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.

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.

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.

Pronunciation (which tones are stressed) will often change depending on previously spoken words. I’m not sure there’s a good way to study these except memorizing lots of sentences. 

For example, if you’re coming off a second tone, it’s very easy to say a first tone or third tone, but much harder to say another second tone – which is why the first instance is often stressed less. For example, say 美籍华人 ten times fast – this can make for an intense oral workout. I wonder if anyone is marketing Mandarin courses by stressing the beneficial aspects of regular mouth exercises?

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.”)

Dandong is famous for its Mao statue, located right next to the train station. My four day trip went well, aside from being marooned in the Pacific – comfortably so, as it were. Being blisfully out of touch with anything happening in the rest of the world, and duly smitten by the experience, I’ve elected to stop having opinions about anything of import. 

** In all seriousness: a bailout of some form seems necessary? It’s lamentable that we’ve come to this. Remain frightened. 

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:

• Extensive personal information. Most people provide their picture, gender (in case it’s unclear sometimes – like this guy). You also generally provide your height and weight, “health status” (insurance is expensive), marital status, and specification of ethnicity / citizenship. 
• Length: in the U.S. you tend to need a good reason to go over one page – like lots of publications. Not so in the Middle Kingdom, where brevity is a sign of weakness. You must fill the page, and preferable be well into two or three. 
• Don’t stick your name at the top. Subtlety and humility are highly valued. 
• Style: like the Chinese home, the resume must be perfectly Feng-Shui’d to allow for a pleasurable read, and maximization of career-qi. They need to know you’re serious about appropriate aesthetics – no minimalism or crafty use of white space.

If you’re like me, this document will have one purpose: demonstrate that you are in fact familiar with Chinese, and sufficiently in tune with the culture to know and use the format. Or at least are sufficiently pliable enough to meet their demands.

You can make one here. I could start using it as an email sig – and flood everyone’s inbox with useless graphics. Excellent.

It’s also interesting how amazingly simple it is to text using a ten-button input (the numbers on your phone) in Asian languages. There’s got to be a doctoral dissertation out there regarding combinatorics and inputs in different language families – paradoxically, it seems harder to program predictive algorithms for Western languages. In this circumstance there’s a large tradeoff between phonetic complexity given limited signals (Chinese) and average word usage (? English ?). More investigation required.