The List of Filtered Items

In The Order Of Things, Michel Foucault quoted Jorge Luis Borges who quoted a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia, which grouped "animals" as follows: 

a) animals which belong to the emperor 
b) embalmed animals 
c) tamed animals 
d) milk sows 
e) sirens 
f) fabulous beasts 
g) dogs without a master 
h) those which belong into this grouping 
i) those who behave like mad 
k) animals painted with a very fine brush of camel hair 
l) and so forth 
m) animals which have broken the water jug 
n) animals which look like flies from afar.

This definition movitivated Foucault to write the book, which he said "first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought - *our* thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other."

Now I have no idea what this so-called Chinese Encyclopaedia could conceivably be except that it was surely someone's practical joke.  In any case, I like reading lists and trying to figure out the logic behind why the items in the list are collected together.

So it is that I read this list given at China Digital News.  Here is the background:

It is an open secret that all Chinese Internet hosting services, including wireless and instant messenger services, filter user communication through key word blocking mechanisms. But overly vague and broad Chinese internet laws and the internet police force never made the forbidden words explicit -- Not until some Chinese hackers located a document within the installation package of QQ instant messaging software. The file contains over one thousand words, most of them in Chinese, which will be blocked by the service.

Owned by Tencent, QQ is China's most popular Instant Messenger service. On a regular basis, tens of millions of users use their service. On one day, March 13 , there were more than six million users online using QQ at the same time. Because of its high traffic volume, it is technically much harder to build in the key word filtering mechanism on the server's end. Instead, Tencent sneaked in a filtering program file in their installation package at the client end. When a client installs the QQ2003 software on their own computer desktop, a program file, called COMToolKit.dll, is automatically included. This file contains all the forbidden keywords, which will be automatically blocked when the client runs QQ.

Recently, some Chinese hackers located this file and released it on the Internet. The censored key words list is commonly used not just for QQ, but also for all websites, BBS and text messaging services.

The entire list is then provided at China Digital News.  And what a fascinating list!  I could spend days just trying to classify and rationalize the system!  And there are in fact quite a few things that I don't even know! This is a wonderful way to expand my politico-cultural indoctrination.

The table below contains some quick groupings of the list items that I know (which guarantees that this page will be inaccessible in China if the filters are really working).  On the whole, I would have to say that filtering is a losing cause.  There are so many variations that can be played in the Chinese language that this static .dll file will be beaten with ease (for example, see the list of improper variations on the names of officials -- I know I have even nastier variations in mind).  The only hope is to require users sign in with their IDs, record their entire sessions and then threaten them that any transgression will be punished eventually when the new workarounds are detected and all their previous sessions will be retroactively re-examined.

Postscript: China Herald noted that this page could be read without any problem in Shanghai, while the page at China Digital News was blocked.  If true, then only URL blocking was in place (and this site was not banned whereas China Digital News was) and keyword filtering was not working.  Why is my URL not banned in China?  It ought to be because it carries quite a number of banned articles in English translation alongside their full Chinese originals which cannot be seen inside China.  This website may be too small to come to the attention of Internet Nanny and this is the way to beat the system because even the 30,000 censors cannot humanly screen out something that appears simultaneously on 1,000 out of tens of millions of small websites with billions of web pages around the world.

Post-postscript: On further thought, this list must be for used only for filtering wireless and instant messaging only.  There are some terms that are in the mainstream discourse, such as the 两会: the National People's Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference.  If these terms are used to filter web pages including official communications, the government would grind to a halt.

(SCMP via Asia Pacific Media Network)  Web users get their ten cents worth despite the censors.  By Andy Greenberg.  October 5, 2004.

Comedian George Carlin had seven dirty words you were not allowed to say on television. Tencent, maker of the popular instant messaging programme QQ, has more than 1,000 it does not want broadcast in cyberspace.

Last month, a group of hackers uncovered a file buried within the operating instructions of QQ 2003. The file contains a list of words likely to rile government officials.

About 20 per cent deal with sexual jargon too rude to print in a family newspaper. For Chinese-language students looking to expand their vocabulary of naughty words, this .dll file is a good place to start. (Users of QQ 2003 should search for a document called COMtoolkit.dll. Newer versions of QQ's program lack the file).

The remainder of the list deals with politically touchy subjects. In the file, not surprisingly, are topics such as Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet.

But the file also hints at concerns about the Web being used to spread ultra-nationalism, with references to the Sino-Russian border and territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands.

Many of the words are general, such as "truth" and "idea", suggesting philosophical discussion is off-limits. Other words include references to official corruption and the cases of political prisoners.

Why some phrases appear on the list - "in October", "spring in Beijing", "toad" and "North Korea" - are a complete mystery. [Blogger's note: "Spring in Beijing" is a overseas Chinese-language pro-democracy magazine; see Beijingspring.com].

What is also not clear is how the .dll file works. It does not appear to block words from instant messages, suggesting its purpose is to alert officials to the discussion of sensitive topics.

Mainland internet users are aware of what critics have dubbed The Great Firewall of China, leading to the creation of new spellings for names and terms to bypass the censors.

The artfully insulting homonyms include spelling former premier Zhu Rongji's name so that it reads deaf and deformed pig. Chairman Jiang becomes soy sauce marinated pig daughter-in-law, while Mao Zedong's moniker is transformed into a vivid description of a toilet.

As the censors catch on, internet users are forced to come up with ever more inventive spellings.

Head of Human Rights in China Xiao Qiang said: "There are constantly new subjects and topics being banned by the government and [internet] users need to come up with new key words or phrases for these topics."

But despite the best efforts of Tencent, which did not respond to requests for comments, and other companies which aid government efforts to control discourse, Mr Xiao believed the internet had set China on a course from which it could not turn back.

"While the overall censorship is still effective, the Net has already created a bottom-up force and is constantly negotiating this new space with the old style, top-down censorship and propaganda regime," he said. "The transformative effect of the internet has already set China on an irreversible course towards greater openness and public participation in social and political life."