When #MeToo was blocked on Chinese social media, people used the character for rice, mǐ, and the character for bunny, tù, to dodge the censors. They used emojis to represent the phrase too!

If something is censored, it is harmonized. When the word for harmony, hé xié, was banned, people started using the word for river crab, hé xiè. It’s different by just one tone. After hé xiè was banned, people started using fish or anything from the sea.

To talk about social distancing during the pandemic, people changed the character for sit, zuò, to look like two people socially distancing. This character was invented by the winner of a creative character contest in Japan.

Eventually, many Chinese slang words get banned. But as sociolinguist Xuan Wang said, “Wherever there is censorship and control, there is resistance.”

This story was originally reported by Meaghan Tobin and Katherine Lee for Rest of World.

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