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Coincidence? Beijing Apple Store phone# references Tiananmen Sq. date (6-4-1989)
- Egregore 15y agoIt will be interesting to find out what modern Chinese people know and think of Tiananmen Sq. events.
- meric 15y agoI've had several international student friends from China. One of them, when they first arrived, gobble up all the information that was censored in China. E.g. taiwan, tiananmen, tibet, etc. And now hates the Communist party to the guts. Then there is another one who said Tiananmen was unfortunate... but it was "necessary"; That one also praised Jiang Zemin on modernising the economy, and told me to focus on that instead.
- maethorechannen 15y agoThey use a different date format in China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_Republic_of_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_R... It probably wouldn't be recognized by most people as the date of the Tiananmen Sq date (to be honest, to me it looks like 6 April 1989, so it's only signifgant if you write dates the way you write dates)
- eurleif 15y agoThat doesn't necessarily mean it's just a coincidence, though. The phone number may very well have been chosen by an American. Apple is big on central management, after all.
- maethorechannen 15y agoOr it was the next number assigned by some computer like most phone numbers, which seems far, far more likely.
- Umofomia 15y agoThe event is referred to as the "6-4 incident" in Chinese (六四事件), so the month-day order is correct. Generally the year is listed first in full dates (e.g., 1989年6月4日), but it's arguably still recognizable when it occurs afterwards. [edit] Addendum: BTW, I just noticed the link you supplied refers to the Republic of China, which is the de facto government in Taiwan currently and is different from the People's Republic of China, which is what most people refer to as "China". The PRC follows the regular Gregorian calendar in YYYY-MM-DD format.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cynest 15y agoRepublic of China \= People's Republic of China. Given the lack of details in the article, it doesn't appear as if that date system would be used in Beijing.
- RexRollman 15y agoOf course it is; it's just our minds looking for patterns.
- dramaticus3 15y agoIn other non-news the Chinese takeaway on Main Street, Kent has 5-4-1970
- JonnieCache 15y agoWell, if it isn't a coincidence, someone's certainly going to get in trouble if we keep shouting about it. Also I could see this thread getting HN blocked over there too.
- Umofomia 15y agoTrue enough, though I doubt it's going to be through HN that the Chinese government finds out about it. It's already been noticed on some Chinese-language blogs: http://chinese.winandmac.com/hotgossip/apple-store-china-mainland/ http://chinese.winandmac.com/hotgossip/apple-store-china-mai... (this one's from Hong Kong)
- maethorechannen 15y agoLooking at the bottome of the page I see that Apple have a toll free number 400-666-8800, I take it we're supposed to wonder if that 666 is a coincidence as well? Saying that, if Steve Jobs was the devil it would explain a lot.
- DerekL 15y agoCoincidently, the retail price of the Apple I was $666.66.