BEIJING, June 3 — Chinese police beefed up their presence today at the bridge where a rare protest was staged last year, with authorities censoring online map searches for the site and even removing a road sign on the eve of the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary.

In October, days before China’s ruling party was set to hold congress, a protester had draped banners with slogans criticising the Communist Party’s Covid policies on the side of Beijing’s Sitong bridge.

Today, searches for "Sitong bridge" in Simplified Chinese — used in mainland China — led to a message saying "no results found" on map apps Baidu, Amap and Tencent maps.

AFP reporters saw at least four police cars parked on each corner of the bridge today, and that a sign with the name of the bridge had been taken down.

The move comes a day before the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, where on June 4, 1989, tanks and heavily armed troops cleared a demonstration at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by students demanding democracy and greater freedoms.

Hundreds, by some estimates more than 1,000, were killed in the crackdown.

Details of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests have been wiped from history books in China, and censors routinely block websites or social media accounts ahead of the event’s anniversary.

Last year, a live stream by popular influencer Li Jiaqi was cut-off after he showed his audience a layered ice cream, garnished with Oreo cookies on its sides and what appeared to be a chocolate ball and a chocolate stick on top, resembling the shape of a tank, a day before the June 4 anniversary.

In Hong Kong, Tiananmen commemorations have almost disappeared after Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 to quash dissent in the city.

Baidu, the operator of China’s biggest search engine, did not reply to AFP inquiries about when or why searches for the bridge were blocked.

Tech giant Tencent also declined to respond to similar queries. — AFP