China’s internet censors are trying to crush dissenters’ memes and puns. It’s a losing battle.

• China’s youth often use code words and in-jokes to bypass online restrictions.
• The government is becoming more active in cracking down on such workarounds.
• Experts say the plan will likely backfire and lead to a “cat-and-mouse game’ with China’s youth.

Many of China’s youth have become adept at evading online censors using wordplay, memes, and in-jokes.

Now Chinese authorities have launched a fresh campaign to cut down on what they see as “irregular” and “uncivilized” language to thwart dissent online.

It’s a campaign that could backfire, experts told Business Insider, not least because it’s almost impossible to police all language online without shutting down the internet.

“Young people seem to be quite good at coming up with new puns,” said Diane Rulke, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

“This is likely going to be a cat-and-mouse game that will go on and on.”

China’s use of wordplay and memes

Gary King, the director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, told BI that China carries out its online censorship in various ways, the most commonly used strategies being removing social media posts and automatically filtering certain keywords.

King said the latter is “very ineffective” because it is easy to get around it by using different language, including homophonic puns, coded in-jokes, and memes.

That’s exactly what some people in China have been doing. For example, NPR reports that the phrase “banana peel shrimp moss” has been used as a coded plea for Xi to step down.

“Xiang jiao pi,” which translates to banana peel in Mandarin, has the same acronym as the president’s name. “Xia tai” translates to shrimp moss, which is similar to the Mandarin phrase for “step down.”

When a Chinese censor removes an “irregular and uncivilized” phrase, they call it “harmonizing,” per NPR.

“He-Xie,” the Mandarin word for harmony, sounds similar to another word that translates to river crab. Those who have been censored say that they have been “river-crabbed,” the outlet added.

The ‘clear and bright’ campaign

According to the Guardian, China’s online censors will now target even innocent-sounding puns, such as the phrase “rainy girl without melons” which is often used in place of “it’s none of your business.”

This is the latest round of “clear and bright” campaign put forward by China’s internet regulators on October 11.

While this particular branch of the campaign focuses on online language, campaigns in the past have focused on censoring video content and Chinese apps.

However, King said this strategy doesn’t make sense because coded language is unlikely to threaten the government’s overarching mission to stop “actual, on-the-ground protests.”

The consequences for people who attempt to organize these protests are “intentionally vague,” King said.

“The fuzzier the line, the more dangerous it is to come anywhere near it,” he said.

Either way, he added, China’s internet generation is unlikely to attempt to organize mass protests with code words because it would be “impossible” to hide it from the government.

Rulke, the Carnegie Mellon University professor, said it may ultimately be fruitless.

It may also be dangerous. “At a time when the development and exchange of ideas is vitally needed to tackle challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, restricting the creative use of language could have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences for Chinese society,” wrote Urtzi Urrutikoetxea, Chair of PEN International’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee.