Rogue Nation

Liu Xiaobo’s Death Pushes China’s Censors Into Overdrive
By AMY QIN

A vigil for the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on Saturday. China’s censors blocked images of Mr. Liu and of people commemorating him. 

BEIJING — It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of grief on social media that followed.
The accounts of censorship have been mostly anecdotal. 

But systematic research from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs shows that there was a “significant shift” in censorship techniques in the days after Mr. Liu’s death, particularly on WeChat, the popular messaging app from Tencent.
On WeChat, which has more than 768 million daily active users, the number of keyword combinations that were blocked greatly increased, according to the report that the Citizen Lab published on Sunday. 

Additions to the blacklist included general references to his death like “Xiaobo + died” in Chinese and in English, and even just his name “Liu Xiaobo,” effectively censoring any messages that mentioned him.
The Citizen Lab said it was also the first time that images were automatically filtered in private one-on-one chats on WeChat. 

Blocked images included photographs of Liu Xiaobo and of people commemorating him.

One of the distinguishing features of WeChat is that it does not notify users when their messages are blocked. 

The service also makes a distinction between accounts registered to phone numbers from mainland China and phone numbers from elsewhere.

In one experiment, researchers at the Citizen Lab found that a photo of Liu Xiaobo posted to an international user’s WeChat social media feed was visible to other users abroad but was hidden from users with Chinese accounts.
The heightened — yet uneven — censorship in recent days has elicited frustration and confusion among Mr. Liu’s supporters.
On the day after Mr. Liu’s death, one user posted on his WeChat feed: “‘Did you see what I just sent?’ ‘No, I can’t see it.’ For the last two days, this has been the constant question and answer among friends.”
The aggressive attempt at censorship is just the latest indication of the strong grip that the Chinese government maintains on local internet companies. 

In addition to automatically filtering certain keywords and images, internet companies like Baidu, Sina and Tencent also employ human censors who retroactively comb through posts and delete what they deem as sensitive content, often based on government directives.
Failure to block such content can result in fines for companies or worse, revocation of their operational licenses. 

Censors have been on especially high alert this year in light of the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall.
Over the years, the constant cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and internet users has led to the rise of a robust internet culture in which censorship is normalized and satire and veiled references are par for the course.
So even as censors stepped up scrutiny in recent days, many savvy Chinese internet users found ways to evade those efforts. 

In tributes to Mr. Liu, users referred to him as “Brother Liu” or even “XXX.” 

They posted passages from his poems and abstract illustrations of Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.
Over the weekend, however, the tributes gave way to scathing critiques as friends and supporters of Mr. Liu reacted angrily to the news of Mr. Liu’s cremation and sea burial under strict government oversight.
One user took to his WeChat feed on Sunday to express disgust with the use of Mr. Liu’s corpse in what some called a blatant propaganda exercise. 

“Swift cremation, swift sea burial,” he wrote. 

“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.”

Defective Anatomy

Dalai Lama says Chinese have parts of brain missing
Chinese Mistake Satire on Trump for Real News
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

President Trump at the White House last week. Several publications, quoting a satirical New Yorker piece as factual, reported a frantic Mr. Trump worried about eavesdropping. 

BEIJING — The story dripped with intrigue.
A frantic President Trump, holding court in a bathrobe, ordered his aides to wrap the White House telephones in tinfoil, several Chinese publications reported this week, citing The New Yorker.
There was only one problem: The New Yorker article, by the comedian Andy Borowitz, was satire.
That did not stop the story, purporting to describe the depths of Mr. Trump’s worry that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was eavesdropping on him, from ricocheting across the Chinese internet.
“Trump turns White House upside down looking for signs of Obama: ‘I know he’s still here!’ ” read headlines in respected publications like Caijing, a business magazine, and Sina, a news portal.
Internet readers were puzzled. 

The state-run news media — and China’s army of censors — are not known for making jokes. 

Was this for real?
“This is illness,” one user wrote about Mr. Trump on Weibo, a microblogging site.
Others were more discerning. 

“This was made up and meant to be funny,” another user said. 

“Surprising it was treated as news. Editor, could you be more professional?”
It was not the first time that American humorists have unintentionally duped the Chinese news media.
In 2012, People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, reported that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, had been named “Sexiest Man Alive for 2012.” 

The newspaper based its report on a satirical article in The Onion.
And in 2013, Xinhua, the official news agency, mistook as fact a satirical report in The New Yorker about the purchase of The Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive. (The New Yorker article said that Mr. Bezos had bought the newspaper by clicking on it by mistake. That piece was also written by Mr. Borowitz as part of his regular column, “The Borowitz Report.”)
The satirical article about Mr. Trump was published on Saturday, and first picked up in China online and in print on Tuesday by Reference News, a newspaper that translates foreign news and is published by Xinhua. 

The newspaper removed the story from its website on Wednesday after the Chinese news media reported that it was false.
Fake news articles, conspiracy theories and rumors are rampant on the Chinese internet, and media analysts say it is not surprising that Chinese outlets fall victim to jokes.
“Fake news is undoubtedly a serious problem in China,” David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, wrote in an email.