Wang Lijun is the former police chief and current deputy mayor of Chongqing province in China. He recently spent a day at the US Consulate in Chengdu, prompting rumors that he was defecting to the United States. Now his whereabouts are unknown. The Chongqing government claims that he is receiving nothing more than “vacation-style treatment” as a remedy for stress and overwork.
The term "vacation-style treatment" quickly exploded on the web in China as incredulous netizens mocked the rhetoric of the Chinese government. Such memes are part of a growing lexicon of words and phrases used to criticize the government while circumventing Internet censorship. People have developed increasingly creative methods for tricking the censors, sometimes using phrases as code for an idea or pinyins that sound like the banned word. For example, "mitten crab" means ‘censorship’ and "to fetch soya sauce" means ‘none of one's business.’
The web monitoring system, referred to as "The Great Firewall of China," is blocking terms and removing websites as fast as people can put them up. But these boundaries have not stopped bloggers. Instead they have inspired increasingly creative ways of circumventing The Great Firewall. After Ai Weiwei was arrested in April 2011, his friend Wang Bo (who also goes by the nickname Pi San) attempted to spread the news on his blog, as noted by the New York Times:Pi San quickly posted the news about Ai's detention on Sina Weibo, China's closely monitored equivalent of Twitter and the fastest-growing Internet platform in the world. An invisible censor deleted the message in seconds. He then tried posting, without comment, a cartoon drawing of Ai, the better to evade China's word-sensitive filtering software. But the image disappeared, too — a sign that a human being, not computer software, had deleted the drawing. Pi San told his Weibo followers: "Again I was 'harmonized.' It's just a picture!"
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Then Wang Bo created an animation called "Cracked Sunflower Seeds" which quickly went viral. Now Wang Bo is often referred to as one of China's most famous dissident bloggers. The first part of the cartoon is excerpted in the video above, along with commentary explaining its use of memes from web activist Eva Galperin.When the Chinese government claims that Wang Lijun is undergoing "vacation-style treatment" they're not fooling anybody. But how do Chinese netizens express their incredulity or disbelief? Humorous memes, sarcastic memes, ironic memes- these are the disguises of government critiques. They are effective and hard to monitor. And the creation and use of memes will continue to grow as China's netizens become more reliant on this secret language.