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Watch Your Language! (And in China, They Do) By MARK MCDONALD | March 13, 2012, 1:43 am
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/watch-your-language-and-in-china-they-do/ HONG KONG — Scaling the wall. Buying soy sauce. Fifty cents. A mild collision. May 35. Mayor Lymph. River crab.
These words — some of them silly, all of them patently inoffensive — are part of the subversive lexicon regularly being used by Chinese bloggers to ridicule the government, poke fun at Communist Party leaders and otherwise circumvent the heavily censored Internet in China. A popular blog that tracks online political vocabulary, China Digital Times, calls them part of the “resistance discourse” on the mainland.
Internet usage in China, of course, is massive. One microblogging site alone, Sina Weibo, has more than 200 million accounts. Nationwide there are some 460 million Internet users, and more than 300 million Chinese can access it on their cellphones. (There’s no need to mention the numbers on Twitter and Facebook: They’re both blocked by the Chinese government.)
Internet traffic is watched and monitored with a thoroughness and ruthlessness that is almost admirable in its scope. (The term “Great Firewall” is appropriate and descriptive — and also banned by the censors. The government prefers its own name for its Internet surveillance program — the Golden Shield Project.)
The system ferrets out pornography and commercial scams, yes, but it also blocks certain search terms, scans for words or names it considers politically sensitive and sometimes deletes messages altogether.
More than 16 percent of all messages in China get deleted, according to a new study by the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The survey, published in the online journal First Monday, analyzed 70 million messages sent last summer, mostly on Sina Weibo.
“Weibo users — whose numbers recently surpassed 300 million — realize the days of unfettered, anonymous criticism may be drawing to a close,” writes Andrew Jacobs, a colleague in Beijing. “Beginning on March 16, new government regulations will require real-name registration.”
In short, no more anonymity.
“Another rule will require Sina Weibo to review the posts of those who have more than 100,000 followers,” Andrew says. “Those ‘harmful’ to national interests, according to the rules, must be summarily deleted within five minutes.”
The Carnegie Mellon team found “295 terms with a high probability of being censored.” China Digital Space has compiled its own impressive dictionary of slang and political terms, with etymologies and back stories.
So, good luck searching for terms like Tibet; immolation; the Dalai Lama; Falun Gong; democracy movement; Sheng Xue (dissident writer); Ai Weiwei (outspoken artist); Liu Xiaobo (imprisoned Nobel laureate); June 4 (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989); and Playboy (yep, the magazine).
From time to time over the past year, the words jasmine, Egypt, Jon Huntsman (the former American ambassador) and Occupy Beijing also have been banned.
And after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last March, online searches for the term “iodized salt’’ were blocked, presumably to quash the rumor racing across China that eating large quantities of salt would prevent radiation poisoning.
Two of the most well-known code terms to have sprung up online are “grass-mud horse” and “river crab.”
Another colleague in Beijing, Michael Wines, has explicated the origin of grass-mud horse, describing it horse as “a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity.
“Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that. It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.’’
A subtitled video of the gamboling horse is here — they’re actually alpacas — and Ai Weiwei singing the equine anthem in Chinese is here.
Perry Link, the author of “Liu Xiaobo’s Empty Chair,” described the use of code words and Aesopian allegory by Mr. Liu and other popular bloggers such as Han Han: “Harmony, for example, is a key word used in the government’s rhetoric, and Internet writers use hexie, or river crab, which is a near-homonym of the Chinese word for harmony, to mean repression.’’
To be harmonized, these days, is to be censored.
“Officials are aware, of course, of its barbed meaning on the Internet,” said the Chinese writer Yu Ha in an essay in the IHT Magazine, “but they can hardly ban it, because to do so would outlaw the ‘harmonious society’ they are plugging. Harmony has been hijacked by the public.”
A handful of the underground terms we mentioned earlier:
* Getting soy sauce. “A humorous way for netizens to distance themselves from a sensitive or political topic.” The etymology derives from an on-the-street TV interview about a celebrity scandal. A man interviewed at random, according to C.D.T., issues a profanity and says he has no connection to the matter, proclaiming, “I was just out buying some soy sauce.”
* Scale the wall. Bo Xilai, the powerful head of the Communist Party in the megacity of Chongqing, has been entangled in a mysterious political scandal in recent weeks. So his temporary absence from a session of the National People’s Congress last week sent rumors flying online. Many bloggers reported that they were gathering information “over the wall” or were “scaling the wall’’ — that is, going beyond the Internet firewall, using a tunnel or proxy. At one point, there were mentions of big doings in “the tomato” — a new online euphemism for Chongqing.
* Mayor Lymph. China Digital Times calls this “a codeword for its near-homophone, Charter 08,” the democracy manifesto that enraged the government and turned up its paranoia dial to 11. Mr. Liu, the principal author of Charter 08, remains in prison.
* Mild collision. A subway crash in Shanghai last fall injured hundreds of passengers, and the accident occurred shortly after a high-speed rail crash that killed dozens and injured nearly 200. The rail incident outraged many Chinese, and the authorities were on alert for mass protests.
“The evening after the accident, CCTV, Xinhua and a Shanghai television station all reported that ‘a mild collision’ occurred on Shanghai’s Metro Line 10,’ ’’ according to China Digital Times. “The claim that this was a mild accident elicited the derision of netizens who felt that the reporting was more intended to dampen fears about China’s train system than report what actually occurred. The phrase ‘mild collision’ instantly became an Internet buzzword.’’
* Fifty cents. “Netizens first coined the term ‘Fifty Cent Party’ to refer to undercover Internet commentators who were paid by the government to sway public opinion’’ by posting pro-Beijing statements, reputedly for 50 cents a shot, according to C.D.T.
“Now, however, the term is used to describe anyone who actively and publicly posts opinions online that defend or support government policy. As such, the so-called Fifty Cent Party has become the object of much scorn for many netizens.’’
* May 35. In other words, June 4. Also on the censors’ blacklist are any consecutive combinations of the numbers 6,4 and 89.
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发表于 2012-3-13 19:16
