Why it seems so different between baidu and google?--cencorship or democracy

In China, I used to use baidu—the leading Chinese search engine to search websites, news, images, and download music. After arriving in London, as most people around are using Google and say “you can ‘google’ it”, I tried to use Google.

At first, I didn’t find something different between the two search engines, as it shows in the following, the designs of them seem so similar to each other, as well as the functions:

However, last week when I typed in the words “Tiananmen”, to search for some images of Tiananmen square in google, what I saw are pictures of tanks, armed army, people shot dead… really bloody. I was shocked and puzzled—what are these photos about? Why it seems like a massacre? What happened? … …

With so many questions, I searched for Tiananmen in BBC news. Oh, I have heard that before—June Fourth Movement. It had been a student movement asking for democracy in my memory. There are not any materials in the history text book or other media I could contact with before. The affair sounded like a mysterious story without any details. Conversely, BBC news named it Tiananmen Square Massacre, and described it in detail.

Then I typed in “Tiananmen” again but in baidu image search engine. You could click both of them to see the differences between the pictures in google and baidu. Surprising, isn’t it? One is like in hell full of blood and violence but one in heaven filled with smile and sunshine. There is no doubt that Chinese government has cancelled pictures and articles it hopes people not see. Powerful censorship, isn’t it?

The more information I found, the more questions I have: What contents are censored by Chinese government? How can it achieve this goal? Thanks for powerful google search engine and wikipedia, I get clearer about these questions:

For the first question, the censored content includes
l Sources cover some taboo topics such as Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Falun Gong--a system of "mind and body cultivation" related to buddhism and qigong, dalai lama—the head of Tibetan gobernment.
l Sites related to Taiwanese government, media, or other organizations.
l News sources such as Voices of America, BBC news, Yahoo! Hong Kong.
l Many blogging sites, such as blogger.com.
In a word, contents which may threaten the regime of China Communist Party are facing censorship.

For the second question, Chinese government implements the internet censorship by Golden Shield Project, which acts like a network firewall. It can “block content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the internet gateways”(wikipedia). By the way, “up to 2002, the preliminary work of the Golden Shield Project cost 800 million dollars.

Initially, I feel like being cheated by the government, because what I had seen and heard from media are all government wanted us to know. These filtered materials had made so deep impact on me, and are going to impact more and more Chinese youths.

But, from the government’s point of view, the censorship sounds reasonable in a certain degree. There are so many people in China, and the area is quite large. It is really difficult to control on this condition. If there is not such strict control in media, maybe it had been divided into many parts. Who knows? In history, Chinese people experienced wars and divided situation, and they lived in miserable life. However, China is developing very fast now, though there are still lots of social problems, the situation is much better than before. Of course, I hope people could have more democracy in China in the future.