Reverse-engineering censorship in China | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-engineering censorship in China

sciencemag.org

61 pointsmagda_wang20 comments

Censorship in China is a fascinating topic for me, because it's an area where we can use technology to figure out things about social issues on the other side of the world.

A great example of this is cases where chat clients use client-side censorship lists; in this case you can extract the entire list and essentially have a rich source of words the Chinese government is concerned about. For example (following on some excellent work by CitizenLab [1]), I recently extracted the LINE IM client's list of banned words [2].

The entries there are fascinating to read through; you get the feeling that there's a whole story behind many of them that's waiting to be told. Take for example, "江蟾蜍", which Google Translate glosses as "river toad". It turns out that this refers to an incident where a large inflatable toad was placed in Beijing's Yuyuantan Park [3], which someone then realized looked like former president Jiang Zemin.

I'm hoping to do more research reverse engineering Chinese censorship lists, hopefully even finding ways to efficiently probe server-side lists as well.

[1] https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regi...

[2] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~brendan/line.txt

[3] http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/river-crabbed-toad-stor...

An excellent book to read on this topic is Age of Ambition - Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China[1]

It discusses the topic of banned phrases like "river toad". In many cases what's happening is Chinese citizens find ways around the censors by searching for homonyms and other permutations of censored topics. Some of them are quite hilarious.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth-ebo...

For the lazy, here's a quick google translate of that line.txt list of censored terms:

http://pastebin.com/Afq87wWd

The first paragraph of the section Results basically sums it up. In my personal experience, it is true, not only in the Internet, but also in everyday conversations. People can criticize the party and its leaders freely in their conversations, without any concern to be arrested.

"Criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are routinely published, whereas posts with collective action potential are much more likely to be censored—regardless of whether they are for or against the state (two concepts not previously distinguished in the literature). Chinese people can write the most vitriolic blog posts about even the top Chinese leaders without fear of censorship, but if they write in support of or opposition to an ongoing protest—or even about a rally in favor of a popular policy or leader—they will be censored."

Another Hacker News reader recommended in a thread a month or so ago the book series by historian Richard J. Evans on the Third Reich. In the second book in the series, The Third Reich in Power, Evans points out that the Nazis had a law against making jokes about the regime leadership, and many neighbors informed on neighbors to the Gestapo about jokes they heard. But few of those cases were prosecuted, and even people in the Nazi leadership, according to archival records, thought it was important to let people blow off steam about the Nazi leadership.

Yes, what a dictatorial regime most fears is concerted, fearless action, not just talk. Taiwan's largely peaceful transformation to free and fair elections, a free press, and general protection of civil rights came about only after there was an organized opposition (the 黨外 movement) counteracting decades of attempts by the former dictatorship to suppress the development of independent civil society organizations. The eventual transformation in China will most likely take the same form. The regime is trying to delay that transformation.

It sounds like this attitude can be summed up as "It's alright to complain, but don't talk about doing anything about it."

Or maybe: don't communicate knowledge about some event where crowds are assembling (which spreads the word, and causes more people to show up).

This isn't exactly a new idea. Private clubs were banned in the Roman empire specifically because of the risk of collective action (they didn't want clubs to be the seed of a rebellion). We have correspondence from a governor to the emperor where the governor says (paraphrased, obviously), "a bunch of the men locally have put together a firefighting group, so if a building catches fire everyone shows up and helps put it out. This seems like a decent idea to me, is it OK?" The response is "absolutely not".

The government is not so much concerned about desire to "fix" things as people's desire to politically organize in ways they don't control, hence the perhaps more surprising aspect of the earlier post: they're less keen on individuals organizing rallies in support of a leader than they are on those individuals voicing a personal criticism of that individual.

Reading on what demonstrations of popular support for specific figures within a notionally unified establishment became during the Cultural Revolution is helpful in understanding the present leadership's paranoia here.

In other words, the communists pretty much have granted their people nearly USA-style freedom of speech, after having observed for many decades that it is no threat to the power structure there, and probably in some ways helps to preserve the status quo.

That last bit of censorship they have there just helps to curb some protests; the USA version of that is to let people communicate about the protest, so it blows larger, but then bring in the National Guard.

Or one can just use the DHS to illegally coordinate crackdowns like they did for Occupy.

How are these results reconciled with well-documented censorship of any posts containing specific words?

I've personally seen social media posts with any mention of events like Tiananmen or political leaders blocked (often automatically by software), and a Chinese friend discovered she couldn't text the number '64' around June 4th (she was actually trying to send an address).

You can try it for yourself on a site like Renren (www.renren.com), just try posting something with the words 天安门 (Tiananmen), 习近平（Xi Jinping, China's current President), or 周永康 (Zhou Yongkang, former PSC member).

The Chinese version of Skype (actually Skype, not a clone) even blocks words like 'fuck' (see: http://www.nartv.org/mirror/breachingtrust.pdf)

Nice that someone has done this. It would be interesting to test it on US and European social networks as well. I found it particularly fascinating that griping was not censored but calls to action were. The idea of using griping as a way of evaluating leaders (in lieu of voting) seemed pretty interesting. One could argue that might work more widely.

I can't remember where I heard this, it was on some BBC program, but effectively one anon Chinese official was essentially pointing to what you're saying.

one of the coolest political science articles i've read. they have written several other papers on the topic. there most famous article on the topic is:

http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf

Is the full article not pay-walled for anyone else?

Works for me (in USA). Do you have "Full Text" and "Full Text (PDF)" links on the left? Try this:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722.full.pdf

That link pops up a login screen for me.

The censors are lucky to have a country-specific language.

Chinese is an international language, and an official language of several East and Southeast Asian countries, most of which use Mandarin syntax in their written form.

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