What do cat abuse, mascot and cashfiesta have in common?

. . . all these words may be deemed harmful in China

BEIJING -- Journalist Wang Xiaofeng wrote a satirical essay on his blog last October about what he called "a very Chinese characteristic: sensitive words." He was referring to the keywords that Internet sites in China automatically block users from posting.

"You don't know whether to laugh or cry about these sensitive words," he wrote. "Things that were originally not sensitive at all become highly sensitive because of these sensitive words. They constantly remind you . . . you'd better watch what you say."

Similar keyword lists are used by Internet service providers to filter e-mail and block access to Web sites, and by search engines to censor the results they return. They are a basic tool in the Communist Party's efforts to control the Internet, conveying the government's authority as well as its fears.

The government does not distribute an official list of proscribed words, forcing editors of Internet sites to compile their own. But authorities regularly tell Web sites to add phrases to censor the latest news or the online chatter deemed harmful, several Web editors said.

The Washington Post obtained one list of keywords used by a Chinese blog service provider to flag offensive material. Of 236 items, 18 were obscenities. The rest were related to politics or current affairs.

There were seven terms related to Taiwan, and seven related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. More than 30 phrases related to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, and another 32 were tied to Chinese-language Web sites or publications overseas, many of them run by exiled dissidents.

The list also included the names of several villages and towns where residents have rioted against the government or clashed with police, as well as a series of phrases reflecting the party's anxiety about public anger over corruption and other issues: "children of high officials," "impeach," "pollution lawsuit," "block the road and demand back pay."

The 45 names on the list included such human rights advocates as literary critic Liu Xiaobo and lawyer Gao Zhisheng. Jiang Zemin, the former president, and his influential son, Jiang Mianheng, were listed, as well, presumably to make sure people didn't say anything negative about them.

A dozen phrases referred to ethnic unrest in China's Muslim and Tibetan regions, and four touched on international news, including "Paris riots" and "North Korea falls out with China." Other items seemed intended to protect the censors, including four variations on the phrase, "Down With the Central Propaganda Department."

Several items would make little sense to outsiders, such as cat abuse, cashfiesta and buy corpses. The word "mascot," for example, presumably is listed because someone grew tired of people mocking the cartoon mascots the party recently unveiled for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Most words on the list can be posted on Chinese Web sites, but their presence triggers software that quietly alerts editors to examine the messages that contain them and possibly delete them. In tests, postings that included long sections of the list were allowed to remain on several sites, but quickly removed from others. One site also blocked the computer used to conduct the tests from posting anything else.

In addition, on most sites, at least some of the sensitive phrases cannot be posted. Depending on the site, filters replace the offending words with asterisks or block the entire message.

-- Philip P. Pan