Groundswell of sarcastic humor undermining China's censors

By Craig Simons | Cox News Service | twincities.com
March 11, 2007

It's a Chinese form of "truthiness" that might make Stephen Colbert proud.

China's Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine recently reported this shocking news: The central government created universal health care for the country's 1.3 billion people, wiped out bribery and reduced the country's wide income gap.

Migrant workers in the southern city of Guangzhou, notorious for its sweatshops, were "happy" and "respected," the magazine reported in its print and Web editions.

Of course, it was political parody and all untrue.

Virtually unheard of several years ago, such blatant satire is part of a radical shift sweeping Chinese culture as Internet use spreads and citizens increasingly evade censorship by couching criticism in sarcastic humor.

China has become so awash in a new wave of sarcastic — and often subversive — media that the trend has spawned a name: egao, literally, "evil work."

The word describes "a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and multi-media high tech," said a recent editorial in the government-run China Daily.

While the government tightly controls traditional media channels including television, radio and print, "the Internet has given people the chance to express themselves," said Guo Xinghua, a sociologist at People's University in Beijing.

"Egao is a term for how average people are seizing back the discourse," he said.

Last year, the Chinese government issued a list of "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" as part of a campaign to promote morality within the Communist Party. The list included such instructions as "Love the country; do it no harm."

Chinese Web users quickly posted their own lists on the Internet.

One parody included the couplet, "Love your Mercedes and BMW; do not ride a bicycle," which some readers considered an attack on rampant official corruption.

Despite government attempts to limit access to many Web sites, the number of Chinese Internet users has quadrupled since 2001 and reached 137 million last December, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

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