‘Government's Useless Words’ Criticizing China's ‘Zero COVID’ in Cantonese... Avoiding Censorship

Authorities' Censorship Program Fails to Filter Texts Written in Cantonese
2019 Hong Kong Anti-Government Protesters Also Adopted Protest Slogans in Cantonese

On the 17th of last month, an employee of a restaurant was undergoing a COVID-19 nucleic acid test at a testing site in Beijing, China. Photo by AP Yonhap News

[Asia Economy Reporter Hwang Sumi] Recent foreign media reports have highlighted an increase in posts criticizing the government in Cantonese on Chinese social networking services (SNS). These individuals are expressing dissatisfaction with the stringent 'Zero COVID' policy by using a dialect instead of the standard language to evade government censorship systems.

According to CNN on the 12th (local time), there has been a rise in people criticizing the government's quarantine policies in Cantonese rather than the standard language in China recently.

Cantonese is a dialect primarily spoken in southern China. Most people who use Mandarin, the standard language recognized by the Chinese government, do not understand Cantonese.

It is especially known that posts written in Cantonese are not filtered by the authorities' automatic censorship programs. Generally, when posts criticizing the government appear online in China, censorship teams quickly block or remove them. However, posts written in Cantonese can evade government censorship.

Recently, some residents of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, southern China, posted criticisms of the authorities in Cantonese on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter). As some districts were locked down due to nearly 12,000 COVID-19 infections this month, they expressed dissatisfaction with the government's quarantine measures.

On the 7th, a Guangzhou resident wrote on Weibo, "We were locked down in April, and now we have to close again this month," adding, "But the government did not provide subsidies. Do they think our rent is free?" CNN reported that posts containing vulgar language such as "(The government) talks nonsense" were also found.

However, these posts remained online for several days because they were written in Cantonese. This is analyzed to be due to Weibo's content censorship system not properly recognizing Cantonese spelling.

There have been previous cases of using Cantonese to evade censorship when criticizing the government. According to China Digital Times (CDT), a US-based independent media monitoring organization, posts criticizing Guangdong authorities' mass COVID-19 testing demands appeared online last September but were not censored because they were written in Cantonese. In 2019, anti-government protesters in Hong Kong adopted Cantonese slogans to avoid surveillance by mainland authorities.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.