Chinese Bloggers Outsmart Censors

Hurray for ingenuity and press freedom. Chinese bloggers either shuffle words or take photos of their texts and print that to dumbfound the censors. CNet.com's Graham Webster said that word shuffling is particularly effective because of the Chinese language's ideographic writing system, which makes it "easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages." "Because Chinese splits words into meaning-based units rendered in characters," Webster explains, "Reading reverse text is more akin to 'bass ackwards' than 'sdrawkcab ssa.'" Also effective is the screenshot method where you take a photo of what you just wrote and bring that out.