It is 2013. For four full months, Liu Lipeng engages in dereliction of duty. Every hour the system sends him a huge volume of posts, but he hardly ever deletes a single word. After three or four thousand posts accumulate, he lightly clicks his mouse and the whole lot is released. In the jargon of censors, this is a “total pass in one click” (一键全通), after which all the posts appear on China’s version of X, Sina Weibo, to be read by millions, then reposted and discussed.
He logs on to the Weibo management page, where many words are flagged. Orange designates sensitive words that require careful examination – words like freedom and democracy, and the three characters that make up Xi Jinping’s name. While such words regularly appear in newspapers or on TV, that does not mean ordinary citizens can use them at will.
Red is for high-risk words that cannot be published and must be deleted: “Falun Gong”, the banned spiritual group; “64”, representing June 4, the date of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre; the names of Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama; “Jasmine”, because, after the Tunisian revolution of 2011, several small-scale demonstrations that have come to be known as China’s “Jasmine revolution” have made the Chinese government nervous.
After three years as a censor, Liu detests his job. He detests the white office ceiling, the grey industrial carpet and the office that feels more like a factory. He also detests his 200-odd colleagues sitting in their cubicles, each concentrating on their mouse and keyboard as they delete or hide content.
