{"id":10979,"date":"2011-10-31T04:10:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T04:10:28","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-10-31T04:10:41","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T04:10:41","slug":"Where-an-Internet-Joke-Is-Not-Just-a-Joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=10979","title":{"rendered":"Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China\u2019s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions \u2014 or precisely because of them \u2014 the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. \u201cCensorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,\u201d says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. \u201cIt forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.\u201d<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. \u201cBeyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,\u201d says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. \u201cNothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.\u201d  So pervasive is this irreverent subculture that the Chinese have a name for it: egao, meaning \u201cevil works\u201d or, more roughly, \u201cmischievous mockery.\u201d In its simplest form, egao (pronounced \u201cEUH-gow\u201d) lampoons the powerful without being overtly rebellious. President Hu Jintao\u2019s favorite buzz word, \u201charmony,\u201d which he deploys constantly when urging social stability, is hijacked to signify censorship itself, as in, \u201cMy blog\u2019s been harmonized.\u201d June 4, the censored date of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, is rendered as May 35 \u2014 or \u201c535.\u201d There are also more complex forms of egao, like Hu Ge\u2019s 2010 film spoof, \u201cAnimal World,\u201d in which a rare species of Internet users is \u201csaved\u201d from \u201ccompulsive thinking disorder,\u201d i.e., the urge to think freely. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Satire is sometimes a safety valve that government might grudgingly permit. Better a virtual laugh, after all, than a real protest. But being laughed at, as Orwell found during his stint as a colonial police officer in Burma, can also be a ruler\u2019s greatest fear. And the Chinese government, which last year sentenced a woman to a year of hard labor for a sarcastic three-word tweet, appears to suffer from an acute case of humor deficiency. \u201cJokes that mock the abuse of power do more than let off steam; they mobilize people\u2019s emotions,\u201d says Wen Yunchao, an outspoken blogger who often mounts sardonic Internet campaigns in defense of free speech. \u201cEvery time a joke takes off,\u201d Wen says, \u201cit chips away at the so-called authority of an authoritarian regime.\u201d  Satirical threads sweeping across the Internet can often seem like brush fires whose origins are lost in the conflagration. But behind every outbreak are individuals probing the limits of self-expression, flirting, often perilously, with the blurry line between the permissible and the punishable. Over the past several months I followed two individuals \u2014 the animator Pi San and the blogger Wen Yunchao \u2014 in an effort to understand the dynamics of \u201cmischievous mockery\u201d and the increasingly serious game of cat-and-mouse taking place along China\u2019s digital front lines.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p><strong><em>No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China\u2019s?  You could&#8217;ve fooled me.  Try the Obama Administration.  Oh, I forgot they are not only limited to the web but to all media in general, particularly foxnews!  (only joking)  LOL<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/10\/30\/magazine\/the-dangerous-politics-of-internet-humor-in-china.html?pagewanted=2&#038;ref=asia\">SOURCE<\/a><br \/>\n<!--break--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China\u2019s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":72448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Joshua","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China\u2019s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed","magazineBlocksPostCategories":[],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":132,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":4,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg",113,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Joshua","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1213"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}