BEIJING : Foreign journalists were barred from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Wednesday as an Internet clampdown that blocked Twitter expanded to include m ore blogs on the eve of the 20th anniversary of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

In a further sign of the government’s unwavering hard-line stance towards the protests, the second most-wanted student leader from 1989 said he had been denied entry to the southern Chinese territory of Macau.

In exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, Wu’er Kaixi travelled to Macau today to turn

himself in to authorities in a bid to return home. Immigration officers at Macau’s airport pulled him aside and demanded he fly back to Taiwan.

Authorities have also shut photo-sharing site Flickr and confined dissidents to their homes or forced them to leave Beijing, as they ramped up efforts to prevent online discussions about or commemorations of those who died in the military assault on demonstrators on the night of June 3-4, 1989.