Generally, Chinese netizens regard the West’s paternalistic concern over censorship and information control in China with light bemusement. While Western media, The New York Times and the BBC in particular, loves to write about Internet censorship in China with an affected, ominous regard for online life behind the “Great Firewall” and to lament its victims, Chinese netizens would rather discuss how they creatively negotiate the contours of the Firewall and its ever-increasing addition. When in 2006 the U.S. held Congressional Hearings about the subject, the oft-censored blogger Zhao Jing wrote an open letter entitled “The Freedom of Chinese Netizens is Not Up to the Americans,” in which he explained that the rest of the world is missing the point entirely in its discourse about Chinese Internet censorship. “The only true way of solving the Internet blockage in China is this: every Chinese youth with conscience must practice and expand their freedom, and oppose any blockage and suppression every day. This is the country that we love. Nobody wants her to be free more than we do,” he writes. In other words, Chinese netizens are not victims but active players in the circumvention and re-negotiation of Internet censorship in China.

It is fairly incontestable that “China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world,” as the OpenNet Initiative concluded in a 2005 study of mainland Internet usage. The government regularly blocks websites, shuts down blogs, requires websites to use automatic keyword filtering software, monitors e-mail and SMS, and seeds forums with pro-government commentators, all in the name of “harmonizing” the Internet. However, for every tool in the harmonizers’ arsenal, China’s netizen community has a way to circumvent it. The use of VPNs and proxy servers, for instance, is small but growing.  Even when access to proxy servers is blocked, particularly active netizens will take it upon themselves to repost links and email copies of their software to others. After the website for AnchorFree, a “hotspot shield,” was blocked, use of the service actually increased because of such grass-roots efforts.

Bloggers who find themselves censored will simply migrate from one hosting service to another.  Fully Drunk Dolphin, an oft-censored blogger, suggests setting up an innocuous, domestic blog and an overseas “back-up” blog that cannot be harmonized. That way, a blogger can alert readers to the existence of an expanded version that they can access using a proxy. Domestic readership of the uncensored version is low, but Fully Drunk Dolphin points out that “It is better to have a handful of smart readers than to have 1.3 billion retarded fans.”

The strict controls placed on blogging platforms have made Bulletin Board Services extremely popular in China, which have developed their own unique culture of censorship and resistance.  Chinese authorities have recently taken to employing tens of thousands of people at pennies per hour to scan message boards and “guide” the discussions, posting nationalistic, pre-fabricated messages in support of official government views and reporting “trouble-makers.” Chinese netizens have no qualms about calling out these posters as members of the wumaodang, or “Five Mao Party,” and having them blacklisted.

Forums are also home to a lively, dynamic series of memes and tongue-in-cheek slang that innovatively enlist the Chinese language to ridicule censorship. Netizens often use abbreviated slang for flagged language and curse words, such as ZF instead of the characters for zhengfu, or government. The language games do not stop there, though.  Baidu Baike’s “Ten Mythical Creatures,” probably the most widespread of the anti-censorship memes, used homophonic language and parody to evade automated filtering software. The raunchy mythical pantheon includes the Intelligent Fragrant Chicken, or Da Fei Ji, which is a homophone for a slang term denoting a sexual act. There is also the French-Croatian Squid, Fa Ke You, which is exactly what it sounds like. The most celebrated Baidu Mythical Creature is the Grass Mud Horse, Cao Ni Ma, whose name sounds like a common curse describing one’s mother and any number of sexual acts.  “The Song of Cao Ni Ma” (link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08) spawned dozens of videos, a feature in the New York Times, and even a line of stuffed animals. The Grass Mud Horse, a “lively, intelligent, and tenacious” creature, is terrorized by the River Crab, He Xie (a homophone for “harmony” and therefore symbolizing censorship). The Grass Mud Horse videos, in combination with the 50th Anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan Uprising and the imminent Olympics, were largely responsible for the government’s decision to block YouTube. That, of course, did not stop netizens from continuing their Grass Mud Horse shenanigans, which still pop up frequently on the Internet.

China’s netizens are perfectly aware that they are being “harmonized.” Their clever and committed circumvention of the government’s information control measures is an indication that the liberation of the Chinese Internet is going to happen slowly, quietly, and on netizens’ own terms, within their own language and framework.

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Keywords: how Chinese netizens overcome censorship Chinese netizens scaling great firewall future of internet censorship China