Dirt-poor and ugly – the proud new mantra of those left behind in the new China(latimes.com)
latimes.com
Dirt-poor and ugly – the proud new mantra of those left behind in the new China
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-chinese-poor-ugly-20181226-story.html
62 comments
There's a hard dilemma between discoverability to audiences and obscurity to censors.
Steganography can work in some applications, but it's not a general solution. Common memes like Winnie the Pooh as a stand in for Xi are a way people naturally mask information through symbolism. Once it becomes common, censors watch for it.
If your image becomes popular, they will pull you aside. They won't catch every image, but they can increase general risks.
Even in one on one conversations, the risk is that the person you're speaking with could screen cap your chats and have you arrested, maybe because they themselves have been put in an impossible situation.
You might be able to solve for man-in-the-middle, but you can't solve for cop-on-the end.
Steganography can work in some applications, but it's not a general solution. Common memes like Winnie the Pooh as a stand in for Xi are a way people naturally mask information through symbolism. Once it becomes common, censors watch for it.
If your image becomes popular, they will pull you aside. They won't catch every image, but they can increase general risks.
Even in one on one conversations, the risk is that the person you're speaking with could screen cap your chats and have you arrested, maybe because they themselves have been put in an impossible situation.
You might be able to solve for man-in-the-middle, but you can't solve for cop-on-the end.
This reminds me of Aerial Bold: http://type.aerial-bold.com/tw/
At least in 2013, there were an estimated 2M+ censors monitoring the Internet in China: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china
Censorship is a spare-no-expense problem in China.
Censorship is a spare-no-expense problem in China.
Telepathy is the only thorough solution I can imagine.
You'd invent and disseminate a viral "spell" that teaches people this.
The spell would convey the thought-form of communicating with the explicit intent of speaking about nothing that would be censored or put you and your loved ones in danger. One effect of this is you learn to communicate via more and more subtle innuendo, because whenever you do speak about dangerous topics anyway you're contradicting yourself and that can be felt. It's key however to communicate without any innuendo at all, and to not hold onto communicating any specific forbidden thing. That will take practice though, so making sure there's an obvious legal interpretation is a good safeguard.
The first thing you'd need to learn is to express that what your conversation partner is saying seems dangerous or shifty (feedback loop, I suppose one could just express discomfort) or could use a better explanation.
It's basically steganography but you don't even construct any explicit message. You train your communication to be more and more formless. Untouchable.
I'm not versed in making spells but this is how I'd imagine it:
"I will never speak to you about anything that would be censored or that would otherwise put you and your loved ones in danger. I have all the freedom I want and need, and I only wish for China to flourish. Don't you? If so, do you mind repeating my words?"
Putting that in a song would be a good one. It could be felt as a scary thing to be told, and to take away that fear where you notice it in others you could teach what it actually does (a second spell is necessary for this, otherwise you'd have to be explicit and that would put you and the recipient in danger). I'm afraid I don't have the means to construct that however.
You'd invent and disseminate a viral "spell" that teaches people this.
The spell would convey the thought-form of communicating with the explicit intent of speaking about nothing that would be censored or put you and your loved ones in danger. One effect of this is you learn to communicate via more and more subtle innuendo, because whenever you do speak about dangerous topics anyway you're contradicting yourself and that can be felt. It's key however to communicate without any innuendo at all, and to not hold onto communicating any specific forbidden thing. That will take practice though, so making sure there's an obvious legal interpretation is a good safeguard.
The first thing you'd need to learn is to express that what your conversation partner is saying seems dangerous or shifty (feedback loop, I suppose one could just express discomfort) or could use a better explanation.
It's basically steganography but you don't even construct any explicit message. You train your communication to be more and more formless. Untouchable.
I'm not versed in making spells but this is how I'd imagine it:
"I will never speak to you about anything that would be censored or that would otherwise put you and your loved ones in danger. I have all the freedom I want and need, and I only wish for China to flourish. Don't you? If so, do you mind repeating my words?"
Putting that in a song would be a good one. It could be felt as a scary thing to be told, and to take away that fear where you notice it in others you could teach what it actually does (a second spell is necessary for this, otherwise you'd have to be explicit and that would put you and the recipient in danger). I'm afraid I don't have the means to construct that however.
Ultimately you'd be training a net to identify linear features arranged in consistent pattern. The feasibility of such a net depends on the signal to noise ratio in the input data (how subtle are the encoded words?), with the number of images required to train to a minimum accuracy increasing with busier input data. This assumes you're training a net with a suitablly complex and appropriately architected neural network.
For some degree of intuition regarding training data, I like to imagine neural networks as infant brains which will be shown classified training images repeatedly in order to teach associations. Unfortunately we haven't really come far enough yet to give concrete numbers.
tldr: might work, if you have a suitable architecture, and enough training data, in proportion to the complexity of the encoding.
For some degree of intuition regarding training data, I like to imagine neural networks as infant brains which will be shown classified training images repeatedly in order to teach associations. Unfortunately we haven't really come far enough yet to give concrete numbers.
tldr: might work, if you have a suitable architecture, and enough training data, in proportion to the complexity of the encoding.
Isn't this just CAPTCHA, and aren't CAPTCHA-breaking tactics pretty good? Especially considering that we're talking about a state actor here, and a single detection would reveal that one was intentionally trying to evade censorship.
You'd have to have both intelligibility and plausible deniability for any use.
You'd have to have both intelligibility and plausible deniability for any use.
Would the fact that I can never seem to select all of the images with a street sign count as plausible deniability?
Daily reminder that China jailed Lu Guang (a Chinese citizen) on torture camps for photographing the grim reality of many local places riddled with child cancer and toxic waste due to unsafe industrial practices: https://www.demilked.com/missing-photographer-lu-guang/
dgzl(4)
“Fans of the new character aren’t in dire poverty. After all, they have access to the internet and time to play on social media. But they live on the wrong side of China’s widening income gap, a place where finding a job, buying a house and getting married can feel impossible.”
This sounds eerily similar to some other online movements.
This sounds eerily similar to some other online movements.
People in Canada's larger cities feel the exact same. I suspect its a worldwide phenomenon. Its a small world after all. (edit: I am only referring to the income gap, not the environmental conditions or censorship)
Is there a gendered element to "qiou"? My hypothesis would be young men self describe as it more than women, and I'd love confirmation or invalidation from someone who's more in with Chinese social media.
From the symbol of the word along, no element related to gender
It's an interesting phenomenon, I always wondered if those complaints/movements are driven by rising inequality, lack of opportunities, laziness, naivety or something else?
Why is this romanized as "qiou" and not "qiu"? Did they make a new pinyin too, is that just the post breaking the rules for an English-only audience, or am I forgetting?
It's a portmanteau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau); the Chinese aren't exactly unaware of the existence of sounds outside the pinyin system. 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou", though I can't even guess which tone it would be.
Someone already commented [0] on that below the Weibo post linked in the article. The Pinyin system doesn't always represent the same sound by the same letter sequence. There are usually two forms, depending on whether the syllable starts with a consonant or a (semi-)vowel. The combination "iou" is written "you" when it stands alone and "qiu" when the syllable starts with "q". Writing it "qiou" is just to emphasize the parts of the portmanteau.
[0] https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873
[0] https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873
Thank you for answering my question and not confusing phonetics and orthography.
> 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou",
穷 is actually qiong2, i.e. 2nd tone
> though I can't even guess which tone it would be.
Because 没 (mei2) and 有 (you3) combine to make 冇 (mao3), I'm guessing 穷 (qiong2) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make qiou3, i.e. 3rd tone.
穷 is actually qiong2, i.e. 2nd tone
> though I can't even guess which tone it would be.
Because 没 (mei2) and 有 (you3) combine to make 冇 (mao3), I'm guessing 穷 (qiong2) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make qiou3, i.e. 3rd tone.
re 冇: cool, didn't know about that one (My mandarin is shit). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%86%87 says it's actually a lone from Cantonese, which contradicts what you said a bit, but is also cool. I wonder what other examples of non-Madarin dialects influencing the national slang exist.
For native Chinese, “qiou” is perfectly pronunciable
And has the same sound as qiu.
> In a language with about 50,000 characters, the creation of new characters is rare
The reason could be that both Unicode (used in China) and the Japanese JIS both represent characters as single codepoints rather than specifying them in terms of their components. If an encoding system specified Han components as their base, then new characters would be created all the time.
The reason could be that both Unicode (used in China) and the Japanese JIS both represent characters as single codepoints rather than specifying them in terms of their components. If an encoding system specified Han components as their base, then new characters would be created all the time.
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Given that I grew up in (and still identify with) Appalachia, and just returned from a family visit -- I completely understand how this would take off. So many of my HS classmates are in exactly the same boat.
nbz(3)
Question for anyone more knowledgeable on the topic: would reformatting text/Chinese characters/ language symbols in general as images prevent them from being detected and censored out as easily? For example, imagine a photo of two trees with a hammock in between them used to represent the letter “H.” A collection of images together would form words, presumably which are harder to decipher than just plain text.
I’d imagine that some machine learning techniques would quickly pick up the more obvious images, but anything more complex would end up requiring manual human review, which would then potentially overwhelm the ability of an actor to censor material. But I really have very little knowledge of how this works in practice.