Tiananmen oddity:
The Shanghai stock market plays a strange trick on the Chinese Communist Party.
BEIJING — The stock market played a strange trick on the Chinese Communist Party on Monday.
Whether a cosmic joke or coincidence — or as some wags suggested, an act of God — the Shanghai stock market index fell 64.89 points on Monday, which happened to be June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
This darkest moment in recent Chinese history is customarily referred to as 6/4, the unembellished number conveying the same stark tragedy as 9/11 for Americans.
In the numerology of censorship, nothing is more sensitive. There is a ritualized cat-and-mouse game every year on this date between the censors and those who want to commemorate the death of hundreds, perhaps thousands. On the 20th anniversary in 2009, an advertisement managed to slip into a newspaper showing two groups of people — six on one side and four on the other — gazing philosophically toward the sky.
Nowadays, the game is largely played out on the Internet. The numeric phrase 6/4 is banned by censors — as is 5/35, an attempt to get around the bans by referring to the date as the 35th of May. Other words that were scrubbed on Monday were candle, commemorate, massacre, tank and never forget.
After its bizarre closing Monday, censors added Shanghai Stock Market and index to the banned list.
The 64.89-point drop wasn’t the only strange omen. The Shanghai Composite Index opened at 2346.98, which, when read from right to left, could be seen as a reference to June 4, 1989, 23rd anniversary.
The Chinese Communist Party is famously resistant to reflecting on its shortcomings. Only recently has it been possible to discuss openly the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s campaign of terror between 1966 and 1976, and many were shocked when Premier Wen Jiabao referred to it during a public news conference in March.
But Tiananmen Square remains forbidden — because of the brutality of the crackdown, of course, but also because of the rifts it opened in the Communist Party that remain unhealed to this day.