Flying beneath the censor

[geordief]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63813122

This article has a good few examples for how the Chinese people are getting around the censor in the aftermath of the recent  death of their former President. 

 

I wonder who will come out on top?  The censors or the  censorees?

It has been ,I think accepted wisdom that the censor fights a losing  battle ,rather like poor King Canute but the Chinese  CP seems to be game for the fight

Can it win ?

[TheVat]

I saw an AP story this morning about people evading censors to register outrage at the Party over that fire in Urumqi, support the protests, etc.  I learned that the phrase "shrimp moss banana peel," in Mandarin sounds very similar to  "step down, [banana peel is same initials as Xi's name]".  Sounds like there is a lot of creativity there.  And some people have a VPN, so they can vault over the "great firewall of China" and follow foreign coverage of events suppressed in Chinese media.  Then fire off screenshots to friends.  My guess is censors, in these times, just cannot keep up.

 

 

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

My guess is censors, in these times, just cannot keep up.

I think AI development is unfortunately going to address that.

[geordief]

7 hours ago, CharonY said:

I think AI development is unfortunately going to address that.

Is AI in this context not always going to be playing catch up?

Who would have imagined a blank page would be a symbol for (whatever it is understood to mean)?

 

Will AI be writing affecting poetry next and putting our creative thinkers and  communicators out of business?

Or will it be doing a valiant effort at  copycating what is already out of date?

[CharonY]

I think it is only an issue if you care about false positives. They could use AI to flag any and all non-approved patterns of a certain size as default, for example.

[toucana]

There are several recent articles about Chinese dissidents in the southern provinces successfully using Cantonese slang idioms to confuse and defeat Chinese state censorship on Weibo.

https://qz.com/china-censors-stumped-by-cantonese-1849496778

Cantonese which is spoken by up to a 100 million people in the south of China is usually incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers in spoken form - apart from anything else Cantonese has a 9 tone pitch phoneme system - as opposed to the 4 tones normally found in Mandarin.

It is possible to write Cantonese in standard Chinese script forms that Mandarin speakers can read relatively easily, but it only works if the Cantonese speaker makes a conscious effort to use standard simplified script forms, and avoids the use of obscure idioms and dialect vocabulary and grammar.

The dissidents protesting against prolonged lockdowns and other forms of repression have taken to using complex and archaic scripts form for many  words -  quite a few of which haven’t been in common use in Mandarin since the Ming dynasty in the 17th century. The famous 18th century Kangxi dictionary  (康熙字典) for example lists over 47,000 script forms, as opposed to the 8,000 or so characters that a a literate Mandarin speaker would normally be familiar with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwckaHxOWXs

[exchemist]

On 12/1/2022 at 4:16 AM, geordief said:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63813122

This article has a good few examples for how the Chinese people are getting around the censor in the aftermath of the recent  death of their former President. 

 

I wonder who will come out on top?  The censors or the  censorees?

It has been ,I think accepted wisdom that the censor fights a losing  battle ,rather like poor King Canute but the Chinese  CP seems to be game for the fight

Can it win ?

There was a cartoon many years ago in Private Eye showing the king on the beach and a couple of chaps in viking helmets regarding him. One is muttering "silly cnut". 

Though actually the story is supposed to be Cnut pointing out to his obsequious courtiers the futility of attempting to command the sea.

 

[TheVat]

I lived in a college town for a few years where the sports team was called the Beavers.  At that time, their main adversary team had some fans with a bumper sticker that read: Buck the Feavers.

@swansont IIRC, your profile or something you posted mentions the town I refer to.  We may have passed through at different times.

 

 

[geordief]

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

There was a cartoon many years ago in Private Eye showing the king on the beach and a couple of chaps in viking helmets regarding him. One is muttering "silly cnut". 

Though actually the story is supposed to be Cnut pointing out to his obsequious courtiers the futility of attempting to command the sea.

 

That's right .I keep forgetting  that.

 

Was history rewritten by the sore loosers?

 

I find it dismal if we cannot keep ahead of the censors(I suppose if they back up their lies with brutal suppression  it is understandable)

I liked  that  Good Soldier Svejk book.

We had a Czech woman  to help us once in the BnB and she was chuffed that I had read it.

Edited December 5, 2022 by geordief

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, geordief said:

That's right .I keep forgetting  that.

 

Was history rewritten by the sore loosers?

 

I find it dismal if we cannot keep ahead of the censors(I suppose if they back up their lies with brutal suppression  it is understandable)

I liked  that  Good Soldier Svejk book.

We had a Czech woman  to help us once in the BnB and she was chuffed that I had read it.

Then you should definitely read “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.”, by Vladimir Voinovich. That is hilarious. But this is off-topic.

[swansont]

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

I lived in a college town for a few years where the sports team was called the Beavers.  At that time, their main adversary team had some fans with a bumper sticker that read: Buck the Feavers.

@swansont IIRC, your profile or something you posted mentions the town I refer to.  We may have passed through at different times.

Enemy of the Ducks. Our various frat house banners/shirts were often less subtle; not designed to evade censorship, using that vulgarity that rhymes with Duck.

(I was there ‘89-‘95)