23 Oct 14 | China, Digital Freedom, News and features
(Image: Screengrab from linecorp.com/en/)
The instant messaging app LINE has strengthened its censorship methods in mainland China, according to new findings from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The academic researchers not only found proof that the app now censors more topics than ever before, but also that LINE is censoring in a way that is harder to detect for the average user.
Want to discuss the China’s ruling Communist Party (CPC) with your friends on LINE? Go ahead. Compare foreign leaders to dictators? No problem, chat away. Unless you mention both the CPC and dictatorship in one chat message, you won’t notice LINE’s new censorship policy. That’s because LINE recently “improved” its censorship methods in China by adding almost fifty so-called regular expressions to its long list of taboo subjects; that is, groups of words that users are allowed to use independently, but not in combination.
The findings are interesting because LINE’s novel use of regular expressions allows a more subtle form of censorship, argues Jason Q. Ng, one of the researchers at the University of Toronto. “It allows for a more nuanced censorship for topics such as Xinjiang, instead of just a blanket block,” he told Pao-Pao over the phone, referring to the western province which has long been plagued by tensions between Chinese authorities and the indigenous Uighur people.
That’s positive for the authorities, he explains: “If you hide a smaller set of things, less people will encounter censorship than if you block everything related to a certain topic. Many people might want to speak in a so-called ‘legitimate’ way on a topic like Xinjiang, so if [the censors] block everything related to the topic, it will just make those people curious about the censorship, and the reasons behind its existence.”
Ng says that he thinks that the new method of censorship will only hinder the small minority of people already aware of the existence of censorship. One of the new, blocked combinations of words on LINE includes “Xinjiang”（新疆）and “independent” (獨立). Similar censorship techniques have already been implemented on Weibo, also known as Chinese Twitter.
There’s a whimsical name for the phenomenon that the Chinese authorities are trying to avoid with these new techniques: the Streisand effect, after American singer Barbara Streisand. In 2003, she attempted to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California by suing a photographer. The lawsuit ended up inadvertently generating a storm of publicity: whereas only six people had viewed the photographs before the lawsuits — two of which were her attorneys — the case caused 420,000 people to look up the photos within the month.
But it is a serious principle, as demonstrated earlier this month, during the protests in Hong Kong which were in a sense also a prime example of the dreaded Streisand effect. After a few students were teargassed by the police in an effort to suppress their protest, local outrage and support only swelled, resulting in a much higher turnout at demonstrations on the following days.
The Citizen Lab researchers have been tracking and analyzing LINE’s censorship for close to a year. They have reverse engineered the application, finding that when the user’s country is set to China it will enable censorship by downloading a list of banned words from a website called Naver. Whenever the list is updated, they study the differences compared to previous lists.
In a post on their website, Citizen Lab also show users how they can change their regional settings, allowing them to circumvent censorship on LINE within China.
In Citizen Lab’s report on the new methods, the researchers conclude that the new list “demonstrates LINE Corporation’s continued commitment to filtering keywords for users based in China and a push to improve the underlying technology”.
Still, Jason Q. Ng says that it is hard to say whether LINE’s censorship is better or worse than other chat apps like WeChat. “For LINE it is easier to see the exact way they censor,” he says. “Normally we can’t do that: we have to test the app word by word. We are still working on WeChat. Also, it depends on the way you measure: some apps might censor less, but have the ability to surveil a lot. That might be worse for the users.”
This article was originally published at pao-pao.net
20 Jun 14 | China, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Photo: Macmillan)
In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, American journalist Evan Osnos said that he turned down the opportunity to publish a copy of his new book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China because an initial report from the censors came back asking for almost a quarter to be struck out.
The only surprising thing about this is that they were only planning to cut about 25%. Osnos’ book follows the lives of a cast of characters as they pursue their dreams – whether that be for money, for love, for dignity for freedom or justice. He does not hold back listing the faults of China’s authoritarian system – the corruption, the hypocrisy, the lies, the control, and the censorship itself. Among the cast of characters that Osnos follows a fair few are clearly a no-go – among them imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng and outspoken artist Ai Weiwei among them.
Osnos declined to publish because: “to produce a ‘special version’ that plays down dissent, trims the Great Leap Forward, and recites the official history of [former official] Bo Xilai’s corruption would not help Chinese readers. On the contrary, it would endorse a false image of the past and present. As a writer, my side of the bargain is to give the truest story I can.”
For Osnos it wasn’t just a matter of how much of the book would have to go — a lie is a lie whether it is a big one or a small one. He told Index on Censorship: “It’s a slippery slope. If you agree to cut five paragraphs or 10% of the text or 25%, where do you stop?”
Osnos’ op-ed has highlighted the dilemma writers face publishing in China. The mainland is now hungry for western works. A publisher approached Osnos and not the other way around. American journalist Peter Hessler, who was the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker before Osnos, published two of his China books on the mainland, County Driving and River Town. He said that they both sold more than 150,000 copies in China. Country Driving actually sold more copies in China than they did in the US. In the first 10 months of last year, 650,000 censored copies of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel, professor emeritus at Harvard University, were bought in China. Around 10% of the book was excised.
Osnos wouldn’t compromise, but Hessler and Vogel did, for different reasons.
Hessler says he felt that he owed it to the people he was writing about to give them access to what he was saying about them. “The longer that I wrote about China, the less comfortable I was with the fact that readers in these places could not read what I was writing about them,” Hessler told Index on Censorship. “It’s an unhealthy dynamic that is common all over the developing world – the foreign correspondent often feels like he’s exporting stories. He doesn’t receive local feedback, and there’s a risk that he isn’t fully accountable to his subjects.”
Hessler’s books tend to follow communities and as such are less sensitive. “The general pattern is to cut references to national leaders or events, while leaving detailed descriptions of local events,” notes Hessler. Just a few pages were cut from both books out of more than 400 pages – changes, he thought, that did not “strike at the core of either book.” He did not try to publish another of his China books, Oracle Bones, because it was much more sensitive and would have faced significant cuts.
Vogel argued that his work opened the door to a more open discussion. “Many Chinese academics were appreciative that my book had expanded the range of freedom, allowing them to discuss more topics than had been possible before the book was published,” he wrote on The Harvard University Press website.
The danger is of course, even if the book does spark discussion, even if the censor does let some “sensitive” details slip through, readers are largely unaware of what was changed and thus the version they read ends up perpetuating the official line.
“If the censorship would change the point or substance of the book, then readers will come away with a, not just limited, but actually incorrect understanding of what the author was trying to say,” notes Eric Abrahamsen, an American publishing consultant and literary translator based in Beijing. “In the case of Evan Osnos’ book, losing 25% would mean that readers would believe that he thinks differently than he actually does. That would be incredibly pernicious, and isn’t remotely worth it.”
Vogel’s decision has earned him scathing criticism from Perry Link, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Link, who is famous for describing Chinese censorship as “the anaconda in the chandelier”, says that rather than opening the doors to discussion, Vogel’s censored book props up the Party’s line.
“The 10% that is omitted from Ezra’s book is not a random 10%,” he said. “It is a 10% that distorts the reader’s overall impression of the whole — i.e., the other 90% as well. Ezra’s book is very favourable to the regime. If 10% is omitted, it reads like a flat-out, all-out endorsement by a Harvard professor of Chinese Communist Party authoritarian rule.”
This article was published on June 20, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Jun 14 | China
China’s censors have a hard time stamping out memes.
Memes are proving one of the most powerful weapons Chinese netizens can use to fight online censorship. In the weeks on either side of this year’s 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Chinese censors blocked a variety of terms on social media, including “blood”, “May 35” and even “today”, but references to the event kept on emerging in memes. Images alluding to the infamous “Tank Man” took on a variety of forms, using heads of Mao, tractors, lego and the iconic Hong Kong rubber duck in lieu of circulating the actual iconic photo.
The concept of the meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to explain certain ideas, catchphrases, trends and other pieces of cultural information that replicate through a population. In its current usage, memes are defined as cultural items in the form of an image, video or phrase that spreads via the internet and are often altered in a creative or humorous way.
They’ve been part of the Chinese blogosphere for years and in many ways are ideally suited to the Chinese context. In part this is because Mandarin as a language allows for a playful form of double entrendre. Due to its many tones even the slightest shift in pronunciation can change a word’s meaning, while still sounding similar enough to invoke comparisons. The most famous Chinese meme, which parodies censorship itself, is that of the grass mud horse — caonima. In certain tones caonima means an alpaca; in other tones it’s a famous Chinese profanity. A few years back a video depicting a grass mud horse defeating a river crab, hexie, which is a homonym for the propaganda catchword “harmony”, went viral. To this day memes relating to this still emerge to poke fun at Chinese authorities.
Herein lies the strength of memes; their ability to evolve quickly and to imply rather than state makes them very difficult to detect and delete. After all, it’s hard enough for Chinese censors to keep track of and block all search terms directly referencing taboo topics. It’s harder still to block the infinite variations of words and images that might allude to controversy.
“Due to advanced and pervasive censorship, Chinese netizens are often forced to use coded language and images to talk about the social and political issues they find important,” says Ben Valentine, strategist and contributing writer for The Civic Beat, which examines social change memes and viral media.
“Images are much harder to algorithmically block because machines have trouble understanding visual content. While online writing directly talking about anything to do with Tiananmen Square in 1989 is extremely difficult, some of these memes make it past the censors. This is partially why, despite pervasive censorship, the Chinese web still remains a quite lively and active online space,” he adds.
For David Bandhurs, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, anyone who engages on a regular basis with others in the Chinese internet space “understands that irony, parody and other forms of expressive subterfuge are absolutely essential”. Memes “are the very substance of self-expression, of which social and political expression are a part, in a repressive space”.
Ahead of the 4th June anniversary, Bandhurs posted a photo of his milk carton to Weibo (China’s Twitter). The expiration date was “04/06/14” and he wrote: “It’s not yet expired. We have to remember.”
“This was a very casual post, its point being to share a momentary thought with my community, a thought which for some might prompt a moment of esprit de corps, or a moment of reflection,” he tells Index.
“A lot of memes emerge, and they emerge constantly, in exactly this way. They encapsulate a thought or a feeling — often with a strong social or political dimension — that cannot be openly expressed. For example, the meme ‘My father is Li Gang’ quickly became emblematic of the injustice and inequality resulting from unchecked power. It was like a key that could open a box of thoughts no one could make very explicit.”
Just how effective are these memes? When shared instantly and abundantly across platforms like Weibo, they can be very powerful. In some instances Chinese memes have spurred a call to action, as was the case with those that knocked Beijing’s poor air quality. Until recently, the government denied the extent of the pollution. Conversation on the topic was silenced. Then photos of blue sky days and other related memes emerged. Now the government is approaching the topic with more transparency.
As for those topics which still remain off limits, memes provide an alternative form of political discourse. The China Digital Times sees caonima specifically as the “the icon of online resistance to censorship”.
Memes represent a way in which Chinese people momentarily seize control of conversations. For example, when blind activist and lawyer Chen Guangcheng was arrested, thousands of people posted photos of themselves wearing sunglasses in protest. While it might not seem like the biggest act of defiance, it’s still something in a nation where free speech and collective action are strictly controlled.
“These memes allow for more expression, a political conversation to start, for humor around a taboo subject; this is an incredibly empowering feeling. The ability to connect, talk, laugh, and touch on politics feels good,” explains Valentine.
Speaking of memes more generally, Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web, tells Index:
“The power of politically-oriented memes is that they can be used in a playful way that isn’t necessarily directly confrontational to a regime. In some cases, the regime doesn’t even realize they’re being undermined. This allows activists to openly protest with impunity or even anonymity.”
At the same time, it’s important not to overstate the power of memes in China. Most vanish in the cyberspace vortex. Bandhurs’ milk carton post, for example, had more than 3,000 views, but could not be shared or commented upon, taking the sting out of it.
Memes are also predominantly harmless and politically apathetic. An office worker in Beijing, Wang Meimei, 28, said she and her friends constantly share memes. These solely relate to entertainment, not politics, because “we’re not interested in that”.
Meanwhile, 35-year-old Huang Yeping, who works in news media in Beijing, says none of the recent memes he has seen capture any form of zeitgeist.
“Is it me or have Chinese become even more subdued in terms of political expression, so much so that they haven’t been able to create anything as infectious as grass mud horse or a derivative of the tankman?” he asks, then adds:
“There has been this chill spreading across the cyber world.”
And as this indicates, taken alone memes cannot supersede collective action, nor do most have that in mind. They can spark a discussion, yes, yet remain as entertainment without the other key elements that bring about concrete action. What memes can do is allow for everyday Chinese to seize control of conversations — whether they be of a social, political or cultural nature — even if only for a few hours or days before the army of censors step in. And as Valentine says, that “feels good”.
This article was published on June 19, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
23 May 14 | China, News and features
(Photo: Yo Hibino/Wikimedia Commons)
“Keep quiet and carry on” is the slogan that can best describe China’s take on the approaching 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
This is the yearly Tiananmen anniversary crackdown, and people within China know what to expect; slower internet, blocked search terms, more military personnel in public and the arrest of high profile individuals. But this year’s crackdown appears particularly thorough, either a reaction to dissent being higher than usual or a perception that it is in light of the milestone anniversary.
The Chinese government has already jailed scores of lawyers, activists and intellectuals, sending a chilling message to any other would-be agitators. Of the most widely reported was the arrest of Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights lawyer who helped organise the 1989 protests. His detention came three days after he joined a private panel discussion on the massacre. Around 15 people were at the event, five of whom have since been detained. Then there was the airing of confessions on state media by journalist Gao Yu and citizen journalist Xiang Nanfu this May, which echoes Maoist propaganda tactics.
As we get closer to 4 June actions against freedom of expression will grow. Yvonne Shen, who is Asia News Digest Editor at Freedom House, an NGO committed to tracking violations to free expression, says the Chinese government “step up their censorship efforts in the days surrounding that date”. Within a week the organisation anticipate spikes in suspicious activity online. They are keeping a close eye on social platform WeChat in particular, given its current popularity.
“There was a leaked document dated 31 May, 2011, from the Beijing Municipal Government, that suggested the authorities had launched a ‘wartime coordination mechanism’ that required all units to report suspicious information during the “sensitive period,” Shen tells Index of the government’s usual tactic.
China forbids open discussion of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which soldiers fired on crowds of unarmed pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds if not thousands (no official death toll has ever been released). On top of arrests, an army of censors work overtime to ensure mentions of the event are quickly removed. Sites are blocked and words that allude to or directly reference it vanish.
The private realms of emails and direct messages are also monitored, as Louisa Lim, author of upcoming book The People’s Republic of Amnesia, Tiananmen Revisited, describes: “I wrote my book on a brand-new laptop that had never been online. Every night I locked it in a safe in my apartment. I never mentioned the book on the phone or in e-mail, at home or in the office — both located in the same Beijing diplomatic compound, which I assumed was bugged.”
Chinese journalists are trained “not to ever touch Tiananmen with a 10 foot pole,” Beijing-based journalist Eric Fish tells Index. He too perceives a recent shift: “The atmosphere for Chinese journalists has tightened quite a bit in general since Xi Jinping came to power. It feels like they’ve clamped down a lot more than normal in the lead-up to this anniversary.”
As Fish says, the detentions form part of a broader crackdown on free speech. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, there were hopes he would relax censorship. These hopes were quickly dashed. Index recently reported on a ban of seemingly innocent US TV shows, which shows just how pervasive the attack has been.
Even foreign journalists, who are usually granted more leeway, have experienced “a big uptick in pressure over the past two years,” says Fish, a reference to several prominent cases of journalist visas being revoked.
This is a fact Steven Levine has had to accept. “I anticipate being refused a Chinese visa the next time I apply to visit China as this is one way in which the Chinese authorities punish foreigners who criticise their human rights practices,” explains the retired professor of Chinese history and politics, who coordinates the Tiananmen Initiative Project — an individual effort aimed at focussing attention on the Tiananmen Movement and government crackdown.
Levine’s project has already been banned from the Chinese online world; within days of launching last November, the site had been blocked. Levine will not be deterred and continues to correspond with Chinese individuals inside the country, as well as with exiled Chinese who were either leaders or active in the 1989 movement. For him, being refused a visa is a price worth paying. It’s a different story for those inside of China, who take a much bigger gamble.
That said many have come up with creative ways to circumvent censorship. For example, prominent writer Murong Xuecun avoided the censors by using the politically neutral word “tractors” instead of the highly provocative “tanks”. And while “4th June” is blocked, the new code of “May 35th” has filled its place — a count of that month’s 31 days plus four in June.
It’s a game of cat and mouse. Ultimately, the cat is winning, but the mice aren’t going down without a fight.
This article was posted on May 23, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
