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.

Martin asks in the comment thread:

i’ve been curious–how do you get around cens0rsh1p while writing in chinese? aren’t the individual characters fully-formed words? are all these comments in english?

Providing a wonderful opportunity to rant about language. Well, there are several ways to [sort of] dodge censorship in Chinese. Each character is a fully formed syllable with a basic meaning. Most words are two or three characters. Each particular syllable usually corresponds to a number of characters, for example, ji (with different tones) can be written as: 几、及、急、既、机、鸡、积… And so on. Some of those make no sense written alone. Regardless, it’s possible to replace words based upon pronunciation alone – 鸡肉 (ji1rou4 - chicken meat) could be written as 及揉 – the tones are wrong, and it would like like a bad typo. More common is to simply write JR. Chinasmack has a good list of commonly used terms. My knowledge doesn’t go much beyond that.

There’s also a very curious version (consider it a Chinese leetspeak, used by ‘post-90s kids’) that they call Martian. It’s a more complicated version of finding characters with homogenous pronunciation (including tones) and radicals (component characters) with similar meanings. It’s been popularized as a way to dodge censors, and demonstrate one’s grasp of obscure characters not commonly found in normal speech. For example, the phrase 达到美帝 (‘overthrow the American Empire’ – might catch the eyes of evil imperialist net nannies) could be written in Martian as 墶椡鎂締. Pronunciation is almost identical, and the characters read similarly – rather, they look similar, since all of the characters have an additional radical, which would allow the phrase to dodge automatic text searches.

‘[Spoken] foreign language capacity comes in waves.’ This mantra, repeated daily, is one of the keys to living and studying abroad. There are times when one feels fluent in Mandarin; and carries on discussions about politics, religion, and reasonably complex economics.

Then there are days where one barely finds oneself able to communicate, and is met with slow, “DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND-WHAT-I’M-SAYING?” as you blurt out, what must sound like (approximate with a thick Russian accent):

“To having the time; help me a little! Horse your rice. Indeed, I am to search for to projected electrics!” when the goal was to simply inquire, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be a bother – do you know where the movie theater is?”

Perhaps it’s not quite that bad. Still, those of us who would laugh at Ching/Engrish should be aware of how very amusing we probably sound.

Toward Better Tones in Natural Speech - Dr. Liao (of the Defense Language Institute) suggests re-conceptualizing tones in Mandarin to take into account natural speech patterns and tone changes within sentences:

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“It’s really very difficult to say for certain, as these problems are extremely complex, but I feel that Great Leader Chairman Mao would agree with American Treasury Department Overlord Paulson and his “save-market scheme.”**

其实很难说，因为这些情况挺复杂、但是我觉得伟大领袖毛主席会同意美国财政部保尔森霸主的“救市方案”。
(Qí shí hěn nán shuō, yīn wèi zhè xiē qíng kuàng tǐng fù zá, dàn shì wǒ jué de wěi dà lǐng xiù máo zhǔ xí huì tóng yì měi guó cái zhèng bù bǎo ěr sēn bà zhǔ de “jiù shì fāng àn.”)

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If current trends continue, the CCP and its subsidiaries will soon own most of the U.S. – ironic that. There is only one logical choice: capitulation and appeasement. As such I’ve expedited my Chinese resume project – though the glamour photo will probably be replaced by something more stern and serious, indicating efficiency and productivity. 

And you can have one too, with my user friendly template (turn comments on for translations) and a little copy-pasting from an online dictionary like www.nciku.com. Chinese resumes are pretty formulaic – it’s like filling out a character sheet or application, so directly translating things isn’t all that difficult. It’s also not unusual just to list “Date – Employer – Title” without lengthy explanations of duties. You could even use English for the aforementioned. 

You will of course notice a few linguo-cultural format differences:

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or how / why you should learn Mandarin. Yes the title is gratuitous, but it will land me higher on google.

How to:

1. Learn Logograms: they aren’t as frightening as you might think. The easiest way to remember them is to make up a bogus story based upon etymology (much like remembering people’s names). The following book suggests just such an approach – though written for Japanese instruction, the book teaches only meanings, not pronounciation. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the method it’s easily ported to Mandarin:



I first read it when studying Japanese many years ago. The author advocates using character radicals to construct personalized meanings for hard to remember words, since the vast majority of Chinese logograms are combinations of three-dozen or so basic symbols. For exampled, I learned 洽谈 (qia4tan2; “hold talks / discussion”) as “flowing (water) contracts and fire.” Obviously, during all negotiations we want our contracts to be flexible, but also to get our way through fiery speech. Or it’s possible to simply do a visual association – when I first learned 高 (gao1, “high; up”) I decided that it looked like an alien sitting in a ufo that was high above the ground. Yes it is stupid, but it works.

2. Speak: tones aren’t so bad (they lie, there are actually at least 6 or 7 ‘tones’ in normal Mandarin, if you consider the idiosyncratic multi-word tone changes); I find the best way is to try to memorize them within each character, and try to divorce yourself from relying on Pinyin notation. That being said, if you speak *fast* enough, no one will really care, since context will usually carry the day. It’s at least a valid method of walking before running.

More importantly, speaking Chinese often will give your face an extensive workout. I find that this is underemphasized in language instruction – allow your mouth to take on unusual shapes. With Chinese, move your tongue back slightly as the starting point, and then find out how to produce the sounds properly.

But why would we want to learn Chinese?

1. To sell fake American antiques to our gullible Chinese overlords after the invasion and subsequent occupation.*

That’s the most compelling reason i can think of. Furthermore, Mandarin is only really spoken by a couple hundred million or so people in Northeast China – a really boring place, thanks to the cultural revolution. Down in the South, where the interesting stuff is they all speak some bumpkin-local-dialect, which bears about as much resemblance as to the mother tongue as French does to German. And even though Chinese is become important in business and academia, most of the people who will be willing to do business / academe with you probably already speak English. Go learn something useful, like mathematics or poetry.

* A more comprehensive analysis of geopolitical realities puts China’s rise ‘past’ the US well beyond 2040, blithely assuming no major roadblocks (of which there are potentially many).