Chinese Bloggers Get Creative As Online Censors Spring Into Action

Jiang Zemin
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If you want to discuss rivers of any kind online right now in China, you’re going to be out of luck.

That’s because China’s censors have blocked all mentions of the word on Sina Weibo, its officially sanctioned version of Twitter, and elsewhere online.

Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s failed to show up on Friday to celebrate the Communist Party’s 90th birthday, and people are speculating that he is dead. “Jiang” means “river” in Chinese.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press in China report that searches for the characters “river” and “death” and related searches are currently being blocked.

Messages for the searches yield warnings that such searches are “illegal,” reports the AP.

The blockage of the search highlights the farcical nature of the situation however, as the Journal’s reporting shows.

For example, Weibo has also blocked the phrase “myocardial infarction,” but not the phrase “heart attack.”

Bloggers in China have adopted their own creative ways to get around the ban:

Chinese microbloggers have employed a variety of tricks in an apparent attempt to get around the blocks. With Weibo censors blocking searches the word for “hung” (挂了), a common Chinese euphemism for death, users have been circulating an image showing an empty set of clothing hanging out to dry, pants hiked up to chest level the way Mr. Jiang preferred.

It’s not the first time China’s censors have gone to great lengths to prevent Internet users searching out information on the country’s top leaders. At various times, Chinese language searches for “carrot” on Google have been blocked, apparently because one of the three characters in the word matches the surname of current Chinese president Hu Jintao.

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