As of March 5, the following search terms were blocked on Sina Weibo (not including the “search for user” function).
Attack in Kunming: After the violent 3/1 attack at Kunming Railway Station left 29 dead and well over 100 injured, state media described the tragedy as a “terrorist attack carried out by Xinjiang separatist forces.” As this horrible attack further sullied long strained relations between China’s majority Han and minority Uyghur ethnicities, sate media was also quick to remind the public of the “irrationality of blaming the entire Uyghur community or the Muslim world.”
- Xinjiang+terrorist (新疆+恐怖)
- Kunming Railway Station+East Turkestan (昆明火车站+东突)
- Kunming Railway Station+Uyghur (昆明火车站+维族)
- Kunming Railway Station+Xinjiang (昆明火车站+新疆)
- Children stabbed (砍杀儿童)
In an article castigating Western media coverage of the Kunming incident, People’s Daily reprimanded foreign outlets that referred to previous knife attacks against schoolchildren in China.
Via CDT Chinese.
Browse all of CDT’s collected sensitive words on our bilingual Google spreadsheet.
All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.
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.
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