Guest Post by Mark Crispin Miller

You’d think they would, what with their (nominal) devotion to the cause of “freedom-and-democracy” (in some places, but not others: including, evidently, China—and, in fact, the USA)

Check out the lede to this Times piece about the CCP’s swift crackdown on the “chatter” over those two banners posted on the Sitong Bridge. According to the Times reporters, the “column of smoke” above the overpass “drew attention to [the] protester” who’d hung the banners that caused all the online fuss, which China’s “Internet censors” then rushed to “quell.”

Photo: screenshot from Fang Zhouzi’s Twitter account

China’s Internet Censors Race to Quell Beijing Protest Chatter

October 14, 2022

When a column of smoke appeared on Thursday over the Sitong Bridge overpass in the Haidian district of Beijing, it drew attention to a protester who had hung banners openly bashing China’s top leader by name and criticizing the country’s “zero Covid” policy, including one calling for “freedom and not lockdowns.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/world/asia/china-internet-protest-xi-jinping.html

Not to be pedantic, but that “column of smoke” did not “draw attention to the protester,” who was (of course) no longer there. What the smoke did “draw attention to” was those two banners which said dissident had hung before s/he fled the scene, being eager not to “draw attention” in the act.

Since the Times is, nowadays, a badly edited and, therefore, poorly written paper, that stupid lede was surely unintentional; although it does betray a certain odd unwillingness to focus on the content of those banners, which, except for one wee snippet (“freedom and not lockdowns”), the Gray Lady’s minions failed to translate for her (ever-dwindling) Western readership.

Here, then, is the translation that the Times did not provide (but that a former student sent one of my colleagues):

“No Covid test, we want to eat. No restrictions, we want freedom. No lies, we want dignity. No Cultural Revolution, we want reform. No leaders, we want votes. By not being slaves, we can be citizens.”

“Go on strike at school and work, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”

Why, then, no full translation in the Times? Did its editors consider one not “fit to print” because it doesn’t really matter what the protest said? Or did they decide that that full protest wasn’t “fit to print” because it matters greatly, and not just to the Chinese people? After all, would not that first, and longer, protest resonate with millions in the world’s “democracies,” who also want not to be slaves, but citizens, respected by their governments? Perhaps somebody at the Times (or CIA) did not want that full protest sparking “protest chatter” over here (and elsewhere in the West)—“chatter” which our “Internet censors” would then have to “quell.”

Was that full protest translated anywhere? If so, please let us know. In any case, let’s do our best to share it far and wide.

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