From PRI's The World
Want to circumvent China's Great Firewall? Learn these 9 phrases first.
By Kuang Keng Kuek Ser
China sometimes gets a bad rap for creativity, but few nations can offer up the imaginative array of code phrases that ordinary Chinese have developed to get around the Internet censorship of their ruling Communist Party.
Since the beginning of the Great Firewall of China in 1997, as Beijing's vast censorship operation is often known, many Chinese online been at war with authorities, defending freedom of expression and information in cyberspace. One of the unintended consequences of this struggle is that users need to being creative in how they use language to circumvent censorship....
This struggle has been closely watched by China Digital Times, a news website founded by Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Last month the website released the updated edition of “Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang”, an eBook that collects the most time-tested and popular phrases used by Chinese Internet users to avoid government censorship....This story aired on multiple public radio stations, including KERA, WVXU, KUOW, WGBH, KOSU, WVTF, KBIA, WLRN, and more.