As the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approaches, China’s largest social media platform, Sina Weibo, has ramped up censorship of sensitive information, saying it would tighten control over undesirable terms, including homophones and related variants, to create a “clear” cyberspace.
That has become a battle of wits between Chinese cyberauthorities and netizens who use phonetic abbreviations or more creative homophones or variants of terms to avoid censorship.
For example, the Chinese word for “the Netherlands” — helan (荷蘭) — resembles that for the Chinese province of Henan (河南). After violent clashes at banks in that province earlier this month, people used slogans such as: “Save the depositors of Dutch [helan] banks.”
Everyone knew what they were referring to, as wordplay is ubiquitous in China.
Common expressions, including homophones for the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), “democracy” and “democratic movement,” are likely to be censored on Sina Weibo from now on.
Over the past few years, the CCP has tightened its grip on freedom of speech on the Internet, expanding its focus on homophones and intentional misspellings, and Chinese social media users have been using ever more creative homophones, variants or even the Romanization of Chinese terms to evade online censorship.
It is evident that the CCP has long had censorship standards for sensitive expressions on the Internet. Authorities are constantly searching for the use of terms that might threaten the party.
Under authoritarian rule in China, freedom of speech means following what the CCP says. Beijing does not care about people’s feelings and continues to suppress their last remaining expressions of free will online.
With the party congress approaching, the CCP is seeking to purge all white noise on the Internet, trying to turn it into Beijing’s “red utopia,” a cyberworld with no political criticism, where the greatness of the CCP leadership and the goodness of the party are praised.
Nick Hu is a graduate student.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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