Kill Bill in Chinese is made of four characters: kill-dead-bi-er. (bi-er is Chinese way of pronouncing Bill.)
In order to build a harmonious society, “kill” as a bad word should not appear on internet at all. The internet platforms have to replace the bad word with a square. As a result, some netizens found this could happen:
(rough translation) As a bad word, "kill" was shown as a square 口. Some movies look more interesting, for example, "square-dead-bi-er".
It went viral.
Why? Because the square 口 in Chinese means “mouth/oral”. Dirty minded people see “oral-dead-bi-er”, and in Chinese grammar, it is “give oral sex to Bill till he dies”.
People say, it changed a violent movie into a porn one. And what a way to die! (sounds better than auto-erotic asphyxiation, right? )
But, “dead” is a bad word too! So it should be “oral-oral-bi-er”.
But do you know that “bi” in Chinese sounds the same as cunt, and can be used by people who are bent to bypass the censorship? It should be “oral-oral-oral-er”.
You say ““oral-oral-oral”? Isn’t it “pin”(品)? Isn’t it “pin-er”?
But “pin-er” is too close to “pin-cong”, a Chinese internet forum focusing on political topics which was shut down in Oct 2018. A bad name.
Okay, maybe this movie should have no name.
No no no, the twitter thread concluded: this reminds people of the Hong Kong youth protesting with blank banners. No name could mean prison terms.
Relax, we are not there yet. We are just sucking Bill till he dies.
Back in September 2021, Tencent informed its users that according to new Chinese laws regarding personal information, Wechat (overseas version) and Weixin (domestic version) would be governed by different laws. The domestic version will obey the much more stringent laws and regulations concerning data sovereignty and content censorship.
The good part is that the users can still interact with each other as usual. Well, until they break China law. If you are a Weixin user, your account gets suspended. If you are a Wechat user, you still have your account, but no one inside China can see you in any group when you talk: you are shadow banned.
But there is more to that. On Wechat, a short video was circulated about the new rules. In it, it was explained that your account was never yours and Wechat can confiscate it for any reason at any time and re-purpose it. At that time, I was so shocked that I sent the video to all my contacts to make sure that they know that and consider Signal if they could.
And it seems that I forgot to tell Australian politicians: they just discovered that their Wechat account was repurposed.
Since we are talking about a Tencent product, some news on Tencent - on Jan 12th, Pony Ma, Tencent chairman and cofounder, gave a speech. He said:
Tencent is just an ordinary company during the great development of the country, a beneficiary of the national development wave. The company may be replaced at any time. In the future, when Tencent serves the country and society, it should not be absent, but in position, and never in an offside position. It will be a good assistant and connector.
It has also been reported that Tencent is divesting from key business partners such as JD, Meituan: “Tencent made these recent divestments against a backdrop of China’s antitrust crackdown and a campaign on common prosperity. Speculation is thus rife that Tencent is voluntarily dismantling its ironclad alliance to be in the government’s good graces. “
Combined together, you get the picture that Pony Ma is trying his best to avoid Jack Ma’s fate. As for Jack Ma, he managed to get to Spain, but his Ant group is under investigation.
I am seeing more and more mention of a new social media called Xiaohongshu, considered as China’s Instagram. It has 300 million registered users.
Since I am talking about censorship, I want to tell a story from last June. On June 4th 2021, the editor of Xiaohongshu’s Weibo account asked : “Tell me loudly, what is the date today?”
And promptly the Weibo account was suspended. By now you know why. Perhaps the shocking part of this censorship is the young generation: they live in such a censored environment that they really did not know that they have crossed a line invisible to them.
Sadly this happens everyday. There is no black list of words for you to check. Either your message can not be sent because some bad words are in it, or it is sent and later your account is suspended. It is very effective because it keeps you self censor yourself ALL the time. Big Brother is watching you, but you watch yourself even more.
Supposedly Karl Marx explicitly said that China was never a feudal society.
In my 15 years of education in China, we were told that China was a half-feudal, half-colonized society until CCP made us standing up as people.
Today, netizens coined a new phrase: half-feudal, half-internet society.
To every Chinese, it echoes the all too familiar “half-feudal, half-colonized society”. We do not think “internet” here has the same negative connotation as colonization. It is just a better phrase to describe China today, borrowing the forms of an old jargon.
As you can see in the picture, the man has a hair style from the Qing dynasty. Qing is considered especially backwards. It is famous for the most harsh Literary Inquisition, aka speech crime.
To some people, this picture represents the Chinese system: an internet with harsh censorship. To others it represents the current regressive ultra-conservative culture: the people using the internet have mentality of Qing dynasty.
Luckily, this newsletter is still 口 of 口, therefore you can enjoy it to its full extent!