The Ingenious Circumvention Methods of Chinese Bloggers: Writing Backwards

There is an old chinese proverb that says "有志者，事竟成, yǒu zhì zhe, shì jìng chén," which in English translates to mean "As long as you have the will, you can succeed."

For bloggers in China where Internet censorship is a daily fact of life, and whose posts often risk being filtered, or getting deleted by the government censors, this old Chinese proverb has taken on a new meaning. In the case of some Chinese bloggers, "where there is censorship, there is also a will to circumvent."

And they have succeeded, at least for now by employing ingenious circumvention methods such as shuffling words by writing backwards in order to circumvent key-word filtering.

Using an ingenious online tool, which converts text from left-to right sideways (modern Chinese), into right-to-left vertical (traditional Chinese) Chinese bloggers have discovered an ingenious method to get around keyword censors.

This circumvention method is particularly ingenious, and effective in the Chinese language because of its ideographic writing system, which makes it easier, and simpler to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages, according to CNet.com's Graham Webster.

Chinese bloggers have also employed another ingenious circumvention solution known as the "Screenshot Method." Here Chinese bloggers would write the text and then take a screenshot of it. This is also effective Webster says because government censors aren't very adept at parsing text in a JPEG file.

As the above cases show, where there is a will, Chinese bloggers will find a way...

For more information on the online software which converts text from left to right, go to http://www.9van.com/shupai.html