In Chinese, a tonal language, words can be represented by different characters but sound similar. For example, 河蟹; pinyin: héxiè (river crab) sounds similar to 和谐; pinyin: héxié (harmony, used to mock the CCP espousal of a “harmonious society”). Chinese Homophone Search is a tool translating censored words into their homophones — readers will know the real meaning of the word depending on the context.

 

Chinese Homophone Search is a tool made for Algorithmic Censorship Resistance Toolkit in The Future of Memory project.

The Algorithmic Censorship Resistance Toolkit is a constructed and collected toolkit of different tactics that obfuscate and encode text so that it becomes machine unreadable.