“Tank man”, the famous photo of the demonstrator student who blocked a column of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in June 1989, mysteriously disappeared yesterday from the Bing search engine, both inside and outside China, just on the eve of the anniversary of the protest then severely repressed by the Chinese authorities. “It’s a human error and we’re working to fix it,” said a spokesperson for Microsoft, the IT giant that runs Bing, hours after the US press broke the news. But many observers fear that behind it is the shadow of Chinese censorship on the occasion of the 32nd anniversary of the crackdown.
On Google Images, a direct competitor of Bing, the search for “Tank man” highlighted the images of American photographer Charlie Cole, including that of a demonstrator in a white shirt trying to block the advance of a column of at least 17 tanks in 1989 in Tiemen Square in Beijing.
Protests for democracy had been going on for seven weeks. Their repression had resulted in hundreds, if not more than a thousand, of deaths. But the click, which won the prize World Press for the photo of the year in 1990, it remains largely unknown in China due to censorship.
The country has an extensive internet surveillance system that allows it to black out any content deemed sensitive, such as political criticism. And in the name of stability, the country requires digital giants to do this upstream task. I do not resign to comply with these regulations, the vast majority of users of foreign search engines and social networks (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are blocked in China and Internet users can only access with software such as VPN.
But, in this case, the disappearance of the photo on Bing, therefore outside China, seemed incomprehensible. Any commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown is banned in China, and the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong was the only place it was tolerated. But with Beijing’s crackdown on all forms of opposition in the former British colony, the torchlight procession was banned this year. The park in which it took place remained empty for the first time in 32 years.