6.4 isn't a number, it's a date. It's common in China to have the separator for date elements be a period, so for example Christmas will happen on 12.25

And I dare say you learned to count with no mention of 6.4 ;)

(Pretty sure the Chinese don't use MM.DD for dates)

Do you have anything to back that up? For example, I speak to (and text with) Chinese people frequently, and can say from personal experience that M.D (zero padding is unusual) is quite common. Less than a week ago a Chinese student asked me to look over her application to a Canadian university and I recommended that dates written like 10.6 be reformatted to, using the example, "Oct 6". Where are you getting your ideas from?

edit:

Here's an image of a flyer that I was given today, advertising an event of the campus Russian club. You'll note that the event is scheduled for "2014.12.19 19:00"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e5fclcou9z39dl5/mmexport1418392916...

I think the question now is, where do you get off randomly spreading misinformation about topics you're obviously not familiar with?

> (Pretty sure the Chinese don't use MM.DD for dates)

Wikipedia says China is big-endian, matching iso8601.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Asi...

Didn't seem likely that Chinese censors would make that kind of mistake. 1989.6.4 is, of course, the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

iOS autocorrect turns "tiananmen" into "tiara man". This could be construed as a form of censorship (or dialogue-shaping?) as well.

Well they use Y年M月D日 for full dates, so I would imagine they would use M.D in an abbreviation?

June 4, 1989: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

to add to what others have said, what they censored was 八九 (eight-nine) and not 八十九 (eighty nine), and 六四 (six-four) not 六十四 (sixty four).

It's the same as "Nine Eleven" having a completely different meaning from "Nine One One" or "Ninety One".

Given that 4rt asked about "6.4" and not "64", I think it's safe to say that the strings "89" and "6.4", which make perfect sense in Chinese, were also censored and that that's what he meant to ask about.

You can use "89" to refer to the year in written english, too, although I guess (a) it's a little less common since the Y2K bug hype; and (b) it's more properly written "'89", with a leading apostrophe.

Also censored: 64, 6.2+2, 6.5-1, 7.5, 6四, 六.四