06/07/25 - I am back!

June 4th just passed (or, well, I guess it’s been a couple of days. Sorry, I’ve been sick). This isn’t an especially big year for it or anything—36th anniversary. But every year, the exact same event takes place. The government censors go into high alert mode. On almost all social medias, for those few days, you can’t change your avatar or username. They’ve removed a bunch of emotes, like white candles or tanks or pictures of Tian’anmen square. A lot of games shut down their in-game chat, and some games even completely removed co-op mode for this day. And obviously, don’t even think about trying to play World of Tanks.

In previous years, companies that manage livestreamers and v-tubers have passed out memos reminding people to not advertise anything that features the numbers 89 or 64 anywhere in its price tag or model number or whatever, and to not mention the word “tanks” even if you’re referring to entirely mundane water tanks or whatever. But I’ve seen a lot of livestreamers just choosing to take a day off this year rather than risk anything.

Apparently, some overseas viewers of Tiktok have said they can’t comment on Chinese tiktoks on June 4th?

And of course, what stands out the most about June 4th is just how fast the censorship team is. I bet they have to hire a lot of seasonal workers just for this one day. Having been banned on Weibo a couple of times myself in the past, my comments usually stay up for a couple of hours before anyone notices, but on June 4th? Seconds.

But every year, there is nonetheless a concerted effort to speak out, to make visible waves, and it’s incredibly heartwarming to see. And every year, people manage to find some small, less-moderated space to congregate. Apparently, in past years, it has been in the comment section of Zheng Zhihua’s song “Sailor”, which was sampled to write the song “Flowers of Freedom”, which Hong Kong singers sang in support of Tian’anmen Square protestors at the time. But this year, the government’s caught on, so people have moved to Xuexi Tong, an app that many public schools use for assigning homework, uploading study materials, and even has a social media function so that people can post any questions they can’t figure out to ask other people’s help. And a lot of people are uploading Tian’anmen Square memes.

And of course, every year, the embassies of other countries write posts commemorating and supporting the spirit of Tian’anmen Square protestors, and I’m always grateful for those efforts. But even they have be very indirect about it, like posting a white candle or vaguely talking about how important it is to remember history.

And while it is always fun and heartening to see people’s efforts, unfortunately, I have to say, the censorship is clearly winning in this case. It seems every year, there are more people who genuinely have no idea why they’re being censored on this day. It used to be that everyone knew what happened, they just know that they can’t talk about it. But now, I’m seeing more and more comments of people genuinely confused why all of a sudden, they can’t stream World of Tanks, or change their profile picture. Apparently, even people old enough to own a store now genuinely don’t know why they can’t set their prices to anything ending in 89 on this day.

I always thought that the censorship couldn’t possibly win, because even though nobody in my family ever told me and school didn’t teach me, I was still able to put together, just from what I was not allowed to say, that either on the 9th of August 1964 or the 4th of June 1989, something happened at Tian’anmen Square that involved tanks. Because it’s not as though the censorship is particularly subtle. Tian’anmen Square is a major landmark and popular tourist spot. It is going to come up. A popular Chinese saying, “eight or nine times out of ten” (十之八九) mentions 89 and will get censored on most websites. I always naively assumed that people can put the clues together just by looking at the negative space.

But I think the problem here is that censorship has gotten so much stricter since Xi Jinping came into power, that it’s harder to put context together. Now, it seems like just about anything could be problematic, so the pattern isn’t as strong. I’ve literally seen a discussion in the comment section of a webnovel, talking about why 89 is censored, and people eventually came to the conclusion that it must be a very subtle dick joke. I’ve seen people theorise that the reason censorship always ramps up around June 4th is just because that’s during the Gaokao and…I don’t know, the government doesn’t want to distract Gaokao students with livestreamers, so they all have to take a day off? Or some of them genuinely just believe it’s a coincidence that their favourite game does maintenance on this day so a lot of functions are down.

It makes me really sad every time I see someone who has no idea what’s going on, who comes up with a plausible enough theory and move on without ever digging deeper, and there are more of them every year. The same way it makes me sad that we’re running out of living witnesses to the Mao famines. There are so many stories from those days that’ll never be told.

I’m gonna leave a link to Human Rights in China, which has a collection of Tian’anmen Square testimonials on their website, for anyone who’s interested in reading more.

There’s been a couple of cases of indiscriminate mass-killings, one of which happened on the 4th of June too—a Wuhan University student indiscriminately stabbed people in the university cafeteria. It doesn’t seem to be related to the date, though, as he posted to social media that he’s going to do it because he didn’t pass his thesis defense. I’m not entirely sure on the victim count—mass-killings are already not being reported on, combined with the sensitive date, it’s hard to get any concrete information about what’s going on.

I did find a very blurry screenshot of the last post he made before he went on the killing spree, where he referenced that he has signed a “three-party deal”, which might explain why passing his thesis defense was such a big deal to him. A three-party deal is something that Chinese businesses will sometimes offer particularly promising high school students, where the business will offer to sponsor the student and pay their tuition for college (sometimes including living expenses and even extra monetary awards above and beyond that), and in exchange, after the student graduates, they have to spend so many years working at that company. My dad’s company sometimes does this, and although it’s supposed to be a win-win scenario where the company gets talented employees, and the student gets no student debt and somewhat guaranteed employment, a lot of these deals will include a clause where if the student is unable to graduate on time or fails too many classes, then they have to pay the company back all of its money.

And I don’t know much about academic circles in China, but I hear from this youtuber who actually got a doctorate in China, that apparently, it’s not possible for everyone to pass their thesis defense. There’s a certain quota of people that has to get failed. And this curious phenomenon will happen where, say, the bottom 20 people or whatever have to go on to a second round of defense, where the three of them that perform the worst has to be failed. And because no professor wants one of their students to get failed, if a student presents genuinely terrible, worthless work, they’ll pass that student in the first round because they know they have no chance in the second round. And they’ll pass their good students onto the second round, because their work is solid enough that they won’t be selected as one of the three. And when every professor is thinking this way, students who are genuinely doing high-quality, good work will end up failing through literally no fault of their own.

And once this guy failed, he wasn’t going to graduate on time. It meant more money sunk into his education, it meant he had to pay a company back for all the expenses he wracked up in undergrad and his years of pursuing a PhD thus far, and it meant he was out of a job when he did graduate. I could see why someone would despair in that situation.

The other incident was another vehicular manslaughter in Shandong, Heze. No manifesto in this case, no idea what it was for, and no clue on how many dead. Just that someone drove a car into a bus stop.

There was a story brewing over the last week or so about a lot of cave explorers in China speaking out about local governments using cave systems as landfills, filling beautiful natural caves with ancient stalactite and stalagmite formations with all kinds of trash or pumping it full of contaminated waste water from local factories. But that story hardly had time to brew before June 4th completely cleared it off of the internet.

In an interview with the CEO of Great Wall Motor, Wei Jianjun, he accused BYD of being the next Evergrande, following the same model of overproduction and insane levels of debt by paying suppliers in IOUs, using their production capacity and the theoretically valuable cars they manufacture as collateral to get bank loans, while not actually able to sell any of those cars. There’s videos of apparently seas of unsold BYDs, parked inside abandoned buildings that Evergrande never finished building. And this problem is only going to get worse as the government runs out of money to keep subsidising BYD’s cars, which they’re already selling at a loss. But in defense of BYD, I do have to point out, that when you buy a BYD, you do actually receive a BYD. Nobody is getting stuck with a 30 year car loan on a car that doesn’t even exist. But I’ve always thought BYD was an unsustainable business. I think all Chinese electric car manufacturers are, because almost none of them are actually selling their cars for a profit. Pretty much all of them rely on subsidies to survive.

And the government is bound to run out of subsidies. They can’t even pay healthcare workers anymore. There are nurses complaining about getting their pay cut down to half of what they were making. And nurses are already paid like shit in China to begin with. Some of my family works in hospitals, and I hear nurses were only getting paid 3500 a month to begin with, and now it’s closer to, like, 1500 a month. That’s assuming they’re getting paid at all. A lot of hospitals just don’t have the money and are behind half a year or more on wage payments.

Wow, this has been a depressing post.

I suppose to lighten the mood, I’ll cover a little bit of news about this year’s Gaokao. As you might know, different states can have completely different exams for their students, which vary a lot in content and hardness. But the default exam that a lot of states use is the National Exam One, which is what most discussion is going to be based on. The general sentiment seems to be that the history exam this year is particularly hard, with a lot of ancient texts in the exam that aren’t commonly seen or studied for. A lot of people are complaining that they feel like they’re taking an exam in Dynastic days. Almost all the discussion is focused on how hard History is.

I’ll include the first question on the exam, to see what you guys think:

An archaeologist discovers an ancient site where over 1300 graves were uncovered, with less than 1% being large graves, about 10% being medium-sized graves, and 90% being small graves. Among those, the large graves have plentiful artefacts buried inside, including full sets of stoneware and clay religious vessels. Thus, we can deduce that this ancient site can be dated back to:

A. Early Ancient Stone Age

B. Late Ancient Stone Age

C. Early New Stone Age

D. Late New Stone Age

I will say, though, at least this is better than 2022, where they had the hardest maths that people had ever seen, because everyone has to take maths, but only half the people have history as an elective.

There is also apparently this hear-warning story about the “only fully-blind student in Guangzhou attending the Gaokao”, which I think is more concerning than Guangzhou Voice of Transport realised. Because I feel like there should probably be more than one 18-year-old who’s blind in a state with 130 million people.