Chinese Censors Accidentally Block Shanghai Index

New submitter Vulcan195 writes "Now this is amusing in so many ways ... Today (June 4, 1989 ... i.e. 6/4/89) is the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Naturally, the Chinese Censors were working overtime to block anything that made remote or oblique references to that event. Well, sometime during the day the Shanghai Composite Index dropped by 64.89 points; You can guess what happened next."

no accident

[je ne sais quoi]

It was no accident, the Shanghai index fell 64.89 points and people starting blogging that since 6/4/89 was the date of Tiananmen massacre, the stock index coincided with the date, which is a particularly infamous one. The censors then blocked those people for discussing the massacre, which is verboten. The NYT [nytimes.com] has a more in depth article. Now, the fact that the stock market fell by that exact amount by closing (see here [yahoo.com]) might be an accident, but the censors were doing exactly their job, censoring people discussing the massacre. As the NYT points out, other stock markets have been hacked and this may have be the case here as well, or some other intentional act. The Chinese government is investigating and you may rest assured that we will likely never know what they find since that would draw attention to why they were investigating in the first place.

Re:Is that the correct date format?

[Anonymous Coward]

China uses YY//MM/DD, and in Chinese they usually explicitly write the character for year, month, and day after each part respectively.

Something like 2012Y, 06M, 05D

Re:Not like the USA

[JoshuaZ]

You are possibly assuming there a degree of targeting accuracy which they didn't have. Also, many historical building had military import (such as historic railway stations used for moving supplies). Keep in mind in World War II, the accuracy of bombing was so poor that they sometimes bombed the wrong city. If you had a factory or the like in the middle of an area, that wasn't going to help. The more serious problem with Dresden was that arguably they really were targeting civilians. There is some complexity involved though- it isn't clear that the laws of war had yet reached a consensus at that point. See http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jpcl.htm [icrc.org] for some relevant points. There's a decent argument also that the presence of factories and the presence of military units stationed in and around Dresden made it a legitimate target. George Marshall made an inquiry that came to that conclusion, but the fact that the US military thought an inquiry was necessary does reflect strongly on the questionable nature of the decision. The argument that the bombing was not justified has been most strongly argued by Alexander McKee who is a historian who has written a fair bit on this subject. Overall, I'd say that McKee's analysis is a strong but not convincing case (although this is also going off my memory of the last time I looked into this subject in detail which was around 5 or 6 years ago).

Re:Is that the correct date format?

[Cederic]

Because the 4th June 2012 is better expressed as 20120604.

Middle-endian date formats are fucking obtuse.

Re:Not like the USA

[Attila Dimedici]

There is only one person who has ever claimed that Churchill knew that Coventry was the target of the raid you are referencing. The more credible claim by other sources is that Churchill knew that an attack was coming but believed that the target was London.

Re:Is that the correct date format?

[Patch86]

Fun fact- in countries like the UK where "DD/MM/YY" is the normal format, we say "4th of June", not "June 4th".

Re:Nagasaki

[Interfacer]

The bombings happened on different days. The Japanese had several days to surrender, which they didn't.

From wikipedia:
Together with the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, the United States called for a surrender of Japan in the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945, threatening Japan with "prompt and utter destruction". The Japanese government ignored this ultimatum, and two nuclear weapons developed by the Manhattan Project were deployed. Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, followed by the Fat Man over Nagasaki on 9 August

The Japanese government still did not react to the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito, the government, and the war council were considering four conditions for surrender --snip--
The Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 5 April. The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Korechika Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace . --snip--

This doesn't read like they were ready to surrender.

Re:Not like the USA

[Jodka]

from the parent post

No matter how you spin it, the fire bombing of Dresden and subsequent incineration of 250K civilians was an atrocity...

from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

..such, "grossly inflated" casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, Tagesbefehl No. 47, that originated with Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

Re:Not like the USA

[LoyalOpposition]

No, they did not.

Yes. They did.

By then, Japanese were already trying to find a way to surrender.

According to this article [wikipedia.org] the Japanese always planned on getting a negotiated ending to the war. In a sense one might say that the Japanese were already trying to find a way to surrender[1] even as they were dropping torpedoes on Pearl Harbor.

Americans wanted to be the ones who dictated the condition for surrender,

Well, yeah. That's kind of the point to fighting a war--getting to dictate the terms. Japan wanted to dictate terms. America wanted to dictate terms. The Soviet Union wanted to dictate terms. Germany wanted to dictate terms. Great Britain wanted to dictate terms. France wanted to dictate terms. Morocco wanted to dictate terms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Côte d'Ivoire wanted to dictate terms.

even though the conditions they imposed were exactly the same as ones Japanesed proposed to begin with.

That's not correct. Terms the Allies insisted upon that were unacceptable to Japan included the elimination "for all time [of] the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, the occupation of "points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies", Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine, the Japanese military forces shall be completely disarmed, stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners, and the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The Japanese government rejected those demands as late as 27 July 1945.

In other words, the whole thing was entirely to humiliate Japanese (and to threaten the rest of the world).

That's not correct. While it's true that any country would find it humiliating to be forced to accept such terms, it's also true that merely having to surrender would be humiliating to a country who had never lost a war, which situation Japan found itself in prior to August 1945. All of the above terms and the simple fact of surrender, itself, had as their primary goal not to humiliate Japan, but rather to forestall the onset of World War III.

~Loyal

Contrary to popular belief, believing something does not make it so.

[1] For certain values of "surrender".