Reverse-engineering censorship in China(sciencemag.org)
sciencemag.org
Reverse-engineering censorship in China
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722
18 comments
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...
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
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."
"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."
It sounds like this attitude can be summed up as "It's alright to complain, but don't talk about doing anything about it."
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.
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.
Or maybe: don't communicate knowledge about some event where crowds are assembling (which spreads the word, and causes more people to show up).
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.
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.
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
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
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722.full.pdf
That link pops up a login screen for me.
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...