How Chicken Nuggets, Candles, and KFC Defeated China's Censors

Jun 09, 2026 - 09:55

This year marked the 37th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, and China's censorship campaign reached astonishing new levels. From banned numbers and shadow-banned candles to blocked KFC promotions and tank-shaped chicken nuggets, Chinese netizens found increasingly creative ways to keep the memory of June Fourth alive. In this episode, we examine the strange battle between one of the world's most sophisticated censorship systems and ordinary people determined to remember. Along the way, we explore what may be the ultimate June 4 Paradox: the harder the CCP tries to erase history, the more attention it attracts to the very events it wants forgotten.