CDT Weekly, March 5-12

Delivery Knights and Nomadland; Xi ……… sprinkles pepper, others pray for jade; nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei

Welcome to the fifth edition of CDT’s weekly email newsletter. With these updates, we aim to provide an overview of new content across CDT’s English and Chinese sites, as well as the bilingual China Digital Space wiki, and related content elsewhere.

Today’s entry on the CDT Chinese Sensitive Words calendar, a running catalogue of current and classic censorship hotspots on the Chinese internet, is 螞蟻呀嘿 mǎyǐ ya hēi. If it meant anything, this would translate to something like “ants, yeah, hey!” The phrase is a Chinese rendering of a lyric from Dragostea Din Tei, the 2003 Romanian-language dance hit by Moldovan group O-Zone perhaps better known as the “Numa Numa” song. The popular face animating app Avatarify includes a feature to make still photos “sing along” to it. 

Avatarify was reportedly removed from Apple’s Chinese App Store on March 2. Global Times pointed to privacy concerns, citing the Beijing-based Institute of China Cyberspace Strategy’s Qin An’s explanation that “unscrupulous individuals or groups might make money from these apps by using them to attract the public's attention first and then violating personal privacy.” CDT Chinese, though, noted suspicions that the removal had more to do with the app’s widespread use on sensitive political figures, and the relative difficulty of monitoring and controlling such content.

Other calendar entries this week include:

• 光復香港，時代革命 Guāngfù xiānggǎng, shídài gémìng—“Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time,” a protest slogan selected against the backdrop of the demolition of political opposition in the city which intensified at the Two Sessions this week.

• 瑪麗蓮夢六 Mǎlìlián Mèngliù—“Marilyn Monroe,” the username of a Weibo user recently sentenced for six months in prison over a compilation of tragic vignettes from the initial COVID-19 outbreak last year, whose case has become a focal point for recent discontent over restriction of online speech.

• 美國加油 Měiguó jiāyóu—“Go, America!” This time last year, Weibo users found that they were blocked from posting this cheer of encouragement.

Three more calendar entries were further explained in CDT Chinese’s weekly Sensitive Words roundup last week, with more details on how these and related phrases had been targeted:

• 撒胡椒麵 Sā hújiāomiàn—“sprinkling pepper.” Xi appeared to stumble over this phrase in a major speech at the Great Hall of the People on February 25, in which he reiterated his administration’s victory over poverty in China. Describing the government’s poverty alleviation work, he read that “we stress fact-based guidance and strict rules, not flowery fists and fancy footwork, red tape and excessive formality, and performative going-through-the-motions, and we resolutely oppose carelessly … <three second pause> … sprinkling pepper.” 

  Xi has occasionally misread during speeches in the past, sparking online hilarity and jibes at his disrupted education. In 2016, CDT published two leaked censorship directives on a case in which Xi misread “lenient to farmers” as “loosen clothing.” In the more recent case, “sprinkling pepper” was correct: it is an idiom for indiscriminate distribution without suitable regard for priorities, or for treating only the surface without reaching underlying issues, either of which would be clearly unhelpful for poverty alleviation. Searches for the full phrase returned only the text of Xi’s speech and other innocuous content, while results for hújiāomiàn on its own appeared to have received heavy manual filtering.

• 祈翠 Qí cuì—“Pray for jade.” The character 翠 is made up of Xi’s surname, 习, and 卒 zú, which has the archaic meaning of “to die.” Prayers for Xi to die briefly flared up amid anger at the government’s early handling of the coronavirus outbreak last year; many accounts were suspended over it, searches were blocked or heavily filtered, and Weibo posts including 祈翠 were visible only to their authors.

• 外送騎士聯盟 Wàisòng qíshì liánméng—“Delivery Knights League,” referring to activist delivery drivers protesting their high-pressure and often dangerous working conditions. One leading figure in the movement was reportedly arrested at the end of last month, following anger over a driver incentive scheme by food delivery service Ele.me whose rewards turned out to be excessively difficult to reach. Weibo has deleted most recent search results, while Douyin showed none from the past week.

The introduction to CDT Chinese’s weekly content roundup commented on the Delivery Knights crackdown, noting that “miraculously, whether it was deleting posts or suppressing or detaining people, the Party’s role was entirely that of ‘public enemy of the workers,’ yet it succeeded in steering the focus of online conflict onto ‘evil capitalists’ like Ele.me and Meituan.” This kind of “steering” was depicted in a cartoon posted this week at CDT English, starring Winnie the Pooh as the Party, a famous cartoon rabbit as China’s angry young nationalists, and Jack Ma as himself. “That capitalist took away your cookies!” Pooh warns, over a plate much fuller than Ma’s.

As the news roundup accompanying the cartoon at CDT explains, Ma’s Ant Financial firm has become another major backlash target over its lending practices and work environment. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Zhai and Lingling Wei described the government’s plans to “tame” Alibaba, the central pillar of Ma’s empire, with measures including a rumored record fine of a billion or more U.S. dollars. On Friday, The New York Times reported the resignation of Ant Group’s CEO Simon Hu “for personal reasons,” while Bloomberg reported that Tencent may be next in the firing line.

Exploitative labor practices by predatory e-commerce giants might seem to offer a link to 無依之地Wú yī zhī dì, or  Nomadland, Beijing-born Chloé Zhao’s film about precariously itinerant elderly gig economy workers in the United States. In fact, the film owes its status as another of the past week’s Sensitive Words not to this subject matter, but to a nationalist backlash against its director. It had appeared to enjoy some measure of official support in China, with Zhao hailed as “the pride of China” by state media after winning a Golden Globe. (Some suspected that the film’s less than rosy portrayal of American life may have been a factor in this enthusiasm.) Backlash and censorship followed, however, over Zhao’s description of China in a 2013 interview as “a place where there are lies everywhere.” The uproar was further fueled by a recent misquote in which she had appeared to disown her Chinese nationality. A parallel case of nationalist indignation erupted after the death of Hong Kong-based actor Ng Man-tat, when some accused his family of selfishness for taking his ashes back to their home in Malaysia, in accordance with his own wishes, instead of leaving them in China. CDT translated a WeChat post lambasting these “patriotic fools,” and asking if the ashes should have been installed in their homes instead.

Nomadland’s apparent resonance with the suppression of the Delivery Knights League is further watered down by issues raised in Wilfred Chan’s critique of the film at Vulture. Chan, who has worked in the delivery industry in New York, highlighted the 2017 non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder on which the film was based, arguing that the latter “exchanges Bruder’s sharp indignation over capitalist exploitation for a muddled message about individual freedom that downplays the real stakes of gig labor.”

Nomadland was paired in this week’s Sensitive Words roundup with another Chinese woman’s receipt of international accolades. Rights lawyer Wang Yu was recognized by the U.S. State Department as an “International Woman of Courage,” prompting heavy censorship and a flood of counter-messages. Wang herself was followed and prevented from attending an online award ceremony by domestic security officials. These “National Treasures” also starred in activist Lu Yuyu’s recent account of his expulsion from Guangzhou, which CDT translated this week to supplement our previous translation of his prison memoir “Incorrect Memory.” 

In other news, CDT English compiled coverage on:

• … the latest study to endorse the label of genocide for China’s ongoing abuses in Xinjiang, and another on a coordinated official campaign to discredit the BBC and its recent reporting on the region.

• … plans unveiled at the Two Sessions meetings to consolidate China’s position in global manufacturing amid calls elsewhere for efforts to shift supply chains elsewhere.

• … dissatisfaction with “Girls’ Day,” an annual campus event held on the eve of International Women’s Day which one female student described as “an insult to the women’s rights pioneers who fought hard for equal pay, equal work, and abortion rights.”