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| Big Panda is watching you! |
To get around the censorship, Chinese internet users have cleverly come up with a series of code words and coded terms to substitute for censored words and phrases.
Here are some of those code words.
1) June 4th = May 35th
As you can imagine, the Chinese government are very draconian in censoring all discussion of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Incredibly, that censorship even extends to the date that the massacre took place!
The Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred on June 4th 1989, so any mention of that date is censored by the Chinese government. To get around this, Chinese internet users cleverly refer to June 4th as May 35th.
2) Beat internet censorship = Scale the wall
Chinese internet users refer to the Chinese regime's online censorship as the wall, so taking action to beat the censorship (such as using a VPN) is known as 'scaling the wall'.
N.B.: For the uninitiated, a VPN is a virtual proxy network, and is used to disguise your real life location. So for example someone in China could set their VPN settings to America or Europe and they wouldn't be subect to Chinese censorship restrictions.
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| "Pssst, wanna buy some noodles...?" |
3) VPN = Vietnamese Pho Noodles
VPNs are important tools in the battle for free speech, and therefore unsurprisngly the Chinese government don't look too fondly upon VPNs. As well as blocking websites that allow users to download VPNs, they even go as far as censoring all discussion of VPNs.
To get around the censorship, Chinese internet users therefore cleverly refer to a VPN as Vietamese Pho Noodles.
4) A visit from the police = Check the water meter
Due to the brutality and unaccountability of the Chinese police, many citizens will refuse to answer the door when the police knock on their door. To get around this, the Chinese police will sometimes go undercover and claim to be there to read their water meter.
However, this devious strategy is well known by Chinese citizens to the extent that 'check the water meter' has become the coded phrase to describe a visit from the police.
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| Kim Fatty 3, looking delighted at his new nickname. |
5) Kim Jong Un = Kim Fatty 3
I'm pretty sure the reason behind this code needs no explanation!
For the benefit of anyone who hasn't worked it out, Chinese internet users are apparently of the opinion that Kim Jong Un is a little bit overweight, so they use the code 'Kim Fatty 3' to beat the censors!
6) Hu Xijin = Frisbee Hu
Hu Xijin won't be a recognisable name to most people in the West, but he is well known in China because he runs the Chinese regime approved newspaper The Global Times.
As you can imagine, The Global Times always puts a positive spin on crimes by the Chinese government, so the Chinese people have amusingly given him the code name Frisbee Hu in reference to his ability to spin!
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| President Xi, pictured yesterday. |
7) Xi is bad = Bad at learning
It goes without saying that criticism of President Xi Jinping is absolutely not allowed in China, but as always the Chinese people have found a creative way to get around the censorship.
President Xi Jinping's surname means 'learning', so the phrase 'bad at learning' is a coded way to say 'Xi is bad'.
Sadly, however, this coded phrase didn't last long before it was also censored.
8) Wuhan = WH, Hubei = HB
During the initial stages of the Wuhan corona virus outbreak, the Chinese government as you'd expect attempted to cover the virus up, and their online censorship became even more extreme than usual. For example, all mention of Wuhan and Hubei (the city and province where the outbreak began) was censored from online discussion!
The simple method that Chinese internet users adopted to beat this censorship was to use the Western letters WH and HB to represent Wuhan and Hubei.
9) Police interrogation = Drink tea
As I'm sure The Global Times will confirm*, Chinese police will often use bribery when they want to 'convince' a witness to support the official narrative. If that fails, they then move onto threats. Whereas in English we would perhaps explain this strategy as 'try the carrot before the stick', in China a popular police incentive is to offer tea as a bribe, rather than a literal carrot.
Mentioning a police interrogation while online will obviously get you censored, so to beat the censorship, Chinese internet users covertly describe a police interrogation as 'to drink tea'.
* #sarcasm (see number 6)
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| "Water meter? But I don't have a water meter?" |
10) Censorship = River crab
In a twist that would be suited to the movie Inception, even the word 'censorship' is censored in China!
To get around the ban, Chinese internet users have adopted the phrase 'river crab' to refer to censorship. The simple explanation for this is because although they are written using different kanji, the pronounciation of river crab is similar to the pronounciation of censorship.
Footnote: President Xi has asked me to point out that everything written in this week's blog post is all lies and falsities. Apparently, the Chinese regime would never censor their citizens, and the Chinese public are free to speak freely at all times. Anyway, big thanks to President Xi for getting in touch to clear that up, and apologies to President Xi and any readers who I may have misled with my erroneous reporting.
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You may have noticed that this blog post is labelled 'part 1'. Sadly, that's because there are many more words and phrases that are censored by the authoritarian Chinese government. I'll round up a few more in a future blog post at some time.
If all this talk of censorship and oppression has left you on a bit of a downer, then apologies! Things will be back to their usual silly self next week. In the mean time you can find more light-hearted subject matter in the blog posts below:
10 interesting Chinese words and expressions
Lost in translation: Chinese movie titles
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