The forums of KDS (宽带山, “Broadband Mountain”) are home to an age old cat-and-mouse game between internet users and censors. Within China, Shanghai natives are notorious for being prejudiced against people from pretty much anywhere else in China. For example, Wuhan people will often say “Shanghai natives are unfriendly and refuse to speak in Mandarin with me, only using the dialect” (the dialect is about as similar to Mandarin as English is to German – there’s a big gap). As a result, on these forums you can find a lot of flaming among Shanghainese about “outsiders.” They spit, refuse to line up properly, and take jobs, I guess.

In order to promote harmonious interaction in cyberspace, censors have flagged the use of 外.地.人* (“outsider”) and 本.地.人 (“local”), sometimes deleting posts that contain these phrases. Presumably these terms were important to users – alternate terms have gradually developed, and were censored once they attained common use. The evolution of both iterations is as follows (meaning in “”, Pinyin pronunciation in italic):

1. 外.地.人 – “outsider,” waidiren. After this was blocked, people simply adopted:
2. W.D.人 or W.D.R – quickly blocked, netizens got more clever, and implemented:
3. Western Digital 人 – must have seemed like a good idea, since it would be impractical to block a company’s name – but when they did, netizens responded with:
4. 硬.盘.人 – “hard drive person, yingpanren” since Western Digital makes hard drives and the word “hard drive” is very commonly used, blocking it would be even more impractical than blocking a company’s registered name… But they did that also, so netizens moved on to using:
5. 石更人 – shigengren, doesn’t really have a coherent meaning, and is only the two composite character radicals of 硬, the first word of the previous iteration. As it stands, 石更人 seems to be the most commonly used when people wish to speak of outsiders in a written format.

And for ‘locals’

1. 本.地.人 – “local,” bendiren. After being blocked, people used:
2. B.D.人 or B.D.R – simple enough, later blocked. Replaced with the current:
3. 蓝光 – “Blue Ray Disc,” languangren. Apparently Blue-ray is common enough that censoring it would disrupt all sorts of other conversations. Apparently it is not heavily flagged yet.

* Periods are used here to dodge automated cens0r searches.