Portrait of Xia Junfeng by Badiucao (@badiucao).
As of October 1, the following search terms are blocked on Sina Weibo (not including the “search for user” function).
- Xia Junfeng+touqi (夏俊峰＋头七): Touqi is the seventh day after a person’s death. Xia, a street peddler convicted in the murder of two chengguan, was executed last week. Xia and his lawyer had argued that Xia acted in self-defense. The chengguan, a para-police force in many Chinese cities, are notoriously brutal.
- Xia Junfeng+hold a funeral procession (夏俊峰＋出殡): Xia’s funeral was held today.
- national martyr (国殇): Xia’s touqi falls on National Day.
- Master Chiang fails to suppress the bandits (蒋公剿匪不力): Alludes to Chiang Kai-shek, president of the Republic of China during the last year of the Chinese Civil War. His political party, the Nationalists or Guomindang (KMT), lost the war to the Communists in 1949.
- Xi The Dream-Ripper (习梦撕): Xi Jinping has introduced the “Chinese dream” to the political vocabulary. Not everyone shares this dream.
All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.
Browse all of CDT’s collected sensitive words in this bilingual Google spreadsheet.
CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.
Have a sensitive word tip? Submit it to CDT through this form:
