Repository of censored and sensitive Chinese keywords | Hacker News Reader

Repository of censored and sensitive Chinese keywords

citizenlab.org

46 pointsdesdiv25 comments

The list of words is so mind-boggling. On the Chinese Internet you cannot talk about former leaders (Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang); current leaders (Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao); communist party/army/Ministry of Truth/Police; porn/fuck/penis/vagina/sperm; protest/persecution/gang rape; Muslim/Tibet; freedom/democracy/revolution....

I wish there was a way to visualize at a high-level how language on the Chinese Internet is drifting over time and try and correlate it to the emotions/thoughts the Communist Party wants people to have. This is the Thought Police and Mind Control from 1984, only way, way more advanced and insidious and real.

Brrrr. Getting the chills just imagining being subjected to this!

Edit: adding a direct link to the Google Docs spreadsheet containing the 9054 words - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19eS47Dg086vR1jh9oo51...

Our company is releasing a version of our game for the Chinese market(now that you can officially buy the consoles and everything...) and the list of things we had to censor out is staggering. Most recent one was having to cut out a few countries from the list of available ones on the user profile creation screen, because China doesn't recognize them(like Taiwan).

You can still include something like "Taiwan, province of China" can't you? It's infuriating, but still better than just removing any option for Taiwan users.

That would be technically correct, but they want you to select "China" if you live in Taiwan. "province of X" would not be a correct choice in the "country" selection box. Obviously I agree with you, but the censorship commission is incredibly strict about that and they wouldn't accept such measures to sidestep their restrictions.

Edit: I really do wonder why someone downvoted my comments. Is that because you support the Chinese censorship or for some other reason?

Languages are not countries. A pet peeve I have is websites that toggle languages with a flag.

In this case, I would be curious to know if the PRC would have an issue with a traditional character option.

Since traditional is used in Hong-Kong which is in PRC, I doubt they would have an issue with it.

We're not talking about languages here however, but countries. A "traditional character option" wouldn't be enough to indicate Taiwan (since languages are not countries, just like you said).

You cannot control peoples thoughts this just makes the language evolve in order to bypass the firewall and people will find different words to mean the same thing in order to avoid the firewall.

And if that word gets banned they will just start using another one.

It makes communication a lot more cryptic if you're not part of the 'in' crowd but it doesn't stop people from talking about it.

The firewall isn't about being impenetrable.

It's about modifying the aggregate opinion of a population - not a specific individual. Politics is about statistics in the sense that you only need x percent of something to accomplish y goal. In other words, only x percentage of people need to think in a certain way to accomplish y goal. This is why, for example, VPNs aren't strictly enforced. Those who need them, get them. But it's such a pain in the ass for a regular person to subscribe to and deploy, that it doesn't matter on the aggregate level for 5% of people to break through.

Right. Also, banning all VPNs would make commerce very difficult. And the Party loves commerce.

I'm sure they'd love to stifle all non-party-endorsed political discussion, but they're in a difficult position which is getting more and more difficult with every year. It will be interesting to see how the situation evolves.

Theoretically, you can't stop people from talking a certain thing; but in practice in you can always increase the cost to reduce the efficiency of communication, especially you can gain a lot of advantages if the effect is on a massive scale, statistically...

And when you increase the cost to such a extent that people get more hassle from talking than get more benefits from this same act, people will simply stop doing it...

A simple example, I am right now typing on my tablet, and I do have to admit that I was a bit hesitant before I start writing this message...it's just much more comfortable to type on a real keyboard than the tablet screen...but I hate censorship and mind control so much that overcomes my reluctance to type on a tablet...

Btw, please don't downvote or upvote my post...I am currently at 256 karma units...I think it's cool and want to maintain this karma for a while...thanks...

Also, thigh gap. The Chinese have a real thing for their 大腿的缝隙

This is exactly what the whole row over the Chinese government "banning puns" was about. The Daily Show did a pretty funny segment on it[1] but they sort of missed the point because something was lost in translation. The ban on puns is a ban on using puns / homophones to dodge keyword censorship in the media and online.

[1]http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/g4fquh/a-measured-discussi...

My reflex, seeing the headline, is to think, "I wonder if there's information to be gained from this: the knowledge of exactly what the Chinese government deems worth censoring might provide information in itself."

Then I wonder if the people in charge of the censorship have thought of this, and are deliberately adding "noise", by censoring some random additional words or censoring everything in the same category as the words they actually want to censor.

r0h1n's post suggests that the range of things they censor is surprisingly extensive, and might be evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

I fear that one user of this repository will be US software startups wanting to operate in China to show they want to enthusiastically play nice with the government.

To those companies I say: you're selling out a billion people's human rights for a buck! Shame on you!

did they really censor the numbers 89 and 6.4?

how do they teach counting?

6.4 isn't a number, it's a date. It's common in China to have the separator for date elements be a period, so for example Christmas will happen on 12.25

And I dare say you learned to count with no mention of 6.4 ;)

(Pretty sure the Chinese don't use MM.DD for dates)

Do you have anything to back that up? For example, I speak to (and text with) Chinese people frequently, and can say from personal experience that M.D (zero padding is unusual) is quite common. Less than a week ago a Chinese student asked me to look over her application to a Canadian university and I recommended that dates written like 10.6 be reformatted to, using the example, "Oct 6". Where are you getting your ideas from?

edit:

Here's an image of a flyer that I was given today, advertising an event of the campus Russian club. You'll note that the event is scheduled for "2014.12.19 19:00"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e5fclcou9z39dl5/mmexport1418392916...

I think the question now is, where do you get off randomly spreading misinformation about topics you're obviously not familiar with?

Well they use Y年M月D日 for full dates, so I would imagine they would use M.D in an abbreviation?

> (Pretty sure the Chinese don't use MM.DD for dates)

Wikipedia says China is big-endian, matching iso8601.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Asi...

Didn't seem likely that Chinese censors would make that kind of mistake. 1989.6.4 is, of course, the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

iOS autocorrect turns "tiananmen" into "tiara man". This could be construed as a form of censorship (or dialogue-shaping?) as well.

June 4, 1989: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

to add to what others have said, what they censored was 八九 (eight-nine) and not 八十九 (eighty nine), and 六四 (six-four) not 六十四 (sixty four).

It's the same as "Nine Eleven" having a completely different meaning from "Nine One One" or "Ninety One".

Given that 4rt asked about "6.4" and not "64", I think it's safe to say that the strings "89" and "6.4", which make perfect sense in Chinese, were also censored and that that's what he meant to ask about.

You can use "89" to refer to the year in written english, too, although I guess (a) it's a little less common since the Y2K bug hype; and (b) it's more properly written "'89", with a leading apostrophe.

Also censored: 64, 6.2+2, 6.5-1, 7.5, 6四, 六.四

These lists would be great discussion material for a medium to advanced level Chinese class at the many Confucius institutes around the world. But it is very unlikely that it will show up there anytime soon.

I think if US foreign policy didn't use censorship, gay rights and color revolutions to destabilize other countries China would censor less, gays would be safer in Russia and people would not die in Ukraine.

But of course it's so easy to blame those fascist foreigners that don't like freedom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com