With the explosion of internet-based social media, the growing activist/political dissident movement in China has found new and increasingly powerful avenues of popular mass appeal and outreach. This is evinced in the growing popularity of dissident blogs and various political-activism and social criticism-focused online forums of communication and social organization.
The Chinese government, always weary of any form of open and popular dissent, and especially so of types that are capable of reaching a mass audience (The Chinese internet population, already the world's largest, at last count stands at 485 according to wikipedia, and is projected to reach over 718 million by 2013), has enacted various technical and political measures to control the dissemination of politically sensitive ideas via the internet. I will examine three measures Chinese web-activists have devised to get around them, and offer suggestions for countermeasures.
The Chinese government operates a vast censorship apparatus, with various constituent components that address various different froms of dissent and which carry out distinct counter-dissent functions. There are two general streams of censorship: First, there are the standard text scanning server clusters that automatically monitor essentially all of China's internet traffic and accordingly filters out of query (searches) results that are deemed sensitive. At the same time, the scanners also automatically troll through online postings and blogs, and automatically deletes entries of blog posts that contain sensitive terms. The database of these sensitive terms are constantly updated. Secondly, the government employs, at the county level, numerous online-monitors, whose jobs are to troll through popular local forums, locate signs of dissent and anti-government opinion, and post pro-government replies/counter arguments so as to "guide" popular opinion in the government's favor.
To counter these measures, Chinese netizens have come up with various interesting low-tech but clever methods. Against unintelligent mechanical trolls, one applies a relatively simple solution: instead of posting text, the dissident converts the file to an image or PDF file, and posts the image instead of text, so that computers cannot search and filter the text against a database. A simple countermeasure would be to implement standardized OCR (optical character recognition) software across the filtering platforms. Such software, which scans images of text and recognizes the text for conversion into text format, are already readily available in english, and are relatively accurate. They are becoming more available in Chinese.
The earliest filtration software are also indiscriminate and very primitive. In that they would automatically filter out EVERY search result imputed into a search engine, that contained sensitive terms, in the process, innocuous results are censored along with politically sensitive ones, causing popular dissatisfaction. A countermeasure to this undesirable result is to create more sophisticated and integrated (for example across spectrums of political sensitivity) databases with more intelligent recognition software capable of combining search terms, so as to filter out truly sensitive search terms while leaving out innocuous ones. This type of advanced, intelligent filtering is already being implemented.
A second, uniquely Chinese method of censorship evasion is to use homonyms in writing politically sensitive blogs. Chinese is unique in having numerous characters that are written differently, but pronounced the same way, and also numerous characters that may be pronounced differently but written the same way in different contexts. This produces a veritable cornucopia of potential puns and other homonyms, many extremely hilarious and highly satirical, to replace terms deemed politically sensitive. A standard set of these has begun to develop among Chinese bloggers and netizens, examples include the term "harmony" (a standard slogan of the current administration is "harmonious society"), which is pronounced "hexie", the derogatory homonym for which literally reads "river crab." The profusion of standardized collections and online dictionaries of these replacement terms is evidence of their popularity. Many of these standardized homonyms are utterly innocuous terms that make it impossible for the government to ban, as this would result in an effective end to internet communication.
Aside from homonyms, there are generalized slangs that have come to replace banned terms, "50 cents faction" is the term used to describe government-paid opinion-leaders. The term comes from the popular assumption that they are paid 50 cents for every comment they post. This is the one type of government censorship, an extremely active and sophisticated kind, that there are no good countermeasures for aside from open ridicule. A downside to this method is that with more prevalent use and public exposures of its use, the government faces an increasingly hostile public skeptical to even truthful expressions of support for the government. As a result, this is a somewhat self-destructive measure, its use should therefore be curtailed, or automated and made secret, such that exposures are rare.
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