Chinese criticize Covid zero – in language censors don’t seem to understand

In many countries, posting insults about the government online is so common that no one cares. But it’s not such an easy task on China’s heavily censored internet.

That doesn’t seem to have stopped Guangzhou residents from venting their frustration after their city – a global manufacturing powerhouse home to 19 million people – became the epicenter of a nationwide Covid-19 outbreak, prompting further lockdown measures. turn.

“We had to do lockdowns in April and again in November,” one resident posted on Weibo, China’s restricted version of Twitter, on Monday — before peppering the post with profanity that included references to employees’ mothers. “Government didn’t provide subsidies – do you think my rent doesn’t cost money?”

Other users left posts with instructions that loosely translate to “go to hell”, while some accused the authorities of “talking nonsense” – albeit in less polite phrases.

These featured posts are notable not only because they represent growing public frustration with the relentless politics of covid zero from China – which uses instant lockdowns, mass testing, extensive contact tracing and quarantines to eliminate infections as soon as they arise – but because they remain visible in everything.

Normally, such harsh criticism of government policies would be quickly removed by the government’s army of censors, but these posts remained untouched for days. And that is most likely because they are written in language few censors will understand completely.

These posts are in Cantonese, which originated in Guangdong province outside Guangzhou and is spoken by tens of millions of people in southern China. It can be difficult to decipher by speakers of Mandarin – the official language of China and preferred by the government – ​​especially in its written and often complex slang.

And this appears to be just the latest example of how Chinese people are turning to Cantonese – an irreverent language that offers rich possibilities for satire – to express discontent with their government without attracting the attention of all-seeing censors.

In September of this year, the US-based independent media monitoring organization China Digital Times noticed that several Cantonese posts of dissatisfaction were evading censors in response to mass Covid testing requirements in Guangdong.

“Perhaps because Weibo’s content censorship system has difficulty recognizing the spelling of Cantonese characters, many posts in risqué, bold, and direct language still survive. But if the same content is written in Mandarin, it is likely to be blocked or deleted,” said the organization, which is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.

In neighboring Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, anti-government protesters in 2019 often used Cantonese wordplay both for protest slogans and to guard against possible surveillance by mainland Chinese authorities.

Now, the Cantonese appears to be offering those fed up with China’s ongoing Covid zero lockdowns an avenue for more subtle displays of dissent.

Jean-François Dupré, an assistant professor of political science at Université TÉLUQ who has studied Hong Kong’s language policy, said the Chinese government’s dwindling tolerance of public criticism has led its critics to “innovate” in their communication.

“It appears that the use of non-Mandarin forms of communication may allow dissidents to evade online censorship, at least for a while,” Dupré said.

“This phenomenon attests to the regime’s lack of confidence and growing paranoia, and citizens’ continued eagerness to resist despite risks and obstacles.”

Perfect for satire and protest

Although Cantonese shares much of its vocabulary and writing system with Mandarin, many of its slang, swear words and everyday phrases have no Mandarin equivalent. Its written form is also sometimes based on rarely used and archaic characters, or ones that mean something entirely different in Mandarin, so Cantonese sentences can be difficult for Mandarin readers to understand.

Compared to Mandarin, Cantonese is highly colloquial, often informal, and lends itself easily to wordplay – making it suitable for inventing and throwing barbs.

When Hong Kong was rocked by anti-government protests in 2019 — fueled in part by fears that Beijing was encroaching on the city’s autonomy, freedoms and culture — these attributes of the Cantonese came into focus.

“Cantonese was, of course, an important transmitter of political grievances during the 2019 protests,” Dupré said, adding that the language gave “a strong local flavor to the protests.”

He pointed out how entirely new written characters were spontaneously born out of the pro-democracy movement — including one that combined “freedom” characters with popular desecration.

Other written character pieces illustrate Cantonese’s endless creativity, like a stylized version of “Hong Kong” that, when read from the side, becomes “add oil” – a rallying cry in the protests.

Protesters also found ways to secure their communications, wary of the fact that online chat groups – where they organized rallies and protested against the authorities – were being monitored by mainland agents.

For example, because spoken Cantonese sounds different from spoken Mandarin, some people have experimented with romanizing Cantonese – spelling out the sounds using the English alphabet – making it virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to understand.

And while protests have subsided after the Chinese government imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020, Cantonese continues to offer the city’s residents an avenue to express their unique local identity — something people have long feared losing once that the city is even more under Beijing’s control.

staying silent

For some, using Cantonese to criticize the government seems particularly appropriate, as the central government has aggressively pushed for Mandarin to be used across the country in education and everyday life – for example, in television broadcasts and other media – often at the expense of regional languages ​​and dialects.

These efforts turned into a national controversy in 2010, when government officials suggested increasing Mandarin programming on the mainly Cantonese television channel Guangzhou — outraging residents, who participated in rare street rallies and brawls with police.

It’s not just Cantonese people affected – many ethnic minorities have voiced alarm that the decline of their native languages ​​could spell the end of cultures and ways of life they say are already threatened.

In 2020, students and parents in Inner Mongolia carried out mass school boycotts due to a new policy that replaced the Mongolian language with Mandarin in primary and secondary schools.

Similar fears have long existed in Hong Kong – and grew in the 2010s as more Mandarin-speaking mainlanders began living and working in the city.

“An increasing number of Mandarin-speaking schoolchildren are enrolled in Hong Kong schools and are seen commuting daily between Shenzhen and Hong Kong,” Dupré said. “Through these meetings, the language change that has been taking place in Guangdong has become very visible to the people of Hong Kong.”

He added that these concerns were heightened by local government policies that emphasized the role of Mandarin and referred to Cantonese as a “dialect” – infuriating some Hong Kongers who saw the term as a snub and argued that it should be referred to as a ” language” instead.

Over the past decade, Hong Kong schools have been encouraged by the government to use Mandarin in Chinese classes, while others have switched to teaching simplified characters – the preferred written form on the mainland – rather than the traditional characters used in Hong Kong.

There was even more outrage in 2019 when the city’s education chief suggested that the continued use of Cantonese at the expense of Mandarin in city schools could mean that Hong Kong would lose its competitive edge in the future.

“Given Hong Kong’s rapid economic and political integration, it would not be surprising to see Hong Kong’s language regime be aligned with that of the mainland, especially with regard to the promotion of Mandarin,” Dupré said.

Speaking ‘no fear’

It’s not the first time people on the mainland have found ways around the censors. Many use emojis to represent taboo phrases, English abbreviations that represent Mandarin phrases, and images such as cartoons and digitally altered photos that are more difficult for censors to monitor.

But these methods, by their very nature, have their limits. In contrast, for Guangzhou’s fed-up residents, Cantonese offers an endless linguistic landscape in which to criticize their leaders.

It is unclear whether these more subversive uses of Cantonese will encourage greater solidarity among its speakers in southern China — or whether they could encourage the central government to further clamp down on the use of local dialects, Dupré said.

For now, though, many Weibo users have embraced the rare opportunity to express frustration with China’s Covid zero policy, which has hit the country’s economy, isolated it from the rest of the world and disrupted people’s daily lives with the constant threat. of lockdowns and unemployment.

“I hope everyone can keep their anger,” wrote one Weibo user, noting how most posts related to the Guangzhou lockdowns were in Cantonese.

“Watch Cantonese scolding (authorities) on Weibo without getting caught,” posted another, using characters that mean laughter.

“Learn Cantonese well and cross Weibo without fear.”