
Reverse-engineering censorship in China - magda_wang
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722
======
moyix
Censorship in China is a fascinating topic for me, because it's an area where
we can use technology to figure out things about social issues on the other
side of the world.

A great example of this is cases where chat clients use client-side censorship
lists; in this case you can extract the entire list and essentially have a
rich source of words the Chinese government is concerned about. For example
(following on some excellent work by CitizenLab [1]), I recently extracted the
LINE IM client's list of banned words [2].

The entries there are fascinating to read through; you get the feeling that
there's a whole story behind many of them that's waiting to be told. Take for
example, "江蟾蜍", which Google Translate glosses as "river toad". It turns out
that this refers to an incident where a large inflatable toad was placed in
Beijing's Yuyuantan Park [3], which someone then realized looked like former
president Jiang Zemin.

I'm hoping to do more research reverse engineering Chinese censorship lists,
hopefully even finding ways to efficiently probe server-side lists as well.

[1] [https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-
regi...](https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regionally-
based-keyword-censorship-line/)

[2]
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~brendan/line.txt](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~brendan/line.txt)

[3] [http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/river-crabbed-toad-
stor...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/river-crabbed-toad-story/)

~~~
vinceguidry
An excellent book to read on this topic is Age of Ambition - Chasing Fortune,
Truth, and Faith in the New China[1]

It discusses the topic of banned phrases like "river toad". In many cases
what's happening is Chinese citizens find ways around the censors by searching
for homonyms and other permutations of censored topics. Some of them are quite
hilarious.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth-
ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth-
ebook/dp/B00GET185M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410465579&sr=8-1&keywords=age+of+ambition)

------
jamesli
The first paragraph of the section Results basically sums it up. In my
personal experience, it is true, not only in the Internet, but also in
everyday conversations. People can criticize the party and its leaders freely
in their conversations, without any concern to be arrested.

"Criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are routinely
published, whereas posts with collective action potential are much more likely
to be censored—regardless of whether they are for or against the state (two
concepts not previously distinguished in the literature). Chinese people can
write the most vitriolic blog posts about even the top Chinese leaders without
fear of censorship, but if they write in support of or opposition to an
ongoing protest—or even about a rally in favor of a popular policy or
leader—they will be censored."

~~~
porpoisemonkey
It sounds like this attitude can be summed up as "It's alright to complain,
but don't talk about doing anything about it."

~~~
thaumasiotes
This isn't exactly a new idea. Private clubs were banned in the Roman empire
specifically because of the risk of collective action (they didn't want clubs
to be the seed of a rebellion). We have correspondence from a governor to the
emperor where the governor says (paraphrased, obviously), "a bunch of the men
locally have put together a firefighting group, so if a building catches fire
everyone shows up and helps put it out. This seems like a decent idea to me,
is it OK?" The response is "absolutely not".

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dak1
How are these results reconciled with well-documented censorship of any posts
containing specific words?

I've personally seen social media posts with any mention of events like
Tiananmen or political leaders blocked (often automatically by software), and
a Chinese friend discovered she couldn't text the number '64' around June 4th
(she was actually trying to send an address).

You can try it for yourself on a site like Renren (www.renren.com), just try
posting something with the words 天安门 (Tiananmen), 习近平 （Xi Jinping, China's
current President), or 周永康 (Zhou Yongkang, former PSC member).

The Chinese version of Skype (actually Skype, not a clone) even blocks words
like 'fuck' (see:
[http://www.nartv.org/mirror/breachingtrust.pdf](http://www.nartv.org/mirror/breachingtrust.pdf))

------
ChuckMcM
Nice that someone has done this. It would be interesting to test it on US and
European social networks as well. I found it particularly fascinating that
griping was not censored but calls to action were. The idea of using griping
as a way of evaluating leaders (in lieu of voting) seemed pretty interesting.
One could argue that might work more widely.

~~~
vikiomega9
I can't remember where I heard this, it was on some BBC program, but
effectively one anon Chinese official was essentially pointing to what you're
saying.

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zmjones
one of the coolest political science articles i've read. they have written
several other papers on the topic. there most famous article on the topic is:

[http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf)

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______1
Is the full article not pay-walled for anyone else?

~~~
KerrickStaley
Works for me (in USA). Do you have "Full Text" and "Full Text (PDF)" links on
the left? Try this:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722.full.pdf](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722.full.pdf)

~~~
monkeypizza
That link pops up a login screen for me.

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ape4
The censors are lucky to have a country-specific language.

~~~
michaelq
Chinese is an international language, and an official language of several East
and Southeast Asian countries, most of which use Mandarin syntax in their
written form.

