[ant_sz]

I'm from Chinese mainland, a student at Shanghai.there is not even a piece of information about this leaked to the mainstream media. many of my classmates managed to get information from multiple sources but more have no idea what happened.

it's quite strange that the blocking turns a political event into a technical one.

I'm not a 100% supporter for the protest, but I extremely dislike the government's passion of blocking everying. it makes me feel hopeless in the country knowing more and more interesting things are becoming far away from us.

[gurkendoktor]

I have seen this in my Twitter stream today, and I can't really believe it - does the PRC state media really try to re-brand the photos as a "celebration"??

https://twitter.com/libdave/status/516281577001590785

Then again, I think that's pretty much what they did with pictures from the Taipei student protests earlier this year...

(Edit: Whoops, duplicate of a sibling post :) )

[spacehunt]

Source: http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/cnstv/2014/09-26/news500277....

They actually got some "celebrators" standing in front of the protesters claiming everybody is having a party.

[yskchu]

Don't spread the FUD that others are creating.

This is a picture of a separate celebration event from the 26th (Friday). It's part of the celebration events leading up to 1st Oct.

[spacehunt]

The students were already boycotting classes and attending the protests around the CGO on Friday.

[coupdejarnac]

From what I've gathered, even protests within mainland China do not make the news there. Unless the protests involve Uighurs or the Japanese embassy.

I lived in Beijing from 2004 to 2006, and during my time there a bunch of websites became blocked, including Wikipedia. It drove me nuts.

[madaxe_again]

They do occasionally - see last week's "terrorist attack" in Xinjiang.

[khc]

I've seen screenshots of mainland media reporting the event as a massive celebration: https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/t31.0-8/106...

[zby]

That is not too bad - they'll probably not deploy army to crush celebrations after all.

By the way - there is a great democratic potential in play: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how...

[curiousgeorge]

Why are you anything but a 100% supporter of democratic self-governance?

[JoeAltmaier]

One reasonable train of thought is, that in a country containing a mix of several cultures with sharp divides, democracy will make 2nd-class citizens out of somebody - the tyranny of the majority will seriously rule.

There are many forms of citizen-participatory government possible. A republic for instance (what you meant when you said democracy?) can have houses formed in a variety of ways to insure minorities are heard.