So the reason I wanted to write this essay is because I’ve seen a lot of people say lately that Chinese censorship seems to be failing rather hard these last three years.
Jesus, Moly, that’s basically a State of the Nation address! This is a great piece of writing. Substack is still accessible in parts of mainland China, so I wonder if I should assign it to my middle school students to read…
I’ll just give an additional example of censorship: I was at an Alan Walker concert (electronic dance music) in Shenzhen a couple of weeks back, and the warm up act was a Cantonese rapper. Midway through the rapper’s set, someone pulled the plug, and the entire stage, set, and sound system just crashed off. He disappeared, and the main act went off without any more “technical hitches.” I don’t speak a word of Cantonese, so I’ve no idea what he was saying, but on an operational level, that’s how they censor artists.
It goes farther than that too! I got really into Chinese standup comedians for a while. The whole industry was still in its infancy. There was only really one company hosting events and putting on TV shows to give standup comedians a stage. Then, a standup comedian made a joke that I think was perfectly fine, but apparently the government thought was insulting to the PLA or something. And the company that he was signed to got fined 8 figures. That's a deathblow for a small agency that's only been operating for three years. Since then, I haven't seen a single standup show come out of China. :(
But back when standup was actually allowed and a thing in China, a really memorable event for me was when they invited two standup comedians to perform on the Chinese New Year CCTV show, which is a very big official government event and something that almost all Chinese people watch. And throughout the entire performance, the two of them just stood around, awkwardly laughed, and danced around to music, and didn't say a word. I presume because not a single riff was approved by the censors. My parents, who have no idea what standup even is, asked me afterwards, "What the fuck is this?" And I was like, "No! No, this is not what it usually looks like!"
But like, wow, I think just the fact that two standup comedians got up on stage to say absolutely nothing for two and a half minutes is pretty spicy commentary :P
Was just rereading this and was struck by the chu na thing. Isn't there concern that they're going to get robbed? If one was able to just hop on a car does that mean there aren't guards? I'd think someone carrying that much cash would be a very tempting target for thieves.
That definitely used to be a problem 20-25 years ago, but nowadays, there's cameras everywhere and facial recognition technology, so so long as you don't wander down particularly shady alleys that happen to be blindspots on the camera, they'll catch the thieves pretty quickly, and this is definitely the sort of case the police are motivated to solve. So I honestly haven't heard about it happening much.
Even in the case of the chu na that ran off with the money, she was caught the same day.
Interesting to get your perspective on this issue and some insight into your broader worldview. I've only been following you for a short time so I've been wondering how much your views aligned with the posts you translate haha
I completely agree with you that the language barrier plays a huge part is limiting people's access to information from outside China, and could well be of more significance than the great firewall. I remember there were a good few years when I could still access English language BBC News and Wikipedia long after the Chinese versions had been blocked. Even now I think UK Sky News is still available without a VPN. Although I don't know if we can ascribe poor English to deliberate policy, I think Japan isn't much better, is it? Or see how British school kids get on with French.
I wonder what you think about how transcending the language barrier can also lead people to standing more firmly with the government because they feel like China is being unfairly maligned.
( As an aside this reminds me of a quote from Hitchhiker's Guide: “Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”)
I still think the great firewall plays an important part in cutting Chinese people off from outside info (and vice versa). I get the impression that VPN use isn't that high outside of young professionals, and even paid ones can be unreliable. At the very least, it adds another layer of inconvenience. And even people who use VPNs to look at stuff they wouldn't be allowed to see on the Chinese internet are probably very wary about actually posting stuff, so it still constrains online behavior.
Perhaps you might do another post focused on censorship and its impact on artistic/creative input. Some seem to feel that its impact is overstated, but I feel like it must generate some barriers to creative imagination. Not due to "brainwashing" or anything like that, but simply because a lot of creativity arises from the act of trying to create something. But if you know that your creative work will likely never see the light of day, or could perhaps even get you in legal trouble you might not even bother to set off down the path that could end with you producing something interesting or beautiful.
I think people are going to be primarily concerned about their personal lives first, and only secondarily concerned about China as a nation. It's one thing if you tie their personal suffering to China being unfairly maligned, like, "The reason you can't have affordable healthcare is because of all these sanctions they keep putting on us!" But for the most part, the more China brags about being the second biggest economy and that it's going to take over the west any day now, and the more people learn of what life is like in these western nations, the more they get upset that their lives don't match up. Theoretically, China's GDP is growing faster, and theoretically, they're working longer hours and paying more taxes, and yet they get much fewer protections and benefits.
And yeah, definitely, the most effective way that censorship is used is in getting people to self-censor. But keep in mind, most of the population who's on the Chinese internet tend to lean young professionals who live in big cities. The demographics which have no idea what a VPN is or how to get it (like my parents) don't have a habit of hanging out on the internet all day anyways :P
I should do a post focused on trends around Chinese TV and movies in order to meet censorship standards. I think that'd be a really interesting topic. There's a lot of tropes that are a lot more common in China because it's what censors like to see.
This was really interesting, thanks for the writeup! One thing I'm curious about: when I was visiting Beijing last summer, a grad student I met there told me that you don't get in trouble for using VPNs for mundane things, but you *will* get in trouble if you use a VPN for seditious activity. But I thought using a VPN made your activity impossible to track... so is there any truth in that?
"Seditious activity". Around the end of 2023, a programmer got arrested for using a VPN to pick up oddjobs and was fined for everything he'd made in the last three years. I'd call that a pretty mundane thing to use VPNs for. But it's not like they're arresting all programmers for using VPNs, because they all do. And what about the poor fanfic writer? Ten years is about the longest you could actually be sentenced to prison for. Beyond that, it usually just jumps to death penalty.
But the Chinese justice system doesn't even remotely try to be fair. It just randomly fucks with people whenever the government wants to be super strict about something, and then when the phases passes, it stops caring again. There was a big crackdown on porn around the time of the AO3 incident, so they started actually arresting people for porn, whereas usually, all that would happen is you'd get your account banned. It's true that 99.99% of the time, you won't get in trouble just normally using a VPN, because they can't put *everybody* in jail. But you do still have to keep an ear to the ground, in case the government starts cracking down on this thing or another.
I'm not entirely sure how VPNs work, but in a lot of cases, people get in trouble because they get reported by people they know, or they get doxed through what they write on the internet. It's why I kind of never came through on the interview with my parents, because it's too easy to let details slip that make it possible to deduce who I am, and I've got family I care about still stuck in China. I don't want to bring any trouble to them.
But if you're talking politics outside of the wall at all, or looking at more neutral sources of the latest news in China, and you get any amount of attention, there's actual people whose job is to piece together all the clues in your comments to figure out who you are, so they can threaten you into shutting up.
Don’t have an intelligent response at the moment, but this is so fascinating and hilarious, and I really really appreciate that you’re maintaining this project.
Something I've noticed: There's a weird sequence where some Chinese people go from: The US is awful. Wait, the government lies and says the US is the worst thing ever so the US must be the best thing ever. Wait, the US isn't perfect, the government was right! I almost wonder if extremity is safer for propaganda because it subtly trains people to think in extreme, non-complex terms.
出纳 seems like it means paymaster. It's still used in some old timey office titles but the position hasn't been common for over a century. The way it worked was that the paymaster would be they would go and get the money from the bank before payday. They'd physically bring it to the factory or wherever. Then they'd set up a table and you'd walk up, hand them some slip or document (often from your manager), and they'd disburse physical money. If it was a big enough operation they'd have people working under them who were called cashiers. These were lower ranked people who'd do the paperwork and physically hand out the cash on payday and the like. There weren't that many incidents of people just taking the money and running in the US. But that's because it happened a lot in the 16th/17th century in Britain so the US inherited Britain's security measures.
China's been deploying AI-like tools for censorship for like 20 years now. It's been getting steadily more advanced. But I doubt it's going to completely eliminate dissent. People are adaptive and you end up with euphemisms and, when those are discovered, new euphemisms. And so on and so forth. I also suspect that China's AI security state is somewhat overstated because there's no objective check.
Like, you hear the police have this fancy computer that can identify criminals with 100% accuracy. Okay. If the Chinese police arrest the wrong person... at what point do you find that out? Are they going to admit it or are they going to send a random person to jail to preserve the illusion? (Or maybe they make up some excuse and fine the person if they don't want to make too much trouble.) When it is tested outside China it tends to underperform and the official line there is that it's only trained on Chinese data so it has trouble identifying non-Chinese. Which maybe. But they're not going to let us look at the success rate in China itself.
I think it's more accurate to say that humans in general are primed to think in extreme, non-complex terms. And there's never a lot of room for moderate voices on the internet. In that, people giving moderate, mild opinions never get any attention.
It's actually not just euphemisms. People are advancing to the stage of putting the government into catch-22s. Like, my favourite win against the censors this year was an article somebody wrote titled, "Why do autocratic systems suck at innovation?" And in the whole article, he never mentions the CCP or China once. The whole thing is about organised crime, the methods they use to maintain autocratic control over their subjects, and how they're getting into a lot of legitimate businesses (like olive oil or avocados) to make money, and yet they never have any success in the tech field. Which then goes on about why non-democratic social structures don't have a lot of incentives for innovation.
It's one of those things where the government can't censor it, because then aren't you admitting you're the same kind of thing as the cartels? China *claims* to have democracy. It can't go around slapping itself in the face. But it can't not censor it either, because everyone reading it knows what the article is trying to say.
My favourite moment of censorship was when a video titled, "It's almost New Years! Time to butcher some pigs!" got censored for "insulting national leaders". The video is literally just a man butchering a pig for New Years.
I'm sure there's a lot of innocent people in jail in China. You heard reports about it back in the day, when there was more freedom of press and investigative journalism. Even to this day, a lot of cases are tried and convicted based on nothing but a confession, which the courts themselves admit was obtained with torture. But, quote, "Considering the problems with organised crime in the area, we have to give certain leeways to the police."
There's also fun compilations of all the ways police AI screws up posted on the internet once in a while, to prove the point that AI will never replace humans. Apparently, it gets consistently confused by celebrities' faces printed on the sides of buses and think it's a person walking in the street. It also freaks out if a piece of paper gets stuck to a camera and thinks it's being attacked by an alien creature.
Jesus, Moly, that’s basically a State of the Nation address! This is a great piece of writing. Substack is still accessible in parts of mainland China, so I wonder if I should assign it to my middle school students to read…
I’ll just give an additional example of censorship: I was at an Alan Walker concert (electronic dance music) in Shenzhen a couple of weeks back, and the warm up act was a Cantonese rapper. Midway through the rapper’s set, someone pulled the plug, and the entire stage, set, and sound system just crashed off. He disappeared, and the main act went off without any more “technical hitches.” I don’t speak a word of Cantonese, so I’ve no idea what he was saying, but on an operational level, that’s how they censor artists.
It goes farther than that too! I got really into Chinese standup comedians for a while. The whole industry was still in its infancy. There was only really one company hosting events and putting on TV shows to give standup comedians a stage. Then, a standup comedian made a joke that I think was perfectly fine, but apparently the government thought was insulting to the PLA or something. And the company that he was signed to got fined 8 figures. That's a deathblow for a small agency that's only been operating for three years. Since then, I haven't seen a single standup show come out of China. :(
But back when standup was actually allowed and a thing in China, a really memorable event for me was when they invited two standup comedians to perform on the Chinese New Year CCTV show, which is a very big official government event and something that almost all Chinese people watch. And throughout the entire performance, the two of them just stood around, awkwardly laughed, and danced around to music, and didn't say a word. I presume because not a single riff was approved by the censors. My parents, who have no idea what standup even is, asked me afterwards, "What the fuck is this?" And I was like, "No! No, this is not what it usually looks like!"
But like, wow, I think just the fact that two standup comedians got up on stage to say absolutely nothing for two and a half minutes is pretty spicy commentary :P
Was just rereading this and was struck by the chu na thing. Isn't there concern that they're going to get robbed? If one was able to just hop on a car does that mean there aren't guards? I'd think someone carrying that much cash would be a very tempting target for thieves.
That definitely used to be a problem 20-25 years ago, but nowadays, there's cameras everywhere and facial recognition technology, so so long as you don't wander down particularly shady alleys that happen to be blindspots on the camera, they'll catch the thieves pretty quickly, and this is definitely the sort of case the police are motivated to solve. So I honestly haven't heard about it happening much.
Even in the case of the chu na that ran off with the money, she was caught the same day.
Interesting to get your perspective on this issue and some insight into your broader worldview. I've only been following you for a short time so I've been wondering how much your views aligned with the posts you translate haha
I completely agree with you that the language barrier plays a huge part is limiting people's access to information from outside China, and could well be of more significance than the great firewall. I remember there were a good few years when I could still access English language BBC News and Wikipedia long after the Chinese versions had been blocked. Even now I think UK Sky News is still available without a VPN. Although I don't know if we can ascribe poor English to deliberate policy, I think Japan isn't much better, is it? Or see how British school kids get on with French.
I wonder what you think about how transcending the language barrier can also lead people to standing more firmly with the government because they feel like China is being unfairly maligned.
( As an aside this reminds me of a quote from Hitchhiker's Guide: “Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”)
I still think the great firewall plays an important part in cutting Chinese people off from outside info (and vice versa). I get the impression that VPN use isn't that high outside of young professionals, and even paid ones can be unreliable. At the very least, it adds another layer of inconvenience. And even people who use VPNs to look at stuff they wouldn't be allowed to see on the Chinese internet are probably very wary about actually posting stuff, so it still constrains online behavior.
Perhaps you might do another post focused on censorship and its impact on artistic/creative input. Some seem to feel that its impact is overstated, but I feel like it must generate some barriers to creative imagination. Not due to "brainwashing" or anything like that, but simply because a lot of creativity arises from the act of trying to create something. But if you know that your creative work will likely never see the light of day, or could perhaps even get you in legal trouble you might not even bother to set off down the path that could end with you producing something interesting or beautiful.
I think people are going to be primarily concerned about their personal lives first, and only secondarily concerned about China as a nation. It's one thing if you tie their personal suffering to China being unfairly maligned, like, "The reason you can't have affordable healthcare is because of all these sanctions they keep putting on us!" But for the most part, the more China brags about being the second biggest economy and that it's going to take over the west any day now, and the more people learn of what life is like in these western nations, the more they get upset that their lives don't match up. Theoretically, China's GDP is growing faster, and theoretically, they're working longer hours and paying more taxes, and yet they get much fewer protections and benefits.
And yeah, definitely, the most effective way that censorship is used is in getting people to self-censor. But keep in mind, most of the population who's on the Chinese internet tend to lean young professionals who live in big cities. The demographics which have no idea what a VPN is or how to get it (like my parents) don't have a habit of hanging out on the internet all day anyways :P
I should do a post focused on trends around Chinese TV and movies in order to meet censorship standards. I think that'd be a really interesting topic. There's a lot of tropes that are a lot more common in China because it's what censors like to see.
This was really interesting, thanks for the writeup! One thing I'm curious about: when I was visiting Beijing last summer, a grad student I met there told me that you don't get in trouble for using VPNs for mundane things, but you *will* get in trouble if you use a VPN for seditious activity. But I thought using a VPN made your activity impossible to track... so is there any truth in that?
"Seditious activity". Around the end of 2023, a programmer got arrested for using a VPN to pick up oddjobs and was fined for everything he'd made in the last three years. I'd call that a pretty mundane thing to use VPNs for. But it's not like they're arresting all programmers for using VPNs, because they all do. And what about the poor fanfic writer? Ten years is about the longest you could actually be sentenced to prison for. Beyond that, it usually just jumps to death penalty.
But the Chinese justice system doesn't even remotely try to be fair. It just randomly fucks with people whenever the government wants to be super strict about something, and then when the phases passes, it stops caring again. There was a big crackdown on porn around the time of the AO3 incident, so they started actually arresting people for porn, whereas usually, all that would happen is you'd get your account banned. It's true that 99.99% of the time, you won't get in trouble just normally using a VPN, because they can't put *everybody* in jail. But you do still have to keep an ear to the ground, in case the government starts cracking down on this thing or another.
I'm not entirely sure how VPNs work, but in a lot of cases, people get in trouble because they get reported by people they know, or they get doxed through what they write on the internet. It's why I kind of never came through on the interview with my parents, because it's too easy to let details slip that make it possible to deduce who I am, and I've got family I care about still stuck in China. I don't want to bring any trouble to them.
But if you're talking politics outside of the wall at all, or looking at more neutral sources of the latest news in China, and you get any amount of attention, there's actual people whose job is to piece together all the clues in your comments to figure out who you are, so they can threaten you into shutting up.
I see, thanks for the reply.
Don’t have an intelligent response at the moment, but this is so fascinating and hilarious, and I really really appreciate that you’re maintaining this project.
Awww, thanks!
Something I've noticed: There's a weird sequence where some Chinese people go from: The US is awful. Wait, the government lies and says the US is the worst thing ever so the US must be the best thing ever. Wait, the US isn't perfect, the government was right! I almost wonder if extremity is safer for propaganda because it subtly trains people to think in extreme, non-complex terms.
出纳 seems like it means paymaster. It's still used in some old timey office titles but the position hasn't been common for over a century. The way it worked was that the paymaster would be they would go and get the money from the bank before payday. They'd physically bring it to the factory or wherever. Then they'd set up a table and you'd walk up, hand them some slip or document (often from your manager), and they'd disburse physical money. If it was a big enough operation they'd have people working under them who were called cashiers. These were lower ranked people who'd do the paperwork and physically hand out the cash on payday and the like. There weren't that many incidents of people just taking the money and running in the US. But that's because it happened a lot in the 16th/17th century in Britain so the US inherited Britain's security measures.
China's been deploying AI-like tools for censorship for like 20 years now. It's been getting steadily more advanced. But I doubt it's going to completely eliminate dissent. People are adaptive and you end up with euphemisms and, when those are discovered, new euphemisms. And so on and so forth. I also suspect that China's AI security state is somewhat overstated because there's no objective check.
Like, you hear the police have this fancy computer that can identify criminals with 100% accuracy. Okay. If the Chinese police arrest the wrong person... at what point do you find that out? Are they going to admit it or are they going to send a random person to jail to preserve the illusion? (Or maybe they make up some excuse and fine the person if they don't want to make too much trouble.) When it is tested outside China it tends to underperform and the official line there is that it's only trained on Chinese data so it has trouble identifying non-Chinese. Which maybe. But they're not going to let us look at the success rate in China itself.
I think it's more accurate to say that humans in general are primed to think in extreme, non-complex terms. And there's never a lot of room for moderate voices on the internet. In that, people giving moderate, mild opinions never get any attention.
It's actually not just euphemisms. People are advancing to the stage of putting the government into catch-22s. Like, my favourite win against the censors this year was an article somebody wrote titled, "Why do autocratic systems suck at innovation?" And in the whole article, he never mentions the CCP or China once. The whole thing is about organised crime, the methods they use to maintain autocratic control over their subjects, and how they're getting into a lot of legitimate businesses (like olive oil or avocados) to make money, and yet they never have any success in the tech field. Which then goes on about why non-democratic social structures don't have a lot of incentives for innovation.
It's one of those things where the government can't censor it, because then aren't you admitting you're the same kind of thing as the cartels? China *claims* to have democracy. It can't go around slapping itself in the face. But it can't not censor it either, because everyone reading it knows what the article is trying to say.
My favourite moment of censorship was when a video titled, "It's almost New Years! Time to butcher some pigs!" got censored for "insulting national leaders". The video is literally just a man butchering a pig for New Years.
I'm sure there's a lot of innocent people in jail in China. You heard reports about it back in the day, when there was more freedom of press and investigative journalism. Even to this day, a lot of cases are tried and convicted based on nothing but a confession, which the courts themselves admit was obtained with torture. But, quote, "Considering the problems with organised crime in the area, we have to give certain leeways to the police."
There's also fun compilations of all the ways police AI screws up posted on the internet once in a while, to prove the point that AI will never replace humans. Apparently, it gets consistently confused by celebrities' faces printed on the sides of buses and think it's a person walking in the street. It also freaks out if a piece of paper gets stuck to a camera and thinks it's being attacked by an alien creature.