Comment Central: Six world-altering anniversaries in the next 14 days

Censors brought down the shutters on a host of online services yesterday and placed prominent dissidents under house arrest less than two days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The first victim of the most sweeping action on the internet undertaken by China’s cyberpolice was the micro-blogging service Twitter, wildly popular as a platform for humour as well as for political comment.

A little while later China’s increasingly tech-savvy population realised that the popular photo-posting service Flickr had vanished. That was followed by the disappearance of the Hotmail e-mail service and Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing — only a day old. The blocks did not stop there: MSN Spaces also disappeared.

Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of the popular English-language blog Danwei.org, said: “They have never blocked so many major websites at one stroke.”

The timing is scarcely a coincidence. Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the entry of the People’s Liberation Army into Beijing on June 4, 1989, to crush seven weeks of student-led demonstrations centred in Tiananmen Square — a move that resulted in the deaths of hundreds.

The response of web users was immediate and furious, but could be seen only by those able to navigate their way over the Great Firewall of China, for example, via proxy servers. Flypig, which maintains a well-known technology blog in China, said: “Now the 3 web services I cannot live without — Twitter, Flickr, YouTube — are all blocked in China. Cheers, motherf***ers!”

Twitter has become increasingly popular in recent months partly because it allows words or phrases that bring up an almost automatic ban or block on most internet service providers in China — such as 6/4 (or June 4). Indeed, talk had been rife about Charter 08 — a document issued online late last year by a group of prominent dissidents calling for greater democracy. Any attempt to write the words Charter 08 on the internet or to reach a site containing references to it is blocked.

Those using Twitter are not interested only in politics. The latest action by China’s busy censors targets fans of Guo Degang — the Chinese equivalent of The Two Ronnies — who used Twitter to share his latest jokes.

The demise of Twitter had been forecast days earlier by Michael Anti, a well-known blogger who told the China-based blog Danwei.org: “Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is. So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of YouTube descends on it one day.”

People as well internet services have vanished. Zhou Duo, a former Peking University sociologist who displayed his support for the student demonstrators in 1989 by joining them on Tiananmen Square, and who negotiated with the army for the safe withdrawal, told The Times that he had been taken from his home and placed under house arrest outside Beijing after he announced his annual June 4 commemorative hunger strike.

The telephone at the home of Ding Zilin, a retired professor and an advocate for Tiananmen victims, whose teenage son was killed in the crackdown, rang busy all day Tuesday. She had said earlier that security agents strongly suggested that she and her husband leave the capital during the anniversary. She had refused.

In southeastern Zhejiang province Wu Gaoxing, a former teacher, was taken from his home by agents on Saturday, shortly after the publication of a letter he had co-signed complaining about economic discrimination against dissidents.

The letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao, said that former political prisoners were unable to find steady jobs and were deprived of medical benefits and pensions. “If we get sick we can only wait to die, and all this just because 20 years ago we were sentenced for political reasons.”

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