China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
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Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#2It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]:
"This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part."
I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a very strange explanation to me. Are there any native speakers with more insight on this?
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#3[deleted]
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#4Web site claims I have an ad blocker, and refuses to show content.
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#5The world is already a dystopian society. Why are the Chinese putting up with this? Are their values that different than Western civilization?
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#6Web site claims I have an ad blocker, and refuses to show content.
That's interesting, because I have an adblocker(ublock origin) and it works fine.
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#7It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]: "This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part." I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a…
Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context.
Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).
[1] (Chinese) http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#8What a _o_se_se!
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#9I'm reminded of https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ab5y7/did_g...
Re: China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping
#10It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]: "This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part." I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a…
This feels like satire. China censored a meme sufficiently obscure that people aren't even sure what it was?