In a recent post, I equated the Great Fire Wall of China to prison walls, which are intended to keep people inside the bounded area of the Chinese Internet. However, this virtual wall is not built from steel and concrete, rather it is constructed with a combination of legal regulations, co-operation with ISPs and technology, which includes IP Blocking, deep packet inspection and keyword filtering. It is this list of keywords used to manage conversations that is interesting.
On her YouTube Channel, Lei’s Real Talk, Madam Lei displayed the above list of keywords Chinese censors use to control speech on the moderated Chinese Internet, that area within the boundary of the Great Fire Wall.
Some words and phrases are obvious, many are obscure. Referring to someone as Mr. Cesspit is an obvious term to blacklist. Slim-necked bottle only makes sense if you read it aloud in Chinese and realize it is a homophone for Xi’s name. The colour green presents [loosely] a homographic problem because of the Chinese character’s relationship to Xi’s name.
So now we can write a seemingly innocuous vignette that has a deeper and darker meaning:
The green slim-neck bottle stands on the mantle of the fireplace. In an adjacent chair sits a young woman: Winnie writes history. This woman vows lifelong vegetarianism. Personally commanding the pandemic, she realized her calling and potential, and now wants to be the leader of the people. I am less ambitious. In this crazy universe, I am a soccer fan, like rolling waves in the stadium, I move with the ups and downs. Yet as luck would have it, I was the sole lottery winner, and now I have a goal of personally eradicating poverty…
This is what autocracy looks like.
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