Tidbits From the World

Today I have no travel pictures to share, but instead here’s a very interesting observation that I made last week while studying Chinese:

This is a text that I had to study for my Chinese litterature class last week. It’s a short biography of Laoshe, an author from the beginning of the 20th Century. As I usually do when I read in Chinese, I looked up all the words, that I was not completely sure about the meaning, in a dictionary. And I stumbled upon that sentence:

1966年“文化大革命”开始后受到了残酷XX……

In 1966, after the start of the “Cultural Revolution”, he was the victim of cruel XX.

XX stands for the word that I didn’t know.

So, I looked up the word in my favorite online dictionary…

And this is what I got! The page was censored! So what could be that mysterious word that activates government censorship? – even in a dictionary… The unknown kindles the curiosity, so I used a proxy to bypass the censorship and I found out the meaning of the word…

And here it was… But why then was it censored? At first I thought it was just one of those keywords that the Great Firewall automatically blocks no matter which website uses them. So, I looked up the word again, this time in a French dictionary, and here’s what I got:

No censorship… the French dictionary worked without any problem. That was strange. So, if it wasn’t a matter of automatically censored keywords, then what was it?

After that, later in the same week, an other “illegal” word appeared in one of my texts: “色情”, litterally “color, feeling”. Again, the English dictionary would not show me any result without using a proxy, but the French dictionary worked without a hitch.

“Érotisme” (eroticism). Recently, the government started a campaign against pornography. Many pornographic sites were shut down or censored. I guess the word that is related to the concept of “pornography” has itself been put on the list of keywords to be censored by the Great Firewall!

That reminded of that dictionary that gave me the following definition for the word “Independence of Taiwan”: Proposition of a handful of people in Taiwan Province attempting to split Taiwan from China.

I try not to discuss too much about politics on this blog. I understand that some people get worked up really easily, especially on the Internet, over articles about China. But for those who don’t understand why I was surprised by this definition in my dictionary, it’s because the translation was very political and biased. Instead of only giving a translation for the word “台独”, a definition was added, thus giving a political bias to a document that is supposed to be neutral and apolitical, a dictionary.

I found something very interesting last summer, when my friend from Beijing came to visit me in Xi’an and he gave me this magazine.

The magazine was a special issue of National Geographic about China.

Before he arrived in Xi’an, he skimmed through the magazine and noticed that some pages were thicker than others… and also, yet another strange observation, page 125 was followed by page 130… (instead of page 126). He then discovered the reason for these pages being thicker than others: they had been glued together! The “X” that you see here on the left page on the photo are the marks left by the glue that pulled off ink from the next page, glue that was placed there by the Ministry of Propaganda.

The text is about the repression of political dissidents and also mentions a case where an artist cut his little finger to protest against the 1989 events at the Tian’anmen Square.

At pages 100 and 101, one can see four artistic representations of chairman Mao: Mao with Stalin’s moustache, Mao swimming in a river of blood, Mao with a flower on his lips and the official portrait of Mao, out of focus.

Chinese cartography has always been a controversial issue. This is because on some parts of the border, the limits have still not been negociated with the neighboring countries and some have not yet received international recognition. On this map, Taiwan appears in white, as if the Island was not a part of China.

On this map it is not Taiwan that is missing, but some borders claimed by China are not recognized. These regions are currently under the administration of foreign countries, mainly India.

And finally, the most ridiculous example of censorship in our era of widespread computers and Internet: censorship by a black marker pen! Under a strong light one can see what lies hidden behind the black marks:

“After 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion swept across Beijing, every decade included at least one major political upheaval. Usually these events were violent, ranging from…”

[the Japanese invasion to the Cultural Revolution to the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989].

The pages that were not censored are mostly about the new Chinese Economy, the Nouveaux Riches, the ancient Chinese Culture, the technological achievements of China, fashion, urbanism and also about air pollution and water shortages.