Oddbean new post about login | logout In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy. As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it. But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship. Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/asia/china-economy-garbage-time.html
Based
Yeah there's a deep well of based-ness going on over there. Harsh environment.
Memes and analogies become tools of resistance, subtle yet impactful. In many ways, this also mirrors a global trend of how people, across countries, use humour, sarcasm, and historical allusions to critique authorities in indirect yet powerful ways. So, the hat tip here isn't just about the adaptability of Chinese social media users, but also about how this dynamic exemplifies the resilience of human expression under constraints, where even memes become vehicles of socio-political commentary.
hmm TIL https://m.primal.net/KpJI.png
Aê galerinha do BR, vamos aprender com os chinas, que a censura veio pra ficar! (E a galera europeia também tá caminhando nessa direção, né mesmo @eddieoz ?) nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzp64suatdx2uqhn2xfu7cgjuqgqcrqadp864uxkv6wckf43atj860qqsx58qq0fxfp9klhfx48trfepm3qq4uerya8mcajgnzjpj3mga27tc5g0ffq
An impressive display of dissidents circumventing state censor was the Hong Kong Billionaire Li ka-shing during the HK protests hiding a secret message in a newspaper ad https://image.nostr.build/fb87bf907e2246590699b9bc29315d3bc3118af8bd3412bd0f33e7b7be281076.jpg Sadly, since 2019 didnt get anywhere..... "Laying flat" for "garbage time" has even less energy Observing from across the Strait, i think in the mid 2000s the chinese internet slang felt very clever, but as censors expand the blacklisted words, trying to decipher what Chinese are trying to say gets harder 😅 its like a mixture of metaphors, folk tales, memes, english substitions -- keeping up with their slang isnt easy A comment that stuck with me went something like this: "Will people of the future look back at our internet discussions and think we're all retarded cowards who cant speak straight?"
I always wondered if they could just type characters that sound like what they're saying, but are not the right characters, so its gibberish if you read it, but makes sense if you hear it. Greetings from Texas. I visited Taiwan once and was really impressed.
chinese in general is filled with homophones (many many characters share the same sounds) so its a common method of circumventing blacklisted words, but homophones can get blacklisted too 😅 (and using too many homophoes screws up context which chinese heavily relies on) chinese netizens have to get even more clever than that, discussing gov officials using animals that resemble them (i.e. winnie the pooh and toad king ) would be evolution of that, and so on when too many homophones get blacklisted (ie. Government 政府) they just start resorting to phonetic english abbreviation 'ZF', then they wait to see if the censors want to blow out two letters from the english alphabet 🤣 so far they havent cross that bridge Chinese internet is a strange strange place
I guess China isn't as good as Google at censorship. Google/YouTube just silence you completely. Nuthin getting thru!
Chinese know the "criticize the old world" technique well. They've been doing it over 60 years. Marxism is built around critical theories, which means to criticize. Critical theories do NOT mean one uses critical thinking. The cultural Marxist takeover of China was accomplished by "Unity, Criticize, Unity" They brought everyone together in unity, and then criticized the old system, and then came to a new "unity" based on whatever whims the Marxist leaders decided people were to unite under. The Chinese called it "speaking bitterness". Speaking bitterness about the Chinese "four olds", which were old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture. This is what DEI in America is designed to do... cultural Marxism tweaked for American culture. DEI, SEL, Emotional Resilience, etc...
Lol "an Austrian philosopher who championed free markets and argued against socialism.." They literally can't say Mises
Is it conceivable that Nostr gets big in China? Could new relays be created and subscribed to faster than the CCP could block them?
Having followed for almost a decade Western “insiders” to Chinese culture, it’s fascinating to me that China has been able to spend so much money to ‘propagandize’ the Western world. And eye-opening to how the Western influencers have adopted that propaganda against us. Communism taught the world that the control of Truth was everything. That lesson breached all borders.
