I was riding an elevator when I found myself facing a cosmetics ad and, for the first time, actually reading it carefully. Every screen had at least one charged, highly suggestive phrase followed by an asterisk. At the very bottom, in text so tiny you could only read it by practically pressing your face against the display, came the "real" meaning and the final explanation for those phrases.
Because it was a cosmetics ad, there were even more of these asterisks than usual. The copy flirted with exaggeration, then used the footnotes to sidestep any legal trouble. And those explanations were always the same kind of thing: some experiment conducted by the brand on a sample group it selected itself. Data with no real universality, sometimes no value at all, because the experiment had already been arranged around the result it wanted to produce.
When I read Chinese advertising copy, I almost never trust any word or phrase marked with an asterisk. Its so-called final explanation is always slightly different from what the phrase naturally means. What you get instead is an "experimental result" manufactured by the advertiser under self-defined conditions, with self-rewritten rules. Over time, I developed a simple instinct: the more asterisks an ad contains, the more suspicious I become of the product. The higher the asterisk content, the farther it usually strays from any shared standard, which is exactly why it needs layers of annotation to explain how much inflation is packed into its seductive language.
At that point, someone might ask: does anyone still believe Simplified Chinese ad copy at face value?
In the past couple of days, Weibo began cracking down on homophones, abbreviations, and variant characters. That was inevitable. Under any system built around censoring sensitive words, this is where things naturally end up.
Homophones, shorthand, and altered characters function a bit like the coded language used when explicit sexual vocabulary was banned in Victorian fiction. Breasts, vaginas, penises: even if the law forbids the words, people will still think of them through substitutes, images, and detours—a soft white loaf of bread, a hole in a tree, a stick someone can always accuse of being loaded with reproductive symbolism. The more direct expression is banned, the more numerous, inventive, and layered these substitutes become.
And once that happens, the next step is obvious: limit not just what people say, but what people might infer. The goal becomes preventing censorship from falling behind the "new concepts" produced by human association itself.
To be fair, some homophones and altered forms really are clever in a very pointed way. Their suppression was probably only a matter of time, because the people using them often had a clear purpose from the start: they wanted to express things that were not supposed to be expressed. But there are also words that were never born with double meanings, and only become suspicious because the reader projects too much onto them. Then the word is treated as if its creator must have intended some impermissible subtext all along.
This is one of those Soviet jokes that never gets old: a person stands in a crowded square holding up a blank sheet of paper and is immediately taken away by the police. No one can clearly explain why, because the paper contains nothing. But that is precisely the problem—its emptiness makes any interpretation possible.
There is another paradox built into this. What exactly was imagined? And how do you arrest the "criminal" on the basis of someone else's imagination? Before they can define another person's offense, they first have to think of the forbidden content themselves.
That is exactly why I deleted Douban and Weibo and gave up publishing my thoughts on social platforms in the Simplified Chinese internet sphere. I could already see where things were headed. Before long, it would no longer be enough to ban "sensitive words." The system would try to define crimes through people's associations, then punish them accordingly.
It would no longer permit association itself, no longer permit excessive interpretation. It would insist that words be understood only according to their original meanings. But those original words can no longer be openly presented online in the first place. Which means the forbidden word itself will eventually vanish from view as well.
So of course homophones, abbreviations, and variant characters have to be prohibited. They point back to words that are not allowed to appear online—things treated as nonexistent so long as nobody names them.
After that comes the ban on association. Every word must return to its original meaning. No overlap, no double meaning, no multiplicity of sense. And yet the people enforcing this still reserve the right to use their own asterisks as final explanations. They can revise meaning, overwrite meaning, and alter definitions to fit their own intentions and experimental goals.
In ordinary people's speech, the asterisk means: do not associate too much.
In their speech, the asterisk means: this is the authorized association, the legitimate interpretation, the officially regulated way to explain conclusions that no one really believes anymore.
Multiple meanings: meanings permitted to exist for certain political purposes, or required to exist only in a prescribed way.