 The next talk is by Brusta and its river crab harmony and euphemism, a peak at Chinese online culture under the censorship. Please welcome her with a great round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So just a reminder before I start to talk that I'm going to use some graphic, vulgar and explicit language if you have young children with you. Or if you are easily offended, then I highly advise your discretion. Also, I will mention a lot of new words in Chinese and I will try to repeat the meaning every now and then. But if it gets too confusing for you, you can just shout out and I don't mind being interrupted. So we start the talk with some music appreciation. So did you notice who were in the song? Anyone notice who were the animals that were mentioned in the song? Yes, and? Good. So what is grass-mount horse and what is river crab? Well, you know, following 40 minutes, I'm going to explain to you a handful of selected terminology, incidents and phenomenon that one might encounter online in China from cultural, historical and linguistic perspectives. I would try my best to entangle the complex layers of humor, resentment, resistance and creativity of Chinese netizens that I have followed closely in the past decade, while at the same time you all know that the censorship by the government started to climb down tighter and tighter. Well, sit tight and here we go. So grass-mount horse in Chinese raised Cao Ni Ma. Read off me, Cao Ni Ma. Good. Cao Ni Ma is a near homophone of, which means that it pronounces the same as Cao Ni Ma, which literally means fuck your mother. As Chinese people's favorite cursing phrase, often referred to as Guo Ma, national curse. And people have been using this phrase for a very long time. Until 2009, the river crabs infested. So river crabs in Chinese is pronounced as He Xi, which is again a near homophone of the word He Xi, which means harmony. And the word harmony comes from the phrase harmonious society, He Xi Shou Hu, which was a social economic vision that the ex-Chinese leader Wu Jintao brought up in the mid-2000s. However, the methods taken to reach this goal, this harmonious society goal, is to delete all the unfavorable voices against a party in all media. Basically, render the term He Xi, harmony, as a euphemism for stability at all costs. The standard is completely arbitrary and you have no idea or you have no right to decide for yourself. So this is basically how online censorship in China started. And of course, soon after, people started to treat to harmonize as a placeholder to censor. So instead of saying harmony He Xi, people started using He Xi just as a joke, river crab, when their online posts get deleted or when they're mentioning any sensitive issues or simply criticizing the Communist Party online. So that means that so people just say, oh, that's river crabs, hence the title of my talk. Also, actually the word crab, apart from the same pronunciation with harmony in Chinese, it also subtly hints at to bully because crabs walk sideways and the sideways in Chinese is heng, which has a double meaning as heng means to bully. And in a picture, you can see that there are three watches on the crab, which refers to three representatives because representative, again, in Mandarin, is Daibiao, which is the same as to wear a watch. So three representatives is also a concept that brought up by then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in 2002 and it means that the Communist Party represents the advanced social productive forces and advanced culture and the interests of the overwhelming majority, except for that it is not the truth. So instead of saying three representatives, people started to jokingly saying wear three watches. So now you understand that Chaonima, this grass moth horse, this cute little innocent looking animal actually means the f-word and the river crabs, the bullies are what takes the unharmonious online contents away to censor. So this phrase is apparently not enough. People also made up this character on the left, you can see following the general rules of how Chinese characters are made. So top, bottom, left to right, and you see the grass moth horse, they're all embedded into one character, which is a very subversive act and I also find it ingenious. It's like people are erecting a monument and saying fuck you censorship. So I don't know if you notice also that there is another point in the song that the habitat and the battle field between the grass moth horse and the river crabs is called Ma Le Ge Bi. Again, homophone, it means your mother's vagina. At the same time, Ge Bi also is Gobi Desert, which is an actual region in north China and south Mongolia known for its dunes, mountains, and rare animals such as no leopards. So it's kind of real to have animals like grass moth horse or river crabs. As you can see by now that in Chinese that it has a lot of the complicated nature of Chinese language both in written and spoken form. There are certain characters that pronounce exactly the same while meaning very differently. So when you want to censor a word in this written form, people always can come up with different other phrases with the same pronunciation to circumvent the censorship. And it can be understood depending on the context. So after I explained to you the linguistic aspects, there's in fact also a cultural and historical layer of the irony about the song. So the melody actually comes from the theme song of the Smurfs when it got introduced into China in the 80s. And people were like, oh, we need to have our own theme song. Two patriotic song writers who normally works for the Communist Party wrote this song and all the kids who grew up in the 80s or 90s watching TV like I did are familiar with this song. So when people adapted the melody to describe, to narrate the battle between river crabs and grass moth horse immediately caught on people's ears and spread virally. The same year, Taonima got so popular, it does not only spawn an industry of videos, cartoons, and stuffed toys in China, but also it got some international attention. So it got mentioned by the jury at the biggest media art festival, Pueza Electronica. That was the same year when WikiLeaks got the award of distinction. Starting with this pair, Chinese netizens compiled a whole collection of internet mythology which originally contains 10 mythical beasts of the internet and is expanding ever since. It first appeared in 2009 on Baidu Baikou, which is an online Chinese encyclopedia run by Baidu. I guess many of you have heard about this, which is the almost only search engine people use in China. So I will briefly introduce another two examples of the mythical beasts just to give you a taste of how they are created. So the first one, Fa Ke You. Fa stands for French, Ke, Croatia, You, Squids. And Fa Ke You is known to be co-discovered, species of squids co-discovered by France and Croatia and have dear habitat in Europe. When agitated, it is said that they are going to release a form of white liquid and cause great harm to humans. So I guess you understand that without me having to translate it. Fa Ke You. So, well, this is the transliteration for Fa Ke You, for those who don't get it. Another one, Yamiedi. It helps if you understand Japanese because it comes from a Japanese phrase, which means to stop. Or if you watch a lot of Japanese pornography that you would probably know this word as well. And it is a stereotype of Chinese towards Japanese pornography. Basically, you know, the girls are very submissive, they always say stop, stop. So, which, and again, Japanese pornography is a very important part of people's life in China because there is no sex education in schools or from parents. So that's how kids get their sex education. The next one I'm going to talk, oh, actually one more mystical creature, which is Gugu, the Inecient Dove, known to be the ancestor of all birds, currently on the verge of extinction in China, though rumor has it that they are going to revive as dragonflies. So according to Native American legend, the bird has a very important habit, which is don't do evil, which can be translated into Chinese as fear of the river crabs. And during the period from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, it once spread all over the world. But after March 23rd in 2010, they started to disappear in mainland China. The abnormal behavior of the bird is suspected to be linked to the recent global extreme climate change. And especially the large-scale ecological, environmental, and geological disasters that have occurred frequently in China. Encountering problems, it did not survive as robustly as grass-matte horses did. Therefore, they chose to migrate to Hong Kong. Coincidentally, in 2010, all Google search services was removed from China to Hong Kong. So this was a watershed in development of Chinese online culture. Since after Google left, Baidu pretty much dominated the search engine market. When Google says that don't do evil, it didn't really know how much evil a search engine can do. So Baidu just demonstrated that to them. Fast-forward to 2016. On Chinese quite like question-and-answer websites, someone asked, what is the greatest evil of humanity? And here is an answer from a 21-year-old Chinese college student, Wei Zexi, who posted about himself receiving treatment for the rare type of cancer he suffered from. And at this hospital, he found from the search result on Baidu. And eventually he realized that the words that he received treatment from wasn't even qualified, and the treatment he got was not as effective as it was promised. So he passed the best opportunity to receive proper treatment, and he condemned Baidu as the greatest evil of humanity. He passed away not long after he posted this answer. So this scandal of course led to a public outcry, and people were really angry about what Baidu did. Well, arguably that it was not only Baidu that led to his death, but also the regulation of the government or the lack of. However, it did point to what people, in general, like a lot of people have suffered from, like they cannot get relevant information on Baidu, and a lot of people just wondered, when will Google return to China? And last August, there was a leaked document from Google that revealed that they were working on a project called Dragonfly, which means it's a censored version of the search engine targeted at the Chinese market. And a lot of people were kind of happy, a lot of Chinese people were happy about it. However, then in November, there was a letter cosigned by a bunch of Google employees. They posted a letter on Medium and saying that this project is against the principle of don't do evil, and we pledged to jump the project immediately. However, what many people did praise them for upholding justice. However, no one really talked about what Chinese were thinking about at the time. And here is a response letter found on GitHub, which is one of the very few international platforms that are still accessible in China without a VPN. So presumably a Chinese programmer who posted this in both Chinese and English, and you can also find this letter on Hacker News. And he basically was saying, like, oh, we want Google to be back, regardless whether it's censored or not, because we hate Baidu so much. I really liked, if you find this letter on Hacker News, I really liked the comment section, because there are so many arguments that perfectly demonstrated the complexity of the ethical issue of tech companies operating in China or outside China. I'll just read out a few. So some people criticized the open letter from the Chinese programmer saying this argument is so wrong, that why do we deal with a massive shit because there's even more massive shit in place at the moment? Fix the root cause. And someone countered that argument saying, it's easy for us to scream human rights when we aren't the ones that don't have access to a platform that has changed our daily life. And then someone remained neutral, but he also said that it wouldn't be a net negative, even if Google censored part of it for getting into China, because it's still 100 times better than Baidu. So I don't know, I know that, you know, audience, I think many of you work for some important tech companies. I don't know this question about ethical issues come across your minds how often it does, but I would insert an unsponsored ad here. If you're still here on Sunday at 1 p.m. at Curie Tent, there will be a talk exactly about this, like the ethics and ethicality of today's technology with the title Why Nobody Cares and Only You Can Save the World by Willem Kline. So I think this is a very important question that all engineers should think about. So after the search engine, let's talk a bit about social platforms in China. And Douban launched in 2005, played a very important role in the development of Chinese online culture and I personally spent a lot of time on there as well. So as a social networking service website, users can create entries of films, books, and music, and movies. Sometimes also the ones that are censored in China, if the admins didn't pay attention to. So it's kind of like a combination of fandom, GoodRace, Reddit, and Meetup all together on this website. So it was very influential and many intellectuals were on there for social discussions. And it made Douban an easy target for censorship. So the admins decided, oh, in order to keep the website running, we have to self-censor at some point. And they did. However, in 2009, as we mentioned earlier, when the river crabs started infesting, things got a bit out of hand. Some admins at Douban removed images of a renaissance painting uploaded by a user because they considered the images inappropriate. And the user got really angry and started a campaign called to put on clothes on famous paintings. And so to ask other fellow users of Douban to upload photoshopped images of famous paintings and put on clothes to cover the news. So that, well, I mean, that's a very good act in response and in protest against the self-censorship of the platform and also to ridicule it. But eventually all these pictures again and discussions got removed from the platform. This confusion of whether nudity in artworks is inappropriate or not continued. Three years later, CCTV, China Central Television, the predominant state television broadcaster in mainland China, reported about a renaissance art exhibition at National Museum of China. And in the broadcast, a picture of the famous David Apollo sculpture by Michelangelo was pixelated at where his penis is. As you can see in this gray capture. So basically the stuff of the state media, the state TV broadcaster basically says, oh, this sculpture is a pornographic image and you can imagine how embarrassed our students must be. So three hours later, however, at the rebroadcast of the news, the pixelation got removed and many, at the time, the media was still relatively free and many media picked it up, but CCTV never responded to that. This is not over yet, the pixelation. So last year, the state administration of press, publication, radio, film, and television, Orien Schwartz, Meenu Tru, says that the entertainment programs are too bad for kids nowadays. Look at all the guys there having tattoos and they're wearing earrings and the girls are dying their hair like crazy. So this is what you see nowadays in TV. Another social media platform that is very influential is Weibo. Weibo stands for microblogging and it sounds exactly the same as scarf, Weibo. So when people say they are posting on Weibo, people also refer to as knitting a scarf. And knitting a scarf has never been an easy feat since Weibo started. So at the early stage, it encouraged a lot of celebrities to join the platform in order to attract more users. And these celebrities included Mike Tyson. And this former world's heavyweight champion, after he opened his account on Weibo in 2013, the first question he asked, of course, is who is the best fighter in China? And the most voted reply was Chenguan. And Tyson was like, who is this Chenguan? A tough guy? I've never heard of it. So it turns out that it is insider's joke among Chinese netizens. Because Chenguan stands for urban management, which is short for Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau. It was established in early 2000s to be in charge with enforcement of urban regulations in most major cities in China. And it has less power than a police. So to make up for that, they just use a lot of violence and brutality. And this is one picture of what they normally do. And a lot of times when they came for inspection, that some street vendors, if they didn't run fast enough, they would get beaten up and sometimes to death. So people really hate them, but they cannot do anything, they cannot report them. It's a governmental agency. So Chenguan eventually became a popular target of jokes and internet memes. So for example, that people would say, don't be too Chenguan, which means that don't bully people. Another famous incident on Weibo was Winnie the Pooh got censored. And I think many of you have heard of that. So actually a lot of, when you heard about it, I guess mostly in 2017 when Western media picked it up, it was already too late because it started in 2013. When Obama met with Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader, who I will refer to as Xi, so don't confuse it with a female pronoun. The comparison between their picture with Winnie and Tigger apparently is too agitating and was ordered to be removed from online, like Weibo and WeChat, which is the messaging app that every Chinese use. However, fortunately or unfortunately for someone that with our current limited technology, the image once seen can hardly be removed from people's mind. So in 2014, this appeared and got banned again. And then in 2015, when she was inspecting the Chinese military during a parade, some people were again circulating this cute image, a harmless plastic Winnie the Pooh toy car. But there's statistics according to Weibo Scope, which is a project at the University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Center. They have monitored this type of censorship on Weibo since 2011 and they said this image was shared 65,000 times with being 69 minutes before it got deleted, which means that 15 times per second. So as Xi's power gets more and more centralized, finally at the beginning of 2018, he announced that he's going to remove the presidential term limit, which basically means that he can rule indefinitely. At this point, the list of censorship gets really ridiculous and it was reported that the phrase, not agree,不同意, was also censored. So you cannot even say不同意, I do not agree. Because of this havers censorship, people's creativity also peaked. In order to express their dissent, Winnie the Pooh was again chosen for political satire. And this one was an old post from Disney's official account on Weibo in China. It was dug out with a photo of Winnie the Pooh hugging a pot of honey and it says, find a thing you love and stick with it. And someone dug it out, re-posted it and commented on it saying, wow, God-like prophecy. And there's also other memes including one of my fairies. My mom said I must get married with Xi's term in office. I finally breathed out a sigh of relief. And then there's also other very creative acts including this one, a cosplayer wearing the royal dragon robe and drawing the comparison between Xi and the emperor. And also this protest, people carried a little toy, Winnie toy and put on the outfit that is commonly seen during cultural revolution and carried it to the front of Hong Kong Chinese liaison office because this happened in Hong Kong in order to perform an enthronement ceremony. The same week I was actually in Hong Kong myself and I bumped into a former colleague of mine who at the time lived in Beijing. So we were talking about how ridiculous the censorship gets nowadays and she told me how people had to use Hei Hua, black words, which means secret language, to communicate and in order to circumvent the censorship on social media to avoid being invited to have some tea with the police. So basically this is how people refer to when you say something online that you're not supposed to. First step, you might get thrown into a little dark room, not physically but digitally, which means that your account gets suspended for a limited period or your account gets bumped, which means that your online social identity simply just disappeared. And or one step before you're thrown into jail as you will be asked by the police to come have some tea and that simply means that they will bring you into the police station and interrogate you or just threaten you not to do it again. So in order to demonstrate how people use secret language, she invited me into a feminist-themed WeChat group with mostly female Chinese artists and arts professionals. Ironically, the name of the group was very similar to one of the most beloved Japanese porn stars. Whose name in Chinese characters is Fan Dao Ai, literally means rice island love. So in the group, all the members changed their allies to rice something. And I soon discovered why it was, because the topic in discussion at the time in the group was Me Too movement in Chinese-speaking art world. So people were very cautious about it. So they adopted Me Too to its Chinese transliteration and chose the characters of Me Too, which means rice bunny. So you might think that why would they be afraid of censorship if they're only talking about feminism? Because, well, if you think that it's nothing, you're probably too simple, sometimes naive. Because feminism or Western feminism is considered as ideology that the Western hostile forces, which is a very common phrase that used by the state media, were using to attack China's views on women and the country's basic policies on gender equality. And there were some feminist activists got thrown in jail or there were a lot of their social accounts got suspended. So here comes the most controversial and confusing part. Not only the Chinese government didn't like the feminist discourse, also some Chinese netizens seem not liking it either because they found it too baisuo, literally the white left. Well, I will explain first what it means and then analyze why it emerged. So baisuo was coined in 2010, and it was only amidst the European refugee crisis that it became popular, and Angela Merkel was actually the first Western politician to be labeled as a baisuo for her open-door refugee policy. She was also called Shengmu, and it literally means the holy mother, which was not a praise in atheist China, which rather, according to its users, means that someone who is over-emotional, hypocritical, and having too much empathy. The anti-baisuo discourse on China social media gained stronger momentum during the US 2016 American presidential election campaign. When some Chinese students in the US criticized Democratic Party as treating Asians unfairly. So they used baisuo to describe them. And then these Chinese netizens who have no little knowledge of American or international politics, especially in regard to immigration, multi-culturalism, and minority rights, et cetera, they just use a term to describe the perceived double standards of Western media. Or they also can use baisuo to discredit their opponents in online debates. And then they discovered Trump, and who is as conservative as some phobic and anti-humanitarian. Trump was considered as the antidote of baisuo, the white left, the people who dislike baisuo naturally became his enthusiastic supporters. And they would also identify Trump's opponent, Obama and Clinton, as the epitome of baisuo, the white left. Despite the fact that neither of them is particularly humanitarian nor are treating migrants very well. And anyone who defends universal values, including Chinese people, would be considered as baisuo as well, especially elites who received good education, in particularly Western education. So if, however, things get really absurd when Fox News picked it up and reported on it. Baisuo, its literal translation is white left, according to political scientist Chen Chen Zhang, wrote about the term in a recent Open Democracy piece. Members of the white left are, in the view of the Chinese, quote, biased, elitist, ignorant of social reality and constantly applying double standards. They only care about topics like immigration, minorities, LGBT, and the environment, and have, quote, no sense of real problems in the real world. They're people obsessed with political correctness to the extent they, quote, tolerate backward Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism, and on top of that... So I don't want to play the whole video, but it's very funny. But in case you're still wondering why there are so many anti-Baisuo supporters, we could also examine the phenomenon with a supplementary knowledge on Chinese contemporary social reality. Because in the end, Chinese dream is actually not that different from American dream, on both worship the social Darwinist logic of survival of the fittest. Therefore, it opposes the idea of a welfare state. Though the wealth gap is widening and the social inequality is hopelessly increasing, many people take on pragmatism with emphasis on self-responsibility, leading many Chinese citizens to dismiss struggles against structural discrimination as naive pretentious or demanding undeserved privileges. No different than the right-wing voices that you see in the West. So the anti-Baisuo criticism also fits especially well with the rising China and declining Europe narrative. In an academic-style asset that was retreated more than 7,000 times on Weibo, the popular macro blogging platform, the poster quoted some European philosophers and concluded that the white left as a moral epidemic that will lead the West to self-destruction. However seemingly objective or academic the post is, it echoes with the official narrative of the Chinese government by opposing against the universal values in order to prove the legitimacy and superiority of current Chinese authoritarian regime. So finally, though the whole anti-Baisuo criticism looks like it's completely born out of grassroots, we cannot rule out the possibility that it's a well-orchestrated campaign by the government or simply that the only safe stand that one can take under the censorship, the only voice that can be allowed in the public sphere. So... Baisuo. And next one, as I mentioned earlier, it could be a campaign by the government, which is exactly another tactic of Chinese censorship combining with the Great Firewall, is to obfuscate the truth by harrowing a large number of internet commentators, which is commonly known as the 50 cent army. And the name comes from the allegation that these commentators would get paid 50 cents in Chinese Yuan for each post they fabricate. And... though some speculate that they are probably not paid anything because it's required if you are a party member. And more recently, after many years of the online censorship, another generation has grown up behind a wall. The scary part is that these young kids, they have never heard anything else except for the nationalist indoctrination since they benefit the most from the economic prosperity of rising China. And they are genuinely proud of the country. At the same time, they were told that the patriotism is a natural human instinct, so they never questioned that. And these people are called... Xiaofenghong, which literally means little pink red. And red is the national color because it's the color of the party and pink simply indicates that they are very naive. So these people, they idolize China and the party the same way as they idolize their K-pop stars, which means they follow their idols blindly and they are just willing to do anything for them. And this one is a poster circulated on Weibo with the hashtag our idol is called Ah Zhong. Zhong comes from China. And Ah is a way people use to add in front of someone's name to endear them, to show endearment and familiarity. And this blind patriotism is accentuated during the recent Hong Kong protest against the extradition bill. So Chinese state media is only reporting the protest partially. It did not explain the cause of the protest, which is the Hong Kong government basically is trying to pass a bill against people's will. Now they mention the occasion when two million Hong Kongers walk on the streets peacefully in order to protest against the bill. And they never mentioned that the Hong Kong police were using excessive violence either. And they only report that the protesters are secessionists who are trying to destabilize Hong Kong and separate Hong Kong from China, which cannot be further from the truth. And these little pinkles, the young patriots who have no other source of information but these fake news from the state media are infuriated about these Hong Kong protesters. So they came up with a brilliant idea and they're going to wage a cyber war. So they need to first bypass the Great Firewall and then go to troll the Hong Kong posters on these international platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And that's what they did. So they climbed over the wall using VPN, which is also illegal in China. So they did that. And at first there was probably only a small group of people, these little pinkles, however it was picked up by CCTV, the state TV broadcaster, and they spoke highly of these little pinkles for their patriotic move. And it further encouraged the behavior, so it kind of formed a positive feedback loop. And I think some of you might have heard about it this Monday that Facebook and Twitter both announced that they have noticed this abnormal behavior and suspended many accounts originated from China on the ground that they are distributing unauthentic information about Hong Kong protests. And this came on Monday and on Tuesday the spokesperson of China's foreign ministry commented on that one being asked to, he said that every Chinese citizen should have the right to say whatever they want to. And I hope that they will eventually come. And here I'm ending my talk with a quote from George Orwell, which is, every joke is a tiny revolution. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brusta. Thank you. Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, we have some time left for some questions that I would hope you take, please stand by the microphones and we'll get to you in a second. Hello. Please turn on the microphone for the questions. It's the Chinese government operating. Obviously. Okay, so we have a question here. Hi, thanks for your talk. Many Chinese, especially I guess among the elites go abroad for university and study in Western universities and like you said, VPN I assume is not completely uncommon knowledge, so they do have access, you know, the little pinkos, they do have access. Do you, is it just they're too, like once they go abroad and go back home, are they already, you know, too indoctrinated by growing up with it? Are they, is there a move towards the left or, you know, towards democracy or do they change their opinions? It really depends because there are also a lot of state-sponsored media overseas. So for example, recently there was a response, like when New York Times reported on this disinformation war against Hong Kong protest, that there was this American, or Chinese students who studied in America and they have this WeChat media account and they just says, oh, like whatever the New York Times says is all fake news, we're not doing that and they're not reporting it, faithfully. So I think it really depends. If you have access to free information, it doesn't mean that you have the ability to think critically. I mean, like you see what happens to America, right? Thank you so much. Next question, please. So actually, and I forgot to mention in the beginning that you're actually from China. And I was wondering, like, as I far as I understand, now you live here, are you not afraid of making this talk, exposing censorship? Well, I expect that question, because that thought definitely crossed my mind for a while. I was like, oh, should I do this? But I think I want to do this talk exactly because if I am too afraid to do this talk, then that is exactly the effect that the censorship wants to create so that you are so afraid that you self-censor and I don't accept that. Thank you, thank you. It's a small defeat of censorship. Please give her the last round of applause and thank you so much.