"Bo ke" is a Chinese neologism for "blogger." New Scientist has a fascinating article by Xiao Qiang about the growth and importance of blogs in the Middle Kingdom. Snippet:
Blogs play an important role in republishing and spreading information as quickly as it is banned from official websites. One example of this played out in September when China’s most influential bulletin board, Yitahutu, was closed down by the net police...
After the closure, all the major university bulletin boards were instructed to delete any discussion of the event. Even the name of the site was censored from Chinese search engines.
But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu’s closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering...
Lots more great info.
[Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the link.]
Posted
by D. Weinberger at November 27, 2004 11:16 AM
Comments
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Posted by: David Weinberger | November 28, 2004 09:17 AM
KQED's "Pacific Time" had a segment on this subject a month or two ago, in which I believe the author was featured. He went into more detail about the prohibited words, which as I recall included the names of most important politicians. The euphemisms mentioned are supported by the tonal qualities of the Chinese language, in which what most Westerners would consider the same word varies in definition acording to its pitch when uttered. So a written word otherwise unrelated to the context can be used in place of a prohibited one, and the reader will realize the prohibited word is one of the the same pronunciation, varying only in pitch.
Posted by: johne | November 28, 2004 02:36 PM