ON THE HISTORY OF SUBTLE SUBVERSION AND COMMUNICATION TACTICS IN CHINA.

<> The art of indirection of Chinese scholar-amateur paintings.
Chinese landscape or otherwise referred to as scholar-amateur paintings of natural environment were art forms developed by scholar-officials to express their opinions including subtle political criticism. These paintings were made by scholars and were most often worked in ink on paper and chose subjects—bamboo, old trees, rocks—that could be drawn using the same kind of disciplined brush skills required for calligraphy. This immediately distinguished their art from the colorful, illusionistic style of painting preferred by court artists and professionals. Scholar-officials were at times also forced out of office, banished as a result of factionalism among those in power. In such cases, the alienated individual might turn to art to express his beliefs. But even when concealed in symbolic language, beliefs could incite reprisals: the eleventh-century official Su Shi, for example, was nearly put to death for writing poems that were deemed seditious. As a result, these men honed their skills in the art of indirection. In their hands, the transcription of a historical text could be transformed into a strident protest against factional politics, illustrations to a Confucian classic became a stinging indictment of sanctimonious or irresponsible behavior. For example the retired scholar-official Zhao Mengfu intended his image of a stallion, painted 600 years later to be interpreted. Expertise in judging fine horses had long been a metaphor for the ability to recognize men of talent. Zhao’s portrait of the horse and groom may be read as an admonition to those in power to heed the abilities of those in their command and to conscientiously employ their talents in the governance of their people.
-Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art


<>Homophones, and linguistic acrobatics.
Homophonic puns are often used to get around various forms of censorship on the internet. Chinese political memes often employ homophones to mask the true meaning, in other words a form of textual, visual and phonetic steganography – as a way to evade online censorship. In restrictive online conditions, contemporary Chinese netizens creatively communicate, through word-play, number-play in order to discuss politically and culturally sensitive topics while evading the various censorship restrictions. One of the main reasons why memes momentarily slip through censors easier than plain text is because one form of censorship technology is based on text detection such as keyword detection algorithms, which cannot detect nuance and subtleties of language and humour.
-On the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon
-Mythical creatures
-On contemporary subversions through memes by artist Ma Yongfeng


<>The obsolete as an evasion tactic.
"Why did the censors miss the name plot in the first place? Perhaps because the names were written in seal script, an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy that looks quite different from today’s characters."
-Source


<>Chinese steganography
While the ancient Greeks carved messages on wood tablets and then dipped them in wax, the Chinese wrote secret messages on silk or paper, then rolled it into a ball and covered it with wax. The emperor or general then gave the wax ball to a messenger, who swallowed it or placed it in his rectum. Secret-ink messages were considered quite magical in China, but like the Greeks, the Chinese used whatever they found in their environment to prepare the messages. They used alum (aluminum potassium sulfate), the white substances used in styptic pencils, dyeing, and pickling. An invisible message written with alum appears when dipped in water. The Chinese, who mined alum, were using alum as invisible ink and developing it with gallnuts – spread across the globe by trade by AD 980.
-source: Prisoners, Lovers, & Spies by Kristie Macrakis

<>Writing on an egg
A Chinese TV show features an intelligent women using invisible ink on an egg, a technique that was known in 16th century Europe featured in Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magic.
-TV show
-Natural Magic, Chapter IV - "How you may write in an Egg."

>>> ON INVENTED CODES/LANGUAGE.


<> Xu Bing, ‘A Book From the Sky’, 1988
Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (Tiānshū) first exhibited in October 1988, in Beijing’s National Art Museum. Xu Bing spend four years inventing 4,000 illegible characters using traditional wooden movable type, a technique which was invented in the Sung Dynasty long before the Gutenberg press. To Western viewers his work bears the appearance of the traditional Chinese collectanea housed in museums, literate Chinese viewers experience slightly differs in that they are confronted with seemingly familiar but strangely illegible variants of Kangxi radicals.
-Source Xu Bings website


<> Asemic writing
Asemic writers draw upon the history of writing, not in order to retreat into a nostalgic fetishization of pre-digital writing but as an aesthetic strategy that addresses our current cultural moment. Michael Jacobson’s blog frames asemic writing in the context of McLuhan’s notion of ‘post-literacy’, i.e. a society where people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position and the word is being replaced by the icon and rebus.
-Source Institute of Network Cultures


<> Polari
Polari was a form of *cant slang or argot used by gay men in Britain prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, used primarily as a coded way for them to discuss their experiences. It quickly fell out of use in the 70s, although several words entered mainstream English and are still used today. There is some debate about its origins, but it can be traced back to at least the 19th century and possibly the 16th century.
Watch “How gay men used to speak - A short film in Polari”.

*A cant slang is a form of argot, a secret language used by various groups—e.g., schoolmates, outlaws, colleagues, among many others—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, occupation, or hobby, in which sense it overlaps with jargon.
-Source: Polari, Argot.


<> Hobo codes
Hobos have played a big part in the history of America – one that’s often ignored. They were the nomadic workers who roamed the country at the start of the 20th century and through the Great Depression, taking work wherever they could and never spending too long in any one place. In their extensive travels, hobos learned to leave notes for each other, giving information on the best places to camp or find a meal, or dangers that lay ahead. This unique Hobo Code was known to the brotherhood of freight train riders and used by all to keep the community of traveling workers safe, fed and in work.
-source: hobo codes


<> Syrian coded languages defies surveillance
To communicate while living under an authoritarian regime requires a special sort of linguistic creativity. As a new paper by Nassima Neggaz in the journal Language, Discourse & Society reports, one solution that Syrians have found is to speak in codes. Like dissidents, rebels, and spies in many times and places, Syrians use codes of their own invention to mask the political so that it sounds unthreateningly personal. In China, too, where government keeps a close watch on antigovernment speech, codes are common, most notably online. The creative ways that speakers of Arabic and Chinese have found to say the unsayable are a testament to how flexibly we are able to use language to express our thoughts, no matter how carefully it’s restricted. In her July 2013 paper, Neggaz, a doctoral student in Islamic studies at Georgetown University, shows how Syrians have developed and used codes over the past four decades to speak about taboo subjects. These codes are shared within small, close-knit groups of trusted people—relatives, close friends—and used even behind closed doors, out of fear of neighborhood informers. These codes are passed from generation to generation, writes Neggaz.
-Source www.bostonglobe.com


<> Writing systems archive
http://writing-system.tumblr.com/


<> Chinese Martian script

>>> ON GENDER ON LANGUAGE.


<> Inscribing gender inequality with writing, by He-Yin Zhen
He-Yin Zhen is considered the founder of Chinese Feminism. She was a female theorist, as well as the editor of a prominent feminist-anarchist journal, “Natural Justice”. Unlike her (male) contemporaries, He-Yin Zhen was less concerned with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationships between patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global and transhistorical problems. Her bold writings were considered radical and dangerous in her lifetime and gradually have been erased from the historical record. You can read English translations of her essays in “The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory” by Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko.

In this book, the section “inscribing gender inequality with writing” from the essay “On The Revenge Of Women” He-Yin Zhen writes how the ancients treated woman as property rather than as human beings. For example: “Chronicle of Three Kingdoms” cites from the authority of “History of the State of Wei” to say that the Xiongnu word for slaves and maids is property, and both word containing the character woman(女) in it. The “Cangjie Primer” concurs with this view. In “Analysis and Explication of Written Characters”, this 女帚 is pronounced ‘fu’ and written with an ideograph suggesting the figure of the woman holding a broom; the ‘Book of Rites’ (the section on quli, or etiquette) explains; when the grand master wanted to take a woman as his wife, he used the expression “getting [someone] to clean and sweep [the house].” This is to assign the responsibilities of a slave to his wife and make her obey him.
-The Birth of Chinese Feminism, pg. 115

-Source More on the book “The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory” by Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko.


<> Kogal: Japanese women’s language
“Language is essential in the social construction of gender. Gender is a system of meaning, and language is the most important way through which old and new meanings are maintained, challenged, or constructed (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003: 6).” -Source Kogal: Japanese women’s language

In Manya Koetse’s article on Kogal, a teenage subculture, she writes about how their identity is reflected in the way they speak. Through reflecting on Kogal she extends the writing to gender and linguistics, and more specifically: gendered language in Japan. The red thread, eventually, is kogals’ identity through language, and her place in Japanese society today.


<> Nushu
The words Nü Shu literally means "Woman's Writing" in Chinese. As the name implies, Nushu is a writing system created and used exclusively by women in a remote part of China. Traditional Chinese culture is male-centered and forbids girls from any kind of formal education, so Nushu was developed in secrecy over hundred of years in the Jiangyong county of Hunan province. More in The New Nushu, Collaborative Script Project