Many Chinese Internet users criticize the anti-Covid policy of the authorities and manage to escape censorship on social networks, according to CNN.
By The Point.fr
© JULIEN TAN / MAXPPP / Featurechina/MAXPPP
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LGuangzhou residents are venting their frustration in language that escapes censorship after their city became the epicenter of a nationwide Covid outbreak, prompting new lockdown measures, CNN reports. “We had to go into lockdown in April and then again in November,” a resident posted on Weibo, China’s restricted version of Twitter, on Monday, before openly criticizing the Chinese authorities. “The government does not help us financially. Do you think my rent costs nothing? he asked ironically. Other users left more flowery messages like “go to hell”, while some accused the authorities of “talking nonsense”.
These messages reflect growing public frustration with China’s relentless “zero Covid” policy, which employs rapid shutdowns, mass testing, intensive contact tracing and quarantines to eradicate infections as soon as they appear, but also because they remain visible. Normally, such vocal criticism of government policies is quickly suppressed by the government’s army of censors, but these posts remained online for days.
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Cantonese escapes censorship
These messages are in Cantonese, a language native to the neighboring province of Guangzhou, and spoken by tens of millions of people in southern China. It can be difficult to decipher for practitioners of Mandarin, the official language of China and the one favored by the government. Chinese people turn to Cantonese to express their displeasure with their government without attracting the attention of censors. In September, the US-based independent media watchdog China Digital Times noted that many posts in Cantonese from disgruntled locals escaped censorship in response to demands for massive Covid testing in the region. . Although Cantonese shares much of its vocabulary and writing system with Mandarin, its written form relies on characters that have an entirely different meaning in Mandarin, so sentences in Cantonese can be difficult to understand. for Mandarin readers.
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For some, the use of Cantonese to criticize the government is also a sign of defiance, given that the government has pushed for Mandarin to be used across the country in education and daily life (for example, in television broadcasts) often to the detriment of regional languages and dialects. Many Weibo users took this rare opportunity to express their frustration with China’s “zero Covid” policy, which has damaged the country’s economy, isolated it from the rest of the world and disrupted the daily life of the population with the constant threat of confinement.