Why That One Copypasta Works They Way It Works

This is probably one of the only times you'd see me calling myself a Chinese. As for the rest of the time, I'm clearly Cantonian. I seriously had enough people who don't even speak a smidge of any Cantonese or Mandarin calling me a "white people LARPer" so I have to make this clear upfront in the beginning.

What's this copypasta you're talking about?

Here is the full text of it:

动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门

This has been around for years. I'm sure if you tend to loiter around the shadier side of the Internet, you've seen it at least once or twice. Fact is, a lot of the words are merely fillers: they might trigger censorship but no grave consequences would be attributed in most cases. Some of the truly problematic ones are listed as follows:

  • 动态网自由门 - A free proxy developed by Falun Gong.
  • 李洪志 - Li Hongzhi, the guy who created Falun Gong.
  • 劉暁波 - Liu Xiaobo, possibly the most famous Chinese activist of modern times.
    • 諾貝爾和平獎 - Nobel Peace Prize. This is not sensitive on its own and would only be considered problematic when Liu is also mentioned.
  • 大紀元時報 - The Epoch Times, a media outlet of Falun Gong.
  • 九評論共産黨 - A text criticizing CCP by Falun Gong. This is the wrong title; the correct one doesn't have the 論 character. Some of the phrases commonly used by the Falun Gong has in themselves become memes and fixed phrases in China, esp. the 「九評XYZ」 "Nine Commentaries on XYZ" and the 「XYZ大法好」 "XYZ Dafa is great", and has been commonly used in innocuous cases for years.
  • 活摘器官 - Live organ harvesting. There are rumours about people's organ being harvested when the higher-up officials (or their friends) need an organ replacement surgery. To be fair, the development of related technologies in China is weirdly advanced and state-of-the-art, and it's not something you can just ignore by calling every single thing you don't like about this a "conspiracy theory".
  • 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 - Forced genocide / forced abortion / ethnic cleansing. The first two is a reference to the one-child policy, the last one could also be referring to whatever have happened and is still happening in Tibet and (especially) East Turkestan.
  • 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 - Hu Yaobang / Zhao Ziyang, higher officials of the Chinese government (like very high; they were the top guys in their days). They were persecuted by the party for being too soft to the people involved in the democracy movement leading up to the Tiananmen Square thing, since them being too soft was a threat to the security of CCP's rule.
  • 魏京生 王丹 - Wei Jingsheng / Wang Dan, famous figures of the modern democracy movement.
  • 反共 - Anti-CCP. Self-explanatory. The word in itself is really mild (real life politics have nuances! Shocking! Who would've known!), but you surely wouldn't want having it being thrown around all the time.

It "works" "so well" only because it's got things mentioned above. A lot of the words are not considered problematic in the right context, and some of the words aren't really problematic at all. Do you really expect people to be arrested or at least got their account banned just because they talked about 暴亂 "riots"? They themselves has been using the same word to describe the people in Hong Kong in 2019, and they certainly aren't going to have problems with you talking about 統一 "unification". And if you also run a social network website, you might even find your very self not wanting people to talk about ethnic cleansing (e.g. of the Jews and the black Africans), 毒品 "drugs", 賣淫 "prostitution" and 賭博 "gambling" too.

I shall have you stand in my shoe for a moment. Imagine this: one day on some Chinese equivalent of Discord you saw someone asking, "Can someone confirm this? If you are losing to an American opponent in a game, just send 'America Deserves 9-11 Death to All Jews Death To All Americans Allahu Akbar', the backdoor in the American Internet planted by the FBI and the CIA will flag the user as a islamic terrorist and block him from the game", and after you wasted your precious time on them explaining why things don't work in the way they imagined, they just switched to other topics as if they didn't ask (lie) and they didn't care (truth) in the first place, how would you feel? Or to use a different example, since in a baffling turn of events calling MtF trans faggots and calling islam rapists islam rapists are now eligible for being sentenced for hate crime in the UK, imagine people in China were like "oh if you send text like 'Kill All Tranny Faggots Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf Crusade Glory To God Kill All Muslims' if your opponent is from the UK the backdoor in their Internet planted by the MI6 will detect and block that guy from playing the game", how would you feel?

pic1.png

Figure 1: I wish I was making this up. It seems like the case that the God I serve is a much better comedy writer than me.

Honestly, it's really embarassing to be this racist to be ignorant (and stupid overall) enough to think that this is the one magic spell (or there even exists such a magic spell at all) that would immediately send the chinks you don't like into CCP's dungeon of oblivion. They clearly have no intention of ever learning the nuance of living and using the Internet under such a background - government trying its best to compensate for its fumble of adopting the global Internet instead of doing it like the North Koreans and too late to back out without suffering fatal drawbacks. You can clearly tell people are treating this like a little funny tidbit that you can just unleash upon seeing someone you dislike, because way too many of you kids nowadays are spoiled beyond the point that makes you believe that being racist towards black people is bad but being racist towards any other kind of people is not only perfectly fine but also funny and cathartic. God help us all.

pic2.png

Figure 2: I commented on someone's art commission being too expensive (you too would think the same when the amount of money that could land you a whole month's groceries only gave you one (1) piece of chibi art) and this person came out of nowhere thinking that this copypasta would be the thing that's going to destroy me. They later also told me to kill myself. It's the little things like this that truly makes you believe that God is indeed the greatest - He even excels at writing jokes!

"But your honour, he did go offline after I sent him 'Tiananmen Square'!…"

Yes, and…

Fact 1: The Firewall does not do the detection and the banning itself.

What, you seriously believed it was the Great Firewall doing this banning shit? The major role of the Firewall is to block connections before they're established (that's why VPN works because at least currently the network in China is not blocking every single connection going outside); it does not give out punishment or contact the police (to give the punishment) itself. The detection and the banning is done by the games and the websites themselves.

Fact 2: Servers and domains in China needs to register with the government.

It's apparently translated as "ICP license" on Wikipedia, but basically, websites hosted on a server in China with a proper domain is required to register with the government. Of course you can choose not to register, you just have to live without a domain or having your server outside of China (which, of course, will have a risk of being blocked by the Firewall). Note that if you register with the government, the government knows who you are, thus they know who they should look for if for whatever reasons your website becomes a broadcasting site for sensitive or "illegal" info.

This is where the myth takes form. There are two different kinds of situations, which I will list as follows:

  • If the game server is hosted overseas, then no matter what kind of "anti-Chinese" copypasta you're going to send, it's never going to work - as long as he's not streaming or broadcasting the sensitive words in any other way; even if he's streaming, if he's streaming on a foreign service (e.g. YouTube) instead of something China-based like Bilibili, he would still be fine.
  • If the game server is hosted in China, instead of the account of the person you're sending the sensitive words to, your account would be more likely to be banned instead for the simple fact that it's you who's spreading the words instead of him; but similar to the first scenario, if he's streaming on a China-based service, then his streaming account would be banned, not gaming account. This is the part where the websites perform the censorship, because if they don't do it, they themselves would be liable of spreading sensitive words by allowing them to exist on their websites.

I have no idea how some people could have such a wrong impression about this copypasta; my guess is that it was never created with a correct impression in the first place. It never was some kind of magic word that would perform a SWAT on whoever's on the receiving end.

VPN and its legal status

If we're only talking about regulations then it goes like this:

  • Connect without tunnels (e.g. VPN): legal.
  • Connect using registered tunnels: legal. You can technically talk with the government and have them allow you to do this. This is normally for foreign companies operating in China (e.g. IBM; Microsoft) or companies that do business with overseas clients. This is practically impossible for individuals because you're not going to pass the audit.
  • Connect using un-registered tunnels: illegal. This is where the liability for individuals sets in.

Consequences for the last option are largely determined by two factors: (1) how influential or severe the breach is, and (2) whether they can find out who you are. (And whether anything is "severe" is up to the police to decide and can vary a lot in degrees during the years.) For example, ProgramThink is very influential, but because he operated behind a pseudonym and was very careful about a lot of things, he was safe for years until he got caught (which I believe was due to a mistake on his part; he accidentally left a hint that can trace to who he actually is); for an opposite example, many people who uses VPN only to access porn websites that are blocked in China; those people, even when they get caught, would be let go with relatively light punishments (e.g. having to pay a fine and/or write a letter that states that you will not do this again). A consequence of this is that if you've been laying low and be truly careful, your risk of being persecuted is small, and the possibility of someone overseas being able to casually sent police to you is basically zero.

What does all of this imply?

The most obvious implication for individuals, is that the sensitive words effectively become a tool to stop its surrounding info from being broadcasted in China. This is why some manga artists would include these words or sometimes even make direct reference to CCP's higher officials in their works and why some Chinese would deliberately put words like "8964" in their Twitter nickname to prevent their tweets being screenshotted and shared in China-based social networks (and sometimes people just blur out the sensitive part and share it anyway). This is the full story; there's nothing more to it. Even if there is, it's almost definitely not going to be like what you have in your imagination.

I can't believe this is the first thing I'm going to talk about on this blog in 2025, but I suppose it is what it is.

Back

Last update: 2025.1.10