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China kept a tight lid Wednesday on content related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, blacking out foreign TV reports on the incident's imminent anniversary and expanding blocks on websites.
News reports about the anniversary of the bloody June 3-4 crackdown that ended seven weeks of democracy protests at the square were abruptly cut off with screens going black on the BBC and CNN in China, as they have all week.
China's censors also appeared to be blocking sites such as Microsoft's new search engine Bing, as well as social networking service Twitter, photo-hosting website Flickr and others.
Attempts to access those sites resulted in an error page saying the site could not be displayed.
The sites join those regularly blocked by China at sensitive times, including YouTube, the BBC's Chinese-language service and press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.
"Twenty years later, it is still impossible for the Chinese media to refer freely to the ruthless suppression of China's pro-democracy movement in June 1989," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
"The information blackout has been enforced so effectively for 20 years that most young Chinese are completely unaware of this major event."
The Chinese army forcibly cleared the square and surrounding areas on the night of June 3-4 1989. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, were killed in the crackdown, which remains a taboo subject here.
China has visibly beefed up security at the square, the nation's political heart, in a bid to prevent protests or other attempts to mark the anniversary, and tightened restrictions on dissidents.
However, many major websites with links to Tiananmen-related information were freely available, including some featuring the famous photo of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks, an image banned in China.
Sites such as CNN.com <http://cnn.com/>, which has been blocked in the past during politically sensitive periods, was accessible in China.
A Microsoft official said Tuesday its Bing.com <http://bing.com/>, Live.com <http://live.com/> and Hotmail.com <http://hotmail.com/> sites were among several to have been blocked for customers in China.
Hotmail.com <http://hotmail.com/> accounts were intermittently accessible by AFP on Wednesday.
Some newspaper readers have reported pages missing in international newspapers distributed in China.
