_dreams

Fighting Censorship

March 11th, 2009

This has made me think that indeed, when it comes to fighting censorship, the Charter has an insurmountable flaw: it is a document. Therefore, its title and content are fixed and it is extremely easy to locate by a bot. Worse even, in this era of the internet, the authors have commited the mistake of giving their Charter 08 a searchable term title. Any internet conversation where the Charter comes up, even if the contents are not copied, is sure to attract the Censor’s eye.

It might sound ridiculous at this point, but I am dead serious: The Charter 08 should be named Wang. Or Zhang or Liu, any other term that is not exclusively related to it and therefore cannot be banned. Two centuries ago, the first Spanish constitution of 1812 was nicknamed by the people “La Pepa”, a popular name for a girl that many intellectuals scorned at the time. Two years later, during the reign of autocrat Fernando VII, this name became extremely useful to dissidents to acclaim the Constitution without risk to their lifes, with the famous slogan “Viva la Pepa!!”

comment: it’s kind of cool to think of it as guerrilla warfare, how to conceal something by making it formless and undefinable, or making it non-exclusive and having multiple identities and unsearchable. By not giving something a definite name, the entity lives in multiple locations and exists more as a movement rather than an object. Think of how terrorists are hard to detect because they look like civilians and are not dressed in uniform. This kind of warfare is hard to fight because the enemy cannot be located. How do you strike an enemy that is dispersed in a sea of people without killing everyone else? The internet age has definitely created a different battle for the world today.

http://chinayouren.com/eng/2009/01/charter-08-why-it-should-be-called-wang/

by Nelson

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