Censorship in China Puns

I’m sure if China threatened them over South Park, they’d cave immediately.

Yesterday I posted an idea(here:https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/duh5bm/a_fun_also_cheap_way_to_scare_the_overseas/ ), but I don’t know why it got shadow banned. (Because of too many down votes or reports?) So today I want to elaborate on the self-censorship in China and how to use it in different scenarios.

1. The black box of China’s censorship

Everyone in China knows that the censorship is very strict, but no one knows how it works and what won’t get censored. There are no clear rules and no keywords lists. The regime intentionally made the censorship a black box, so that its power is mysterious and unlimited. In the last few years they were getting more and more clever at censorship. The commands would be given orally so there’s no document exists. The state owned company provide the service for censorship so the keywords list wouldn’t be spread out. Other companies, such as Weibo and Toutiao, have to buy the service and hire extra employees for censorship. (Related report: https://supchina.com/2019/03/26/jinan-has-become-the-capital-of-chinese-internet-censorship/)

If you post something “inappropriate” online, your post may get deleted and your account may get banned. Worse, the police may arrest you. If the website or social media can’t censor the “inappropriate” posts quickly, the website and social media may have to go offline for several weeks to “improve” their services. To not get their account banned and their websites closed, everyone is doing online self-censorship insanely. In most cases the self-censorship is much stricter than the censorship from the regime, because everyone want to stay safe. Stricter self-censorship is safer.

2. Two kinds of self-censorship

One is on the personal level. You must think twice before you post something online. You have to use some alternative words to bypass the censorship, for example, use “zf” for “government”, because the Pinyin for government (政府) is ZhengFu.

Another is on the platform level. In China, no matter how big the company is, the government has many ways to punish it. So the websites and social medias will censor every trivial thing that may offend the regime, even the regime doesn’t care about it.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the self-censorship became increasingly

I've been applying for jobs in Japan and added South Korea as a backup recently. I've been sending emails to recruiters in Korea, and one of them asked me to consider teaching in China, specifically public schools in Shenzhan. He mentioned a few benefits like the following:

• 50% less work hours
• 3-month vacations compared to 10-14 days in Korea and Japan
• a possibility to move into another field work beyond teaching

Honestly, I've been against living in China, because I can't picture living in a communist country. Also, some of my favorite things like Facebook and South Park are censored. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I'd think.

If you're a foreigner working in China, can you share your experience? Why do you love/hate it? I'd especially love to hear from you, if you worked in other countries in Asia and can provide comparisons.

Thanks!

Hi, I am trying to get a more unbiased view of China than what western media portraits and I was wondering if I could hear some of your thoughts on this issue?

From my limited interactions with students from China here in Europe I felt like there was less tendency to be critical from them, than from students that grew up in our school system where questioning authority, bias and sources and so on was heavily focused on. This may just be me being used to our bias and not used to Chinese bias, so it would more noticeable to me. I am not trying to make blanked statements about your people.

What do you think of the state run media? Do you think there should also be different perspectives than government approved ones?
Do you feel that it would be dangerous to be openly critical of the government actions? Surely people don't agree with everything 100%. In our media they imply you cannot criticize the Chinese government publicly without fearing violent repercussions.

How bad is the censorship? What kind of things are censored and for what reason? Do you think its a good thing?

Thank you for answering.

Skip down to question if you don’t wanna read about the background or already know what’s going on.

As over a month has passed since the coronavirus first broke out in Hubei in China, the number of infected had jumped to 20,000, more then double of SARS in 2003.

In the initial weeks of the outbreak, Doctor Li Wenliang tried to warn fellow colleagues of the virus and advised them to wear masks and protective clothing. Afterwards, he was reprimanded by authorities and forced to sign an apology for spreading “false rumors”. He has recently passed away and many Chinese citizens on the internet regard him as a hero.

In the past month, Chinese civilians have taken online to criticize the authorities for the mishandling of the situation and the extreme measures to censor anybody they believe is spreading “rumors”. At first it was towards the Hubei local authorities that were criticized and President Xi and the CCP in Beijing immediately reprimanded the Hubei government and cast blame on them. However, outrage began to extend towards the national government and the CCP and online censor began to scrub out any negative coverage of the event whilst state TV media reported positive coverage only of the situation. There is even suspected to be an intentional downplaying by the government in regards to the actual number of those infected and that the situation may be far worse then what is reported.

TLDR;

In light of this event, do you think there is a long term ramification in regards to China’s censorship and value of order and authoritarianism over public safety? Is the government’s grip on public discord showing cracks? How will China fair in the event of another disaster that could be worse as this? Or is this like Tiananmen where a generation later will forget? What are your thoughts personally about the situation?

When Facebook or Twitter would ban people with unsavory perspectives, whenever some major media corporation would fire someone for saying something they didn't like, the argument was always "They're a private corporation; they can do whatever they want with their platforms and they don't have to let people use them".

Now that Blizzard bans a Hearthstone player on behalf of China, now that the NBA removes protestors from games, suddenly the woke crowd sees this as an authoritarian abuse of power? Now they want the corporations regulated to follow our constitutional rights? I thought they were private companies and could platform whoever they wanted. I mean, it's nice to see them get it right, but it feels like it's too little, too late. The can of worms has been opened. Are they going to let Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos back on social media? Are they going to give Roseanne Barr her show back? Where is the consistency?

If china is communist, then how are there rich Chinese? My understanding is that communism keeps everyone's value "equal". Also, why does China allow their students to participate in exchange programs in the US if they censor things that their students might get exposed to while in their exchange program in the US?

Hello, I live in Canada. I'm writing a paper on censorship in China and I am wondering if I could get some insight about whether citizens of China care about certain things being censored? Whether its annoying or if you've gotten used to it? No shade, just trying to gain some insight. Thanks in advance