
Dirt-poor and ugly – the proud new mantra of those left behind in the new China - petethomas
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-chinese-poor-ugly-20181226-story.html
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keiferski
_The latest craze in Chinese slang is a combination of 穷 and 丑 with 土 tucked
neatly inside. Pronounced “qiou,” the new character can’t be produced on a
keyboard._

Question for anyone more knowledgeable on the topic: would reformatting
text/Chinese characters/ language symbols in general as images prevent them
from being detected and censored out as easily? For example, imagine a photo
of two trees with a hammock in between them used to represent the letter “H.”
A collection of images together would form words, presumably which are harder
to decipher than just plain text.

I’d imagine that some machine learning techniques would quickly pick up the
more obvious images, but anything more complex would end up requiring manual
human review, which would then potentially overwhelm the ability of an actor
to censor material. But I really have very little knowledge of how this works
in practice.

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pessimizer
Isn't this just CAPTCHA, and aren't CAPTCHA-breaking tactics pretty good?
Especially considering that we're talking about a state actor here, and a
single detection would reveal that one was intentionally trying to evade
censorship.

You'd have to have both intelligibility and plausible deniability for any use.

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joejerryronnie
Would the fact that I can never seem to select all of the images with a street
sign count as plausible deniability?

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mattigames
Daily reminder that China jailed Lu Guang (a Chinese citizen) on torture camps
for photographing the grim reality of many local places riddled with child
cancer and toxic waste due to unsafe industrial practices:
[https://www.demilked.com/missing-photographer-lu-
guang/](https://www.demilked.com/missing-photographer-lu-guang/)

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ixtli
“Fans of the new character aren’t in dire poverty. After all, they have access
to the internet and time to play on social media. But they live on the wrong
side of China’s widening income gap, a place where finding a job, buying a
house and getting married can feel impossible.”

This sounds eerily similar to some other online movements.

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scarmig
Is there a gendered element to "qiou"? My hypothesis would be young men self
describe as it more than women, and I'd love confirmation or invalidation from
someone who's more in with Chinese social media.

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withhighprod
From the symbol of the word along, no element related to gender

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scarmig
I get that, knowing basic Chinese myself. But e.g. "incel" the word itself has
no reference to gender, but it's certainly a gendered identity.

~~~
ixtli
I’m assuming the same.

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Ericson2314
Why is this romanized as "qiou" and not "qiu"? Did they make a new pinyin too,
is that just the post breaking the rules for an English-only audience, or am I
forgetting?

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ThrowawayR2
It's a portmanteau
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau);](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau\);)
the Chinese aren't exactly unaware of the existence of sounds outside the
pinyin system. 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou", though I can't
even guess which tone it would be.

~~~
yorwba
Someone already commented [0] on that below the Weibo post linked in the
article. The Pinyin system doesn't always represent the same sound by the same
letter sequence. There are usually two forms, depending on whether the
syllable starts with a consonant or a (semi-)vowel. The combination "iou" is
written "you" when it stands alone and "qiu" when the syllable starts with
"q". Writing it "qiou" is just to emphasize the parts of the portmanteau.

[0]
[https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873](https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873)

~~~
Ericson2314
Thank you for answering my question and not confusing phonetics and
orthography.

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vorg
> In a language with about 50,000 characters, the creation of new characters
> is rare

The reason could be that both Unicode (used in China) and the Japanese JIS
both represent characters as single codepoints rather than specifying them in
terms of their components. If an encoding system specified Han components as
their base, then new characters would be created all the time.

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mud_dauber
Given that I grew up in (and still identify with) Appalachia, and just
returned from a family visit -- I completely understand how this would take
off. So many of my HS classmates are in exactly the same boat.

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jiveturkey
[https://outline.com/ZsJsDh](https://outline.com/ZsJsDh)

