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In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy.

As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it.

But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship.

Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/asia/china-economy-garbage-time.html

Nyoro~n 1y ago 💬 2

An impressive display of dissidents circumventing state censor was the Hong Kong Billionaire Li ka-shing during the HK protests hiding a secret message in a newspaper ad

Sadly, since 2019 didnt get anywhere..... "Laying flat" for "garbage time" has even less energy

Observing from across the Strait, i think in the mid 2000s the chinese internet slang felt very clever, but as censors expand the blacklisted words, trying to decipher what Chinese are trying to say gets harder 😅 its like a mixture of metaphors, folk tales, memes, english substitions -- keeping up with their slang isnt easy

A comment that stuck with me went something like this: "Will people of the future look back at our internet discussions and think we're all retarded cowards who cant speak straight?"

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Discussion

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

I always wondered if they could just type characters that sound like what they're saying, but are not the right characters, so its gibberish if you read it, but makes sense if you hear it. Greetings from Texas. I visited Taiwan once and was really impressed.

Nyoro~n 1y ago

chinese in general is filled with homophones (many many characters share the same sounds) so its a common method of circumventing blacklisted words, but homophones can get blacklisted too 😅 (and using too many homophoes screws up context which chinese heavily relies on)

chinese netizens have to get even more clever than that, discussing gov officials using animals that resemble them (i.e. winnie the pooh and toad king ) would be evolution of that, and so on

when too many homophones get blacklisted (ie. Government 政府) they just start resorting to phonetic english abbreviation 'ZF', then they wait to see if the censors want to blow out two letters from the english alphabet 🤣 so far they havent cross that bridge

Chinese internet is a strange strange place