Reverse-engineering censorship in China(sciencemag.org)

61 pointsby magda_wangvor 12 Jahren20 comments

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

18 comments

moyixvor 12 Jahren

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...

vinceguidryvor 12 Jahren

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...

cmiller1vor 12 Jahren

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

http://pastebin.com/Afq87wWd

jameslivor 12 Jahren

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."

porpoisemonkeyvor 12 Jahren

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

thaumasiotesvor 12 Jahren

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".

notahackervor 12 Jahren

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.

kazinatorvor 12 Jahren

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

kazinatorvor 12 Jahren

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.

mentatvor 12 Jahren

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

ChuckMcMvor 12 Jahren

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.

vikiomega9vor 12 Jahren

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.

zmjonesvor 12 Jahren

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

______1vor 12 Jahren

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

KerrickStaleyvor 12 Jahren

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

monkeypizzavor 12 Jahren

That link pops up a login screen for me.

ape4vor 12 Jahren

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

michaelqvor 12 Jahren

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.