Censorship on the Chinese net
March 24, 2010
Google has given up its censored Chinese search engine and moved to Hong Kong. Now, internet users in China are redirected to the Hong Kong site when they type Google into their computers. But this is only a short-term solution.
Strict Chinese censorship laws do not apply to Hong Kong, so the world's number one search engine can now give Chinese internet users short-term access to a free and uncensored World Wide Web. This is bound to upset Beijing, so it wouldn't come as a surprise if google.com.hk were soon blocked in China.
But this will not keep Chinese internet buffs from turning to sites outside of the restraints of Chinese censorship. Ways of getting around censorship have been around since censorship itself.
On the net, there is a plethora of help guides describing how users can gain access to censored information via proxy servers using shortened web addresses and anonymizer privacy software.
China's internet users have learned which words to use and those not to, to avoid triggering the automatic word recognition tools used by the country's censorship agencies.
A is for Apple
Anyone who uses the Chinese characters for government (政府; pronounced zhengfu) online has to assume it will be blocked by an automatic filter. That is why, when it comes to sensitive words, experts now type in acronyms for certain words, using Latin letters. The word for government (zhengfu) has become "ZF". Acronyms for various swear words are as familiar among younger Chinese today as they are in local dialects.
Certain numbers are also taboo for Chinese search engines. Each combination of letters that includes the numbers 6 and 4 (whether Chinese numbers or Arabic are used) is recognized as having something to do with the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, which happened on June 4, 1989, and is thus automatically blocked. So China's internet community has started using May 35th as a code.
Another way to avoid censorship is to use different characters for certain words. This is only possible because many words sound the same when spoken but are written with different characters.
The common insult involving an enemy's mother is spoken "cao ni ma" in Chinese. So is the expression "grass mud horse", which has now become very popular on the Chinese net and in videos criticizing Chinese censorship on YouTube.
The video shows a "grass mud horse" competing with a "river crab" (河蟹, hexie). The river crab is a metaphor for the word hexie (和谐), which means harmony. It is used for the Chinese authorities, which propagated "harmony on the internet" while strengthening their campaigns for censorship.
Malapropisms are also blocked
All this does not mean the censors don't know what is going on behind their backs. These malapropisms have been entered into Chinese word blacklists.
It has become a sort of sport for China's internet community to use this character to mock the censors: 凸. It is pronounced tu and means convex. But if you look closely, you can see the character could resemble a certain sign that is made with the finger.
Author: Mathias Boelinger / sb
Editor: Thomas Baerthlein