Another article about China, this time looking at how protesters and censors try to outwit each other.
The forbidden images of the Chinese internet
Some removed images are unsurprising: depictions of state-sanctioned violence, cartoons disparaging government leaders, and aerial shots of protests. But many of them appear innocuous at first glance. All images—even harmless ones—of top Chinese political leaders are banned, except on official websites and approved blogs. For other content, moderators tend to err on the side of caution since private companies, rather than the government, are responsible for complying with state guidelines. After President Xi Jinping eliminated term limits, for example, censors temporarily banned the letter “n,” which was likely a reference to the math symbol and was used to poke fun at the undefined length of his tenure […]
While Pooh Bear might be the most well-known of playful creatures removed from China’s web, he’s not the only one. Years earlier, censors blotted out mention of a 72-foot-tall inflatable frog after internet users likened it to former president Jiang Zemin, once nicknamed “toad.” And after a 2013 recreation of “Tank Man” replaced the tanks with inflatable rubber ducks, “the yellow rubber duck, in whatever context, was doomed to the blacklist forever,” Smith said.
Anything that might jog netizens’ memory of controversial events is subject to scrutiny. Images of candles, typically held at memorials, were removed around the time of the Tiananmen Square anniversary. Other, more covert references, such as playing cards that read “8964” for the year 1989 and date June 4th, have been removed. When Liu Xiaobo died in July 2017, censors went so far as to block out images of an empty chair—Liu was honored with an empty chair at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony when he was barred from leaving the country, turning a mundane household object into a political symbol.
Featured image Paula Schmidt
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