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Article by Stephanie Chiang in Taiwan News (9/2/21):

"Chinese censorship: Media creator substitutes ‘hemorrhoids outbreak’ for ‘plague’

Mobile game developers having to make concessions to appease Chinese censors"

Censorship in the PRC is going from the ridiculous to the pathetic.  We have just been studying the government's attacks on "girlie men" and the authorities are also assailing "entertainment that is too entertaining".  Here's the latest chapter in the CCP handbook dedicated to eradicating everything that is immoral and improper.

Players of the Chinese role-playing mobile game "Entwined Love Across Time" posted screenshots ridiculing in-game dialogue that showed characters discussing the aftermath of a “hemorrhoids outbreak,” UDN reported on Sunday (Aug. 29).

After the screenshots were posted to Weibo (China’s Twitter equivalent), a user claiming to be the creator of the game replied that because censors forbade any mention of the word “plague,” he had replaced the word with “hemorrhoids.” This resulted in a bizarre in-game conversation in the story-based game, in which a character recounts living through “hemorrhoids,” which taught him that “hemorrhoids are not to be feared, as human nature is much more fearsome than hemorrhoids.”

In case you were wondering what the word for "hemorrhoids" is in Mandarin, it is zhìchuāng 痔疮, while "plague" is wēnyì 瘟疫.

The Taiwan News article continues:

Another Weibo user questioned why the word “plague” would be censored and was quickly told it was due to the sensitivity of COVID-19.

In fact, the highly popular mobile and computer game “Plague Inc.” was removed from the Chinese market in 2020 after its popularity peaked during the first weeks of China’s COVID outbreak….

Stephanie Chiang's article is one of the best general treatments of current censorship efforts that I've read recently.  She covers period dramas and fantasy stories, both of which are frowned upon by the censors.  Ironically, with China massively pumping up all aspects of its military, battle games have had to be rewritten to emphasize peace over war.

World of Warcraft serves as another example of Chinese censorship, in which all blood, skeletons, and zombies are removed, as the Chinese Communist Party not only outwardly condemns violence but also adheres to strict atheist views.

One of the most sensitive subjects that comes under the scrutiny of the authorities is love between males:

As anything involving homosexuality is heavily censored in China, terms such as “danmei” or “pure love” (chún'ài 純愛) are widely used to refer to the category, and a "bromance" is often described as "socialist brotherhood" (shèhuì zhǔyì xiōngdì qíng 社會主義兄弟情). At one point in “Guardian,” a character even exclaims that he has witnessed “a brotherhood” (xiōngdì qíng 兄弟情) between the two protagonists.

Any explicit depiction of “pornographic” acts is subject to excision.

Aside from a huge list of censored words, including any form of the numbers 89 and 64 (in reference to the Tiananmen Massacre [on June 4, 1989]) and other political terms, authors “may not describe anything happening beneath neck level” (bózǐ yǐxià bùnéng miáoshù 脖子以下不能描述).

The censors have worked themselves into a frenzied loop that is only going to drag China deeper and deeper into a monotonous, homogeneous anticulture.

 

Selected readings

• "Chinese coronavirus linguistic war" (2/22/20) — note how early this started, even before lockdowns were imposed in America
• "Novel transmission of the novel coronavirus" (3/15/20)
• "A novel lexicon for the novel coronavirus" (3/20/20)
• "Coronavirus slang and the rapid evolution of English" (3/22/20)
• Coronavirus à la japonaise" (3/15/20)
• "COVID-19 response?" (3/14/20)
• "Annual Reviews response to the COVID-19 pandemic" (3/14/20)
• "Scaring off the coronavirus" (3/3/20)
• "Spoofing the 'crisis' meme" (3/3/20)
• "'Forty Days and Forty Nights'" (2/29/20)
• "Winnie the Flu" (2/24/20)
• "Facebook Guang Guang Guang Guang translate loop" (2/22/20)
• "Chinese coronavirus linguistic war" (2/22/20)
• "The five don'ts of novel coronavirus vaccination in Hainan, China" (4/6/21)

 

• "The PRC censors its own national anthem" (2/9/20)
• "The letter * has bee* ba**ed in Chi*a" (2/26/18)
• "Bad words on WeChat: go directly to jail" (12/17/17)
• "Censoring 'Occupy' in China" (10/24/11)
• "Using riddles to circumvent censorship in China" (3/6/18)
• "Peppa Pig has been purged" (5/2/18)
• "Censored letter" (12/19/14) — about a nine-year-old boy who suggested that Xi Jinping lose weight
• "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18)
• "Chinese translation app with built-in censorship" (11/29/18)
• "Lepus oryzinus" (2/10/18)
• "Banned in Beijing" (6/4/14)
• "Where's Xi?" (9/11/12)
• "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
• "It's not just puns that are being banned in China" (12/7/14)
• "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
• "God use VPN" (12/28/15)
• "Censored belly, Tibetan tattoo" (8/28/17)
• "The face of censorship" (1/11/19)
• "The reality of censorship in the PRC" (10/13/16)
• "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19) — many more posts could be listed, but this is a good place to stop

 

[Thanks to Nick Kaldis]

September 14, 2021 @ 6:55 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Censorship, Lost in translation

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