Friday, March 30, 2012

Mainland Netspeak: how to get around censorship

Background


You may have learnt from newspaper that how Internet censorship is conducted in Mainland China. In recent years, the idea of building a "harmonious society" have been advocated by the Communist Party. Many messages which were considered to jeopardize the principle were filtered by the Internet Police or Green Dam Youth Escort, a content-control software. Many sensitive keywords were banned as well.


To express their discontent, Mainland netizens have been using the word River crab (Chinese河蟹pinyinhéxiè), which sounds similar to "Harmonious/Harmonize/Harmonization" (Chinese: 和諧) in Mandarian, to refer to Internet censorship.


Doctored image by netizens :"Indecent material will be river-crabbed" 





How do the netizens cope with Internet censorship?



Before we start talking about this, let's have a look at a satiric song about how llamas(Chinese:草泥馬) beats the River crabs(Chinese:河蟹).

Lyrics:
在那荒茫美丽马勒戈壁
有一群草泥马
他们活泼又聪明,
他们调皮又灵敏,
他们由自在生活在那草泥马戈壁,
他们顽强勇敢克服艰苦环境。
噢,卧槽草泥马
噢,狂槽草泥马
他们为了卧草不被吃掉 打败了河蟹
河蟹从此消失草泥马戈壁



1. Euphony

People use euphony to dodge censorship as this is less likely to be filtered. For example, the words in red are actually all euphony of foul language. When people wants to talk about dissident Ai Wei Wei(Chinese: 艾未未), they refer him as Ai Wei Lei(Chinese: 愛未來) instead.


2. Breaking up the character

Some words which may be related to indecent content are also banned in some forums. For instant, 脫(English:take off clothes) and  (which may be linked with  姦, in English, rape). The netizens break the characters into two. As a result, 脫 becomes 月兌 and 强 becomes 弓虽.


3. Pinyin acronyms
You may refer to this article.



Futher readings:

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