Eleven tourists and police officers were also injured by the jeep, which crashed into a guardrail of Jinshui Bridge on the moat of the Forbidden City before bursting into flames at 12:05 p.m., according to municipal police and Beijing Emergency Medical Center.
Several state sponsored media outlets published a Chinese language report entitled "Car Catches on Fire and Spread Thick Smoke" (天安门前一车辆着火冒出浓烟).

These screenshots show the report was deleted from the china.com web site.

Original URL: http://news.china.com/domestic/945/20131028/18113545.html

Where reports were not deleted entirely, they were sometimes revised to remove images, as shown in these screenshots from the state sponsored Caixin Magazine, which updated its report at this URL - http://china.caixin.com/2013-10-28/100596285.html - with additional information, but removed two images.

Within hours Sina Weibo began censoring "Tiananmen Catches on Fire" (天安门 着火).
 These screenshots show that, within hours, Baidu also began censoring "Tiananmen Suicide" (天安门 自杀) and "Tiananmen Explosion" (天安门 爆炸).

Other terms that were censored on Sina Weibo included:
  • Tiananmen (天安门) + Car Accident (车祸)
  • Tiananmen (天安门) + Explosion (爆炸)
  • Tiananmen (天安门) + Catch Fire (起火)
  • Tiananmen (天安门) + Surprise Attack (袭击)
These screenshots show that both Baidu and Sina Weibo were censoring searches for "Tiananmen Terror" (天安门 恐怖).
Sina Weibo also deleted individual posts that contained images of the incident, as shown in these screenshots.


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