To fully appreciate conversations on China\u2019s social media platforms, merely knowing Chinese is not enough. To evade the most extensive internet censorship system in the world, netizens have no option but to create their own vocabulary to discuss \u201csensitive issues\u201d. This language keeps evolving as the government constantly adds new topics and terms that are prohibited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there\u2019s no better example of this linguistic cat-and-mouse game between China\u2019s social media users and the country\u2019s legions of online censors than the current COVID-19 epidemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government\u2019s handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak has fuelled criticism of the government, including the initial cover-up of the epidemic and restrictions on information that is clearly in the public\u2019s interest. In response to the swell in online criticism, a host of new terms have become \u201csensitive\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In January, users of the Chinese social media platform Weibo complained that the words \u201cWuhan\u201d and \u201cHubei\u201d\u2014where the epidemic originated\u2014were being restricted. Only a small proportion of users could see posts containing those words, and criticisms of the authorities in those areas were stifled.\u00ad\u00ad<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On WeChat, another popular social media platform, combinations such as \u201cXi Jinping goes to Wuhan\u201d and \u201cWuhan + CCP + Crisis + Beijing\u201d were systematically being censored, a recent report from research group Citizen Lab confirmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Netizens began to use \u201cwh\u201d and \u201chb\u201d, the initials of Wuhan and Hubei, as replacement terms. That\u2019s fairly simple. But it gets more complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since China\u2019s National Red Cross and its ability to distribute supplies has been questioned, netizens anticipated \u2018Red Cross\u2019 would be censored and replaced it with \u201cred ten\u201d (the Chinese character for ten \u201c\u5341<\/em> Sh\u00ed\u201d<\/em> resembles a cross). When people express suspicions that supplies had been mishandled by the national Red Cross society, hashtags such as \u201csupplies are reded\u201d began trending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another example is the use of \u201cF4\u201d. Initially a Taiwanese boy band that attained popularity across the region in the early 2000s, it now refers to four regional politicians: the governor of Hubei province; the secretary of Hubei\u2019s Communist Party Committee; the mayor of Wuhan; and the party secretary of Wuhan. Many hold these four men most responsible for the massive outbreak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Innocuous sentences can also hold a deeper meaning, such as excerpts from the leaked police statement that Dr Li Wenliang, who had warned about the virus outbreak in December, had to give to the public security bureau:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCan you do this?\u201d the 3 January police statement reads, referring to the police\u2019s demand that he \u201cstop illegal activities\u201d related to the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCan,\u201d he confirms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDo you understand?\u201d it continues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUnderstand,\u201d Li responds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Social media users began posting the exchange as a sentence \u2013 \u201cCan you do this? Can. Do you understand? Understand.\u201d \u2013 and the phrase went viral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These posts were deleted, but netizens then revived and adapted the statement with more rebellious content. \u201cI cannot and do not understand.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The same night, the hashtag \u201cI want freedom of speech\u201d trended on Weibo. Once detected, it was removed, with those using it blocked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amid the heightened censorship of the coronavirus outbreak, new words are being censored on a daily basis. But Chinese netizens are used to substituting \u201csensitive words\u201d for alternatives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The most common example is \u201czf\u201d, which is the abbreviation for the Chinese word \u201cgovernment\u201d; \u201cjc\u201d stands for the \u201cpolice\u201d; \u201cguobao\u201d (national treasure) or panda images represent the domestic security bureau; and \u201cMinistry of Truth\u201d (from the George Orwell novel 1984) <\/em>is substituted for the Communist Party\u2019s Propaganda Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To access overseas websites blocked in China (such as Facebook and Twitter) netizens need to use VPNs\u2014software that give users the possibility to \u201cclimb over the Great Firewall\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLadder\u201d (for climbing) and \u201cVietnamese pho noodles\u201d are two terms that are routinely used to refer to VPNs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile June 4th, the infamous day of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and one of the most censored terms on the Chinese internet, becomes \u201c35 May\u201d, \u201c65 April\u201d or \u201ceight squared\u201d, to name but a few examples. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Often, netizens are forced to get creative with their posts to a degree which borders on the absurd. The removal of a post on ZhiHu (China\u2019s version of Quora) asking \u201chow to wash narrow neck bottles thoroughly\u201d may be baffling at first glance. But the Chinese pronunciation of \u201cnarrow neck bottle\u201d is similar to that of president Xi Jinping \u2013 a fact that did not escape the censors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, a parent\u2019s complaint on Weibo about his child being \u201cbad at learning\u201d was instantly removed. Why? Because in Chinese, the President\u2019s surname means \u201clearning\u201d. In this context, to say \u201clearning is bad\u201d must be censored. <\/p>\n\n\n\n China\u2019s censorship system is perplexing. The list of \u201csensitive\u201d words is constantly changing, and is never publicly revealed. There are some words that certain users cannot write, but other users can. As a result, people are always self-censoring in an attempt to beat the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a certain genius at work as netizens \u2013 among them talented journalists, students, scholars and activists \u2013 develop a rapidly expanding alternative dictionary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet this never-ending dance also drains their energy. Not least because when their accounts are removed, netizens are forced to create new ones and start again the process of connecting with their followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This leaves a lingering sense that such wisdom and imagination could be better spent on something more productive than fighting a constant battle to be heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u0e40\u0e23\u0e35\u0e22\u0e19\u0e23\u0e39\u0e49\u0e40\u0e1e\u0e34\u0e48\u0e21\u0e40\u0e15\u0e34\u0e21\u0e40\u0e01\u0e35\u0e48\u0e22\u0e27\u0e01\u0e31\u0e1a\u0e41\u0e2d\u0e21\u0e40\u0e19\u0e2a\u0e15\u0e35\u0e49<\/a> To fully appreciate conversations on China\u2019s social media platforms, merely knowing Chinese is not enough. To evade the most extensive internet censorship system in the world, netizens have no option but to create their own vocabulary to discuss \u201csensitive issues\u201d. This language keeps evolving as the government constantly adds new topics and terms that are prohibited. And there\u2019s no better example of this linguistic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-description":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image-id":0,"_yoast_wpseo_twitter-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-description":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image-id":0,"_hero_title":"","_hero_content":"","_hero_cta_text":"","_hero_cta_link":"","_hero_alignment":"","_hero_background":"","_hero_size":"","_hero_show":"","_hero_type":"","_hero_embed":"","_hero_video_id":0,"_hero_hide_image_caption":true,"_hero_hide_image_copyright":false,"_nav_style":"","_disable_share_icons":false,"_disable_sidebar":false,"_display_author_info":false,"_hide_featured_image":false,"_hide_featured_image_caption":true,"_maximize_post_content":false,"_reduce_content_width":false,"_sidebar_id":0,"_stretch_thumbnail":false,"byline_context":"","byline_entity":"","byline_is_author":false,"disable_related_content":false,"download_id":0,"download_text":"","show_published_date":true,"show_updated_date":true,"term_slider":"","amnesty_index_number":"","recipients":"","recipients_refresh":"","recipients_refreshed":"","amnesty_umbraco_data":"","document_ref":"","amnesty_updated":"","footnotes":""},"category":[1584],"location":[1588,1587,1589],"resourceType":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-2584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","location-southeast-asia","location-thailand","location-world"],"datePosted":"March 11, 2020","mlpRelationships":{"1":2307,"2":2584},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"resource-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resourceType?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The new Chinese dictionary<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Lyrical genius, or wasted creativity?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\u0e1a\u0e23\u0e34\u0e08\u0e32\u0e04\u0e2a\u0e19\u0e31\u0e1a\u0e2a\u0e19\u0e38\u0e19\u0e41\u0e2d\u0e21\u0e40\u0e19\u0e2a\u0e15\u0e35\u0e49<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"