China blocks app’s social media over Tiananmen post

Weibo page remained unavailable on Monday

BEIJING (AFP) — A Chinese shopping app has been blocked on social media after a post on the anniversary of the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, as Beijing’s censorship kicked into gear around the sensitive date.

The Weibo page of Xiaohongshu, a Pinterest-like platform where users share travel and shopping tips, published a post on 4 June saying, “Tell me loudly, today’s date is .... !” according to screenshots circulating online.

The date was the 32nd anniversary of the crackdown. But it was uncertain if the post referred to Tiananmen, as the company regularly makes similar statements on Friday ushering in the weekend.

The Tencent-and Alibaba-backed app’s Weibo page remained unavailable on Monday, four days after the post, and was replaced with a notice saying it had been taken down after “being reported for violating laws and regulations.”

The Tiananmen Square crackdown is highly sensitive to China’s Communist leadership. They have gone to exhaustive lengths to erase the movement from collective memory, omitting it from history textbooks and censoring online discussion of the crackdown.

Soldiers marched into Beijing and opened fire on residents and student protesters on 4 June 1989, crushing a weeks-long wave of demonstrations calling for political change and curbs to official corruption.

Hundreds, by some estimates more than 1,000, were killed in the crackdown.