From quoting the national anthem to referencing Hollywood blockbusters and George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Chinese Web users are using creative methods to dodge censorship and voice discontent over COVID-19 measures.
China maintains a tight grip over the Internet, with legions of censors scrubbing out posts that cast the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policies in a negative light.
The censorship machine is now in overdrive to defend Beijing’s stringent “zero COVID-19” policy as the business hub of Shanghai endures weeks of lockdown to tackle an outbreak.
Stuck at home, many of the city’s 25 million residents have taken to social media to vent fury over food shortages and spartan quarantine conditions.
Charlie Smith, cofounder of censorship monitoring web site GreatFire.org, said the Shanghai lockdown had become “too big of an issue to be able to completely censor.”
Hell-bent on getting their messages out, wily Web users were turning to tricks such as flipping images and using wordplay, he said, using a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of his work.
In one example, censors deleted a popular hashtag on the Sina Weibo (微博) social media platform quoting the first line of China’s national anthem: “Arise, those who refuse to be slaves.” The line was being shared alongside a torrent of anti-lockdown fury.
Others hijacked a hashtag about US human rights failings to make tongue-in-cheek barbs about home confinement in China.
In a similar attempt, Internet users rallied to push Orwell’s fiction 1984 to the top of a list of popular titles on the Douban ratings site, before it was blocked.
Censors also raced to kill off a menagerie of memes and hashtags based on a government official who previously said foreign journalists were “secretly loving” the fact they had safely seen out the pandemic in China.
Users then devised a series of oblique puns on that quote, eventually prompting censors to block the hashtag La La Land.
Last month the Internet police floundered in quashing viral video “Voices of April” that featured stories from distressed Shanghai residents in lockdown.
Web users rapidly re-edited and shared the six-minute clip to outrun largely automated screening software, which struggled for hours to identify the different versions.
One frustrated Shanghai local said Web users shared the various formats “to make a point” even though each post vanished within minutes.
“It was us against the AI [artificial intelligence],” the resident told reporters, requesting anonymity.
People in Shanghai have become more “willing to pay the price” for airing critical views, said Luqiu Luwei (閭丘露薇), an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.
The “hardship, discontent and anger” they have endured in lockdown have “far outweighed the fear” of punishment for posting sensitive content, she told reporters.
Top Chinese leaders vowed at a meeting on Thursday to stick “unwaveringly” to “zero COVID-19” and “resolutely fight against all words and deeds that distort, question or reject our nation’s disease control policies.”
State media have played up the positives and “sidelined private difficulties,” said a Beijing-based journalism professor who requested anonymity.
The approach has created “two Shanghais,” where official portrayals contrast sharply with what people view online, the professor added.
Online outrage is unlikely to prompt the CCP to relax its hardline approach, particularly with the country’s president so invested in “zero COVID-19,” said Wang Yaqiu (王亞秋), senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“It’s harder for the government to walk back when it becomes an ideological issue that’s attached to [Chinese President] Xi Jinping (習近平) personally,” she said.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly