“How microbloggers vault the ‘Great Firewall of China’” from CNN World, by Peter Shadbolt, February 20, 2011.
Communicating without keywords to avoid automated censorship. Misspellings and cryptic slang have been used in the English language online world since its beginnings as a way of communicating with others “in the know.” The same thing happens in Chinese, Japanese, etc.: the formation of linguistic subcultures. This article is about dodging censors. Certainly, subcultures form for other reasons as well (search gyaru-moji for posts on the SMS / GMS linguistic subculture of Japanese teenage girls). If you want to track political dissent via social media, detailed local and linguistic knowledge is necessary.
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This shows the endless creativity of netizens and the ongoing cat and mouse game they play with censors.
In the Grass Mud Horse post, there is a link to a netizen’s lexicon for China.