A Guide to Everything Banned in China 

When he talks about a VPN and doesn’t Segway into a sponsor. Kinda surprised me really

5:19 I thought this was gonna be the start of a VPN ad

God knows every country could do with a ban on NicocadoAvocado

Haha the “grass is always less green on the other side” thing is spot on. That’s the most common way the government conditions their people in east Asia. Even Japan is guilty of it. (lived there for 16 years) I never knew how bad we had it until I moved to the US. Everyone is like “we’re missing out on personal freedoms? oh well, it can’t be as bad as outside of Japan” and no one even dares to do anything about it.

"There's no social credit score" +100 social credit score

All throughout the 2000s, I had a Chinese friend I used to exchange long letters with on an online forum - we'd talk about the arts, and football, and life and its ups and downs... earlier in the 2010s, she suddenly disappeared, and I only later found out the site we were on was banned in China. Too bad we didn't exchange email addresses or anything... I still think about her sometimes, wonder how she's doing. I hope you're doing okay. I miss you.

imagine being born on the 4th of June and not being able to tell anyone when your birthday party is

I lived in China from 2010 to 2016, lived in Guangzhou for one year, Shanghai for 5, and traveled all over the country. As a foreigner living there, I only felt I was living in an authoritarian state when I used the internet. People in society are out and about, unafraid, dining, partying, having fun, shopping shopping shopping... it's capitalism on steroids. When I tried to talk to Chinese people about the government, they never seemed afraid to talk, it just didn't interest them. They reminded me of American teenagers-- talking about friends, dating, their social media, pop culture, but no interest in politics. I met people who had lived abroad, and while there, they never bothered to learn about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. It's like they didn't want to know because the truth would be ugly. And they are believers in Tibet and Taiwan being a part of China. They tow the line whole-heartedly. I loved my China experience, but the internet really was a nightmare. Even unblocked websites would take forever to load. I'd have to click "play" on a 10 minute video and wait 30 minutes for it to load so that it would play with only a few interruptions. Every so often, my VPN would stop working. This especially happened during sensitive anniversaries and when there'd be an international summit. I never knew when I'd be able to use fast and uncensored internet. When I'd visit Hong Kong or Taiwan, it was heavenly. It was like... China with fast, uncensored internet. I literally went to Hong Kong once just for a vacation from the firewall. And yes, WeChat.... it was so weird when I moved back to the USA and WeChat was no longer necessary. That app is EVERYTHING in China. You can't function without it. Digital life in the USA suddenly seemed so complicated, having to use so many apps to do different things, when in China, I only needed one. Americans don't even know what WeChat is. That is still bizarre for me.

"When is your birthday?" "4th of June" -1000 SOCIAL CREDIT

Plague Inc. being banned might have been the funniest shit I’ve seen all day 😂

The word “disagree” being a banned word is just so perfect. Like the very concept itself is wrong, which is of course the case.

They banned the word disagree. 😂 And they lived happily ever after, never disagreeing on anything.

“phrases like Tank Man and 4th of June are banned” rip to the one Newgrounds user who was born on June 4th

"China is ranked last place" Turkmenistan and North Korea: **Laughs in distance**

A wise man once said “how strong is this national pride if you have to stop people from joking about it on the internet?”

Fun fact: Typing "June 4th Tianamen Square massacre" in Chinese in an in game chat causes any Chinese people in the server to be disconnected.

“Now, all of this could be avoided by using a vpn…” Me: *skips 30 seconds instinctively*

Regarding the talking animal ban, that one isn't true. Ever heard of Journey to the West? You may know it as Monkey King, but it's China's most famous tale. A tale that features...talking creatures. For the 2008 Summer Olympics, when the mascots were revealed, the Chinese government released cartoons showcasing them where they talked. The mascots, known as the Fuwa, represent, you guessed it...different creatures from China. Kung Fu Panda is also insanely popular in China. The book Alice in Wonderland was banned in one province for putting talking animals at the same level as humans, but that was back in 1931, so before the PRC was a thing. "Winnie the Pooh is NOT banned in China" and while Disney World has the Hall of Presidents showcasing an animatronic of every president in US history up until the current, Shanghai Disneyland's Hall of Presidents is.... *The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh* (yes, this ride is at the park). Funny thing you mention Avatar in China, in 2019 Endgame took the title of highest grossing movie of all time from Avatar. However in 2021, Avatar was able to re-claim its title because it was re-released in China. Though it's just Disney...beating Disney. The embodiment of the Obama awarding Obama meme

Fun fact: this video is banned in People's Republic of China

I'm surprised that the social credit score system was not implemented. My psychology professor even showed us a video in class suggesting it was implemented and we held a debate about it. Not to mention all of the memes and general internet commentary on it.

Whenever I learn more about China, I realise how lucky we are to live with the freedoms we actually have.

"Hey look! They are even building a copy of the holo-" Good job man. That earned a sub.

Wow … As a chinese person i'm surprised how accurate and your content is.And even some content is too localized, it is difficult for foreigners to understand…Thank you for introducing our bad situation to the audience in westworld from a fair and objective perspective

Chinese here. This video is perhaps one of the most insightful and accurate description of the Chinese Internet’s ecosystem. I’d be impressed if you got this done without any help from a Chinese guy. Job well done!

I had a chance to talk to a TV producer from Japan a few years back. Because of the fact that TV is slowly dying as an entertainment in a traditional sense, one of the ways producing companies in Japan, and I would guess other (East) Asian countries, earn money is by selling IP's and rights to Chinese production companies which then create their own versions of films and series. Guess that's a way of making sure not much foreign stuff comes in.

Toddler: “Mommy I wanna big yellow duck” The mom: “shit”

large fan of how kung fu panda breaks so many of these rules yet it started an animation craze

The VPN part would’ve been perfect for a sponsor missed opportunity

im vietnamese and hearing that VPN in china has a slang as Vietnamese Pho Noodle is absolutely hilarious to me 😂

Talking animals are banned? But I grew up with 熊出没 and 猪猪侠 (when I was in mainland) which one has two talking bear bros and another one pigs who have superpowers.

As someone who used to live in China I can confirm a few things: The average person of China is in one of 3 categories: 1. Unaware of the "outside" internet 2. Using a ladder to access the internet (various purposes) 3. Content, they know about the outside but see no need to climb the wall

Went to China after 5 years to see my grandparents, and since I’m more aware now, it was quite frustrating that I couldn’t access outside internet. As long as you’ve experienced the internet on the other side, the internet in China was just very weird. Most people in China are actually quite aware that there is a firewall, especially the younger generation, but they don’t care that much about it

I was learning chinese at a Confucius Institute in Mexico City. We had an author visiting the school, Mai Jia. He was presenting his newest book, which was about espionage. The audience was given the word. I asked him what he thought about the Tian An Men massacre... I didn't know where I was until I saw the audience's reaction that I understood where I was, I was at a place where everyone was on the CCP's side... Saw a bunch of facepalming and just shunning in general... That's when I got scared at how big is the CCP's influence

“Social credit isn’t real” Should’ve put a yet at the end.

I remember talking to a kid on Fortnite who was in China, he wanted to add me on “WeChat” and when I jokingly said screw the president he got extremely scared. Kept saying “no no no don’t say that!” I wonder if they’re always being watched? He made it sound like he was gonna be dragged away by the government for even having heard me say that.

Just wanted to correct two mistakes regarding the banned things: 1) While Winnie the Pooh is not banned by itself, itis banned when it’s mentioned together with Xi, any searches containing the two names will not return any results on the Chinese internet. 2) Time travel AFAIK is allowed in movies/media as I’ve watched a couple of mainstream Chinese shows/movies with it as a theme.

"Hey look! they're even building the copy of the holocaust-"

I used to work for a NZ web host. We were constantly shuffling sites around for our exporter customers, as their node was added to the great firewall because of one social justice site sharing the host IP.

I've lived in China and left in 2019. While some of what you said is correct a couple things stand out as being very wrong. The English wikipedia article of Tiananmen square IS blocked in China. Why? Because the entirety of wikipedia as a website itself is blocked in China. Another claim that is very wrong is that China doesn't have a social credit system. Yes it absolutely has it. It just hasn't been rolled out in all of China and only about 40% of the Chinese population (Still more than a half billion people) live under some level of the social credit system. It's been active in all big first tier cities and while the rule and point system is different based on local government tuning it's usually a system where everyone scores a 1000 points that can go up to 1400 for good behavior and down to 600 points for bad behavior. I personally had a score of 1138 at the time of leaving China in the city of Shenzhen.

I was expecting this video to come from a channel with 1000 times the size. Well done, keep at it.

As a chinese who live in Austrlia，I really agree what you talking about the situation, when I was in china, I have to spend a lot of money and time to get tons of different VPN(some time they just don’t work in china) to get something what we should deserved. The wall is not just exist on internet, but in people’s mind, a group of people what we call them “little pinks” would trust everything that their government told them, what ever it is crazy or not. When you trying to tell them the truth, they will refuse to believe and abuse you, judging you and call you traitor, they refuse everything that is different than their education, they are crazy, madness(they will celebrate the US has over 100k people died in Covid-19 plague) . sometime it is so hard to believe we are same species, we live in the same planet, it is so hard for me to tell other guy I come from china.(forgive my broken English, I’m still learning it)

I am Chinese, and the banned website has no impact on our lives. Because banned websites can find alternatives in China (in addition to pornography, we can also connect to VPNs privately, although this is not legal, as long as we don't use it to do illegal things, the cyber police don't care). It is not legal for us to build a VPN without permission, but a gaming VPN is legal in China, for example, Call of Duty is banned in China, so you can use a game VPN to enter the game (accelerate the specified IP) Of course this is legal in China, it is completely legal to play banned games in China, and there are also many people in China who use Steam, Epic, Xbox, Play Station, Switch..., (but game consoles we generally use Japan, Hong Kong or the United States, because China will ban the store, limited to the host, there is no ban on the website in China)We use the Internet, but we ban some websites (RU-vid, tiktok...and some porn sites) So the Chinese network is the same as the world, except that there are firewalls

I have a friend who lives in beijing and i've asked about the credit score, and apparently it is kind of a thing, just in select regions for select people.

Something about the June 4th censorship: I play genshin, food fantasy, demon cultivation....something, but they're run by chinese companies and every year, for more than a month before and after June 4th, they disable the change nickname or bio option. The global and guild chats are disabled too, and in food fantasy at least, the mail notifications only show the rewards to claim, no text. On some obscure chinese rpg games, they completely disable the friend and private chat system as well as everything mentioned above, probably because they're from small companies and one June 4th language transgression could get their games removed from downloads.

As an actual Chinese ladder user getting to see this video, I’d say it’s 99% true, the last bit is that the connection of Wikipedia site from China kept getting worse since the year 2015, as for now it's impossible for us like reddit or twitter if without a ladder.

7:24 LMFAOOOOOOOO

3:35 "and the letter n" the fact that you had to explain what it meant was hilarious

Interestingly, when I was in China about 6 years ago or so, Facebook messenger does work, but only with pre-existing chats, if I tried to create a new one it'd block the app, but if I used a chat that was in place before entering China it worked. Dunno if it's still the case though.

3:29 China really banned the word "disagree". What has this world come to

I remember living in China and arguing with one of my coworkers about Tiananmen Square. He had travelled around the world and still loved China's system of doing things, going as far as to say the massacre was justified.

Lots of this is true, but some stuff here is allowed, such as ASMR videos, movies with time travel, and the Big Bang Theory. All of these are allowed on well known Chinese platforms such as bilibili and movie/tv show platforms like Youku and IQIYI.

"Talking animals are banned" Kung Fu Panda: "Am I a joke to you?" Kung Fu Panda was wildly successful in China and the Chinese had an official government meeting to discuss why the U.S. made a better movie about Chinese cultural themes than they had and how they could compete.

Did you know in the Chinese release of Yakuza 0 there is a Chinese assassin who is quite scary and wrinkly but it fits his character and makes his presence more impactful. But in China they make him look like a normal chinese dude and he is voice by a Chinese actor who they based the appearance off. The name of the character is Lao gui

"I'm gonna say the N word!" (Chinese Spec Ops appeared out of nowhere)

7:40 Xu Xiaodong, the Chinese MMA artist banned from flying and express rail travel would beg to differ. He exposed traditional Kung Fu and other traditional Chinese "martial arts" as being worthless for combat (as they had evolved into choreography), and for that, the CPC fucked him over.

I'd love to read a book about the opinions of the people who lead China. Their philosophy behind their choices. This extreme censorship feels like fiction in real life!

“they’re even building a copy of the holocaust!” i laughed so hard i almost choked on my drink in the middle of a restaurant oh my god

BritMonkey, nice video it was really entertaining

The Internet of the future will look like the Internet in GTA 4

I love, that watching this video means, that neither of us will ever be in china ever again. Also, the fact, that 1984 is uncensored in china is the most hilarious thing I ever heard. 😂

little correction, the social credit system is running right now, and having a low score can prevent you from boarding planes or even highspeed trains.

Actually many Chinese know about that,but we don’t have the ability to change it.😢

The social credit scoring is being used in china but not throughout. Cities and communities use their own scoring system while the main social credit system is for businesses and private parties. Which are indeed being watched over by the government and encouraged by it, in the hopes that they can adopt this later. Its all link to citizens with link id’s and so forth.

That mood of not caring as long as they can live well is spot on.

I was playing Dota 2 with my Chinese friend that I met at The International and he accidently typed "tanks man" instead of "thanks man" and I haven't heard from him since :/

You are so right about the social credit system . My family lives there no one is ever heard of social credit system

An interesting dichotomy here...Because of the lack of substantive information, the average Chinese is left ignorant of what is going on. Because of the over-abundance of worthless information, the average American is also left ignorant of what is going on.

There are numerous regional pilot programs active for the social credit system though, it's not like they just gave up on it, it's still happening.

Well, as a Chinese living in Canada right now, I have to say, the life in wall is also colourful. Most of Chinese really don't care about their government because it never change and so many people work for the government. All of them only care about their own life, working hard playing hard. And because there is huge population in China, people gathering together is easy, so there are a lot of clubs and shopping malls in big city like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Also the problem is too many people😂people love comparing with each other. Many people love traveling to see the different world.

6:39 BTW, Tencent owns (or has shares in): Riot Games, Discord, Epic Games, Bandcamp, Harmonix, Roblox, Ubisoft, Miniclip, Paradox and many more. It also held stock in Activision Blizzard prior to the Microsoft aquisition.

ah yes, VHS, my favorite format for watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

In fact, Google, X, Instagram, etc. can operate in China as long as they comply with Chinese laws, but they are unwilling to comply, so they cannot operate legally. This is the opposite of Tiktok's situation in the United States. Tik fully complies with US laws, but is forced to sell to Americans. 😂

1:05 I like how it says "Freedom is Slavery" as a reference to George Orwell's 1984.

Thank you for actually presenting factual information about Chinese censorship. There is so much baggage behind it, yet no one wants to look at it seriously without checking their biases. I see a lot of Chinese nationalists defend literally anything their government does, and a lot of sinophobic westerners exaggerate/invent things that don't actually exist. It's kind of difficult seeing someone talk objectively like this on the internet. So thank you so much. ~ A former Chinese citizen

Chinese here. Mostly true. But VPN is way more popular than I thought actually, not very difficult for younger generations to access the international Internet.

As a chinese i agree with this. You know what, when people talk online they do not even dare to put the word 'blood' ,'kill' , 'police' etc in the text, they will simply just put the first letter of the word to represents the actual word, for example, the word 殺(sha)　means to kill, and they will only type S to represent the word. Netizens in china always joke about if the government continue to ban whatever word they like, Chinese language will become dots and symbols. coz we have no more Chinese word to use.

9:15 We can see that the firewall is protecting them from amogus, looks like it's actually a good thing to be in china

Years ago, a client of mine was invited to China for a business deal for his manufacturing company. I told him that before he goes, he should do some research on privacy concerns before going. After finding out that it's highly recommended to take a burner phone and nothing else electronic he then became worried about his patents and intellectual property. I asked him, "Have you already made contact with this Chinese company? Don't worry about it, they stole your product designs within 10 minutes of contacting you."

2:51 RAHHH TALLY HALLS INTERNET SHOW (T.H.I.S) MENTIONED RAHH WHAT THE FK IS A ACTIVE BAND RAHHHH

7:03 In the Japanese title Mother 3 that's actually what happens in game, I am guessing they've read about things that happened in China which helped fuel major aspects of their creativity for the game's storyline. In fact most of the things happening in China is used as a story element of inspiration.

Alright, legitimate question: Are people allowed to be born in June 4th? If so, what do you tell people when they ask you for your birthday? Internet maintenance day of 1998?

Highly doubt 29% of people have access to vpn. I would say maybe 2.9% lol. I'm chinese.

Hi, im on vacation in China right now and I can confirm that i saw 1984 being sold at a foreign books store in shanghai, I didn't pay much attention to it since it was in a sea of other books that i was forced to read in middle school like lord of the flies, but its pretty cool to see it in this video.

2:49 Seeing that clip from the Tally Hall Internet Show gave me whiplash

Two more thing: the translation for "Narrow neck bottle" is "細頸瓶" instead of "窄頸瓶", which is almost identical with Xi Jinping in Chinese pronunciation. Also, despite this video shows a lot of clips from hong kong, we are not inside of the great firewall yet. Maybe it would change in the future( I surely hope not)

This was incredibly fascinating. Sad, but fascinating.

7 years in Tibet is one of my favorite movies. Fun fact: Brad Pitt was banned from entering china due to his role in the film

3:18: ok, but all those people clapping in unison is creepy.

When you started talking about VPN it triggered me expecting the video to be sponsored and I was ready to skip ahead. Imagine my surprise to see no sponsor.

Watched this vid mostly to see if you countered the myth about Winnie the Pooh lmao. there’s actually a Pooh ride at Shanghai Disneyland & merch for sale all over the place, this has always annoyed me sm lol. Also - an interesting fact - when I lived in China and attended an international school, we were allowed by the govt to use a campus wide VPN (it’s not uncommon to have a VPN built into the Wi-Fi, in fact you can buy routers like that at mainstream tech stores in major cities; though you can’t hide things like that as a large organization like a school), and generally they turned a blind eye with a few exceptions. We were always told to NEVER use school Wi-Fi to search for “the 3 Ts”: Taiwan, Tibet, tianamen. Apparently it would literally shut down our internet schoolwide lol.

ok, as a Chinese, i can say most are true, but i still found some of content is this video not true of lack of context.

8:00 they do, i have a friend who went to school in Canada and went back to china. It's not as much of a meme as we make it here in the west, but it is a thing. Similar to our credit system for buying/renting houses and getting credit cards, etc.

I'm American and I've been watching a Chinese show recently, and it's super weird how things get censored. In one scene a character is reading a scientific paper titled "The Effects of Pollution on the Environment" but the word Pollution is blurred out, lol. I clicked on your video because of that show.

I made a website when I was 11 and it’s not banned in China

i love it that they are forbidden to use Amazon yet they sell loads of their merch through it!

Remember guys, the group that is restricting information is usually always the bad guy.

What blew my mind is the fact that I Chinese guy I met while traveling told me that the hbo show "euphoria" and the Netflix show "sex education" are not banned.

Halve of these are just pure fiction

‘Hey look they are even building the Holocaust!’ LOLLLLL

4:18 I have to point out that the Chinese education system requires you to lean one foreign language, and for 99% of people it is English. So basically English is mandatory.