/dev/mull

it's [the great firewall of china's blacklist is] a mixture of inconvenient people, codewords to dodge the censors, and names of foreign media sources. i'm amused by the inclusion of the number "89"; i wonder how hard it would be to get them to block all the digits.

BEIJING -- The stock market played a strange trick on the Chinese Communist Party on Monday.

Whether a cosmic joke or coincidence -- or as some wags suggested, an act of God -- the Shanghai stock market index fell 64.89 points on Monday, which happened to be June 4, the 23rd anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.

This darkest moment in recent Chinese history is customarily referred to as 6/4, the unembellished number conveying the same stark tragedy as 9/11 for Americans.

In the numerology of censorship, nothing is more sensitive. There is a ritualized cat-and-mouse game every year on this date between the censors and those who want to commemorate the death of hundreds, perhaps thousands. On the 20th anniversary in 1989, an advertisement managed to slip into a newspaper showing two groups of people -- six on one side and four on the other -- gazing philosophically toward the sky.

Nowadays, the game is largely played out on the Internet. The number 6/4 is banned by censors –- as is 5/35, an attempt to get around the bans by referring to the date as the 35th of May. Other words that were scrubbed on Monday were “candle,” “commemorate,” “massacre,” “tank” and “never forget.”

After its bizarre closing Monday, censors added “Shanghai Stock Market” and “index” to the banned list.

The 64.89 point drop wasn’t the only strange omen. The Shanghai Composite Index opened at 2346.98, which with a little creativity could be seen as a reference to June 4, 1989, 23rd anniversary.