In many countries, cursing online about the government is so commonplace nobody bats an eye. But it’s not such an easy task on China’s heavily censored internet.
That doesn’t appear to have stopped residents of Guangzhou from venting their frustration after their city — a global manufacturing powerhouse home to 19 million people — became the epicenter of a nationwide Covid outbreak, prompting“We had to lock down in April, and then again in November,” one resident posted on Weibo, China’s restricted version of Twitter, on Monday — before peppering the post with profanities that included references to officials’ mothers.
In September this year, US-based independent media monitoring organization China Digital Times noted numerous dissatisfied Cantonese posts slipping past censors in response to mass Covid testing requirements in Guangdong. “It does seem that using non-Mandarin forms of communication could enable dissenters to evade online censorship, at least for some time,” Dupré said.
“Cantonese was, of course, an important conveyor of political grievances during the 2019 protests,” Dupré said, adding that the language gave “a strong local flavor to the protests.” For example, because spoken Cantonese sounds different to spoken Mandarin, some people experimented with romanizing Cantonese — spelling out the sounds using the English alphabet — thereby making it virtually impossible to understand for a non-native speaker.
“Growing numbers of Mandarin-speaking schoolchildren have been enrolled in Hong Kong schools and been seen commuting between Shenzhen and Hong Kong on a daily basis,” Dupré said. “Through these encounters, the language shift that has been operating in Guangdong became quite visible to Hong Kong people.”
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