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posted by mrpg on Saturday July 15 2017, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the people's-republic-of-censorship dept.

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo died in custody on Thursday. Now comes the censorship:

After Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace laureate, died in custody on Thursday evening, his Chinese admirers went online to voice their sympathy and grief — and countless government censors buckled down for a long night's work.

The Chinese government's drive to silence discussion of Liu — who died of liver cancer at age 61 — predates even 2009, when he was handed an 11-year sentence for helping draft Charter 08, a document calling for multiparty democracy and freedom of speech. On Chinese social networks, searches for "Liu Xiaobo" return nothing, and most Chinese citizens barely know his name.

Yet on Friday, China's social media sites were filled with expressions of solidarity and grief, suggesting that Liu's case — and his ideals — may be more influential in China than many outsiders believe. These expressions were often cryptic and muted — snatches of poetry, allegorical quotes — but still, the censors responded in force.

On Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, they deleted photos of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since Liu's arrest, though she has never been charged with a crime. They blocked flickering candle emojis, the letters RIP and LXB, and the dates "1955-2017," the years of Liu's birth and death. They removed poems by Liu and Liu Xia; photos of the South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993; and even the phrase: "someone died today."

"I think this kind of pokes a hole in the narrative that he's not well known in China," said William Nee, a Hong Kong-based researcher at Amnesty International. "I don't know if I'd characterize this as a paradigm shift. But it might be that some of the seeds he'd started to plant — or, the ideas in Charter 08 — have started to bear fruit among the rights defense community, and they're becoming more well known and are spreading among parts of the general public."

[...] Yet Friday's outpouring of support also exposed some of the censorship apparatus' weaknesses. On Friday, "LXB" was censored, but "XB" was not. The Chinese word for candle — 蜡烛 — was censored, but adding a space between the characters — 蜡 烛 — brought up several results, many related to Liu's death.

This editorial will set you straight.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 15 2017, @11:40PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 15 2017, @11:40PM (#539693) Journal
    And the commenters are remarkable. Take this example:

    Howard J. Harrison July 14, 2017 at 15:47:

    Tiananmen seems so long ago, yet one remembers it like it was yesterday. Tiananmen. Berlin. 1989. What a time!

    That that time and this time should be encompassed in a mere thirty years is surreal.

    Thirty years on, one almost envies the Chinese their regime.

    Suppose that Americans like me now go to New York’s Times Square to demand the termination of democracy. Will the regime send the tanks?

    Just think of it. Americans going to Times Square to demand tyranny and getting it in the form of tanks. You got what you asked for. That's poetic justice! Then there's "Karl":

    Karl July 15, 2017 at 11:41

    Interesting. It seems that Liu’s status maximising didn’t work so well after 1989. Trying to be holier than everyone else works only among people who share your Religion. His Religion was Western progressivism, which apparently is not a religion widely shared in China. So he couldn’t get much status in China, but quite a lot amongst his Western co-religionists.

    Sure, in 1989 things could have turned out differently. There was (maybe still is-don’t know anything about China) a chance for establishing progressivsim as the dominant Religion in China.

    Your comment about the US having the most advanced PR apparatus is only partly correct. This apparatus is very adept at promoting stuff to members of mainstream US culture. It still works, but not quite that well in Europe or Australia. It works even less well in China. If you want to produce effective propaganda, you have to understand the culture of the people you want to influence.

    Understaning other cultures isn’t a strong point of the Cathedral

    And "Karl" never wondered why someone would do something so suboptimal for 30 years except to dismiss it as "religion" and lousy US propaganda at work. "Understaning" other people (much less other cultures) may not be Karl's strong suit either.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:02AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:02AM (#539786)

    It's a neoreactionary blog and neoreactionaries oppose democracy, so it wouldn't be far-fetched for the first commenter to demonstrate against democracy.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:45AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:45AM (#539854) Journal

      It's a neoreactionary blog and neoreactionaries oppose democracy, so it wouldn't be far-fetched for the first commenter to demonstrate against democracy.

      I'm not surprised. Not clear what he thinks gets proved though, if his protest against democracy gets crushed by tanks rather than the usual treatment of police officers loitering around.