Another Crack in the Wall

A Chinese newspaper is in trouble.

A tabloid newspaper was withdrawn from newsstands in China after running a photograph from the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters.

It was probably a coincidence.

The photograph was printed alongside an interview with the Hong Kong-born American photographer Liu Xiangcheng as an example of his work.

..... it seems most likely to have been a mistake by staff who did not realise the significance of the photo, rather than a deliberate act, says the BBC's East Asia reporter Stephen Jackson.

It has been 19 years; many of the staff may have no knowledge of it, especially since it's officially a taboo subject. It does highlight a problem with Chinese leaders and their knee-jerk reactions; shutting down the paper probably caused people like those staffers who never heard of the massacre to ask what the problem was with the picture, and the lack of an official answer will create more curiosity.

It's another demonstration of the difficulty of maintaining a totalitarian state, especially one with a free-market economy. There are many places for information to hide, and in this ironic case the lack of knowledge of something caused it to pop into the open.