I just returned from two weeks of traveling in mainland China and Taiwan. I saw a lot of fascinating things — the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, the Forbidden City. Yet of everything I saw, our visit to Tiananmen Square was the most impactful.

The Square is huge and some of the buildings are stunning. We saw Mao’s tomb and his infamous portrait on the wall of the Forbidden City, but something was lacking — it was the stuff the group didn’t talk about that interested me.

On the bus ride, our tour guide gave us a lengthy description of the size of the Square and the buildings that surround it. She talked about how in 1949, Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China from the gate to the Forbidden City (it’s called “Tiananmen” in Chinese, which means “Gate of Heavenly Peace”), which is now at the end of the Square.

But she didn’t talk about what happened 40 years later. She made no mention of the massacre at all. Our program leader told us we were not allowed to talk about it while touring the Square. We were not even allowed to include the Syracuse flag in the group picture because banners and flags were used during the protests.

Experiencing this kind of censorship firsthand was an almost surreal experience. We were at the Square with a number of tourists and presumably some of us were there to remember the awful bloodshed from 1989, but no one was allowed to speak about it. Instead, we had to pretend we were there to see Mao’s tomb, Mao’s picture and the government buildings surrounding the Square.

The Chinese censorship does not stop at Tiananmen Square. Many of the American social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and even Google are banned in mainland China. Our group was still able to get notifications from these sites, but not able to log in to respond to them. It was maddening, but the social media cleanse was a small price to pay for the other cool experiences we were having.

A professor from a local university gave us a lecture and said most local students know how to get around the censors. Even some people in our group downloaded virtual private networks, which worked for a while, but ultimately slowed people’s phones down. Many locals use Chinese social media sites like WeChat so the Facebook ban does not have much of an effect on their daily lives.

Some Chinese scholars argue that if China did not impose the social media ban, the U.S. would be the only Internet hegemon. They support their argument with the fact that of the top ten Internet companies, all of them are from China or the U.S.

While the Facebook ban was only a minor nuisance and did not infringe much on the rights of the people, the ban on information about Tiananmen Square is unacceptable. Our guide in Xi’an, China told us that if we were to search Tiananmen Square on the Chinese Internet, we wouldn’t find anything about the massacre. He had never seen the famous photo of the man standing in front of the tank until recently.

I admit, I did not try to search it myself, but that is partially because I was scared. I did not want anyone tracking my computer. One student on our trip told me that during a previous trip to China, she had searched the massacre and had her Internet blocked for three days. This kind of information ban is oppression, plain and simple.

There are students that grow up in mainland China never being able to talk about one of the biggest tragedies in their country’s history. The First Amendment protects us Americans from this problem, and I have never appreciated it more than I did the day we visited the Square.

Claire Moran is a junior broadcast and digital journalism and international relations major. She can be reached at clmoran@syr.edu. Her column appears weekly in Pulp.

Published on February 3, 2016 at 8:28 pm