Protesting like a Chinese: Puns

Puns, rhymes and jokes seem to be all the jazz nowadays (06/2026) when it comes to protesting. Left, right or center, if you want to be noticed by news cycle, you better have a really good wordplay, lest you risk fading into irrelevance.

Take Pete Hegseth's address to the military leadership. He slotted in the rhyme Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, which was soon picked up by all late night comedians. I guess they really don't have the imagination to come up with their own content.

Puns and Chinese

When it comes to puns though, the true masters are the Chinese. The Chinese language is probably the most pun friendly language in the world due to two unique characteristics:

• Chinese is written exclusively in a logographic writing system, which makes your homophones extra spicy. The sub-meaning is explicitly slotted in a way that just doesn't work in a language that uses a phonetic writing system.
• Chinese languages are all tonal and most words consist of one or two syllables, making the amount of homophobes much more abundant than they would be in English.

The Chinese family of languages are not the only tonal languages with abundant homophones (Vietnamese has similar one/two syllable word length), nor are they the only languages written using a logographic writing system (Hello Japanese), but the combination of those features is mostly unique.

We have both complete and incomplete homophones and they can both be used form puns.

• Complete homophones such as 目的 goal and 墓地 grave both being pronounced exactly mùdì.
• Incomplete homophones, where the sound is the same, but the tones are different: 問 wèn to ask and 吻 wěn to kiss.

Now, let's see some examples in practise! Those can get wild...

Good (and bad) fortune related puns

Let's start with some tame ones:

• Around Chinese New Year, the character for good fortune, 福 fú is displayed upside-down. This is because the character for upside-down, 倒 dào is a homophone of 到 or arrive, symbolising the good luck arriving. Now this is what I call convoluted.
• Fish, 魚 yú sounds similar to abundance 餘 so fish are often displayed as a way to attract good fortune.
• The number 4 sì sounds very similar to death 死 sǐ, so 4th floor is thought to be unlucky.
• The number 8 bā is thought to be lucky because it sounds similar to prosper 發 fa

Avoiding censorship

In the same way that puns can be used to evoke good luck, they can also be used to... Avoid censorship:

• Alpaca, 草泥馬 cǎonímǎ, literally grass mud horse, sounds extremely similar to fuck your mum, 操你媽 càonǐmā, which was used to avoid profanity filters. Since everyone now knows what it means, a simple emoji 🦙 is enough to convey the meaning. You may find the wikipedia article on it fascinating.
• When the #MeToo movement reached China, it initially was translated in mandarin under #WoYeShi, however this started getting blocked, so it later got changed to #米兔 mǐtù, which sounds similar to the original English. The literal translation is a rice bunny, a popular Chinese candy. After this also started getting censored, a simple white rabbit emoji was used instead 🐇. Notice how there are so many layers of transformation that even if you miss just one step, you have no idea how the pun came to be.
• The word harmonise or 和諧 héxiè refers to Internet censorship. A "harmonised" content is removed content, and discussing censorship was obviously not allowed. A near-homophone river crab 河蟹 or héxiè was used instead. When the censors caught onto that, memes, emojis of all sorts of river animals were used instead to refer to the original meaning. If you missed the original development, you would have no chance to catch on.
• When you complain about the government 政府 zhèngfŭ, you can just instead write 正腐, which is pronounced the same however means totally rotten.
• During COVID times there were repeated lockdowns and people complained online. The character for again 又 would obviously be part of any complaint for repeated lockdown, but those posts got taken down. However users used a unique feature of the Chinese writing system: Character compositionality. There are 3 additional Chinese characters that are written by just adding more 又: 双, 叒, 叕. The meaning and pronunciation here are irrelevant, it's purely visual association. When you see 又双叒叕, you understand that the meaning is something is happening again and again, even though the phrase is complete gibberish. Fascinating.

Clever protesting and advertising

Here we will look into some longer and more intricate uses

• Shanxi good Shanxi beautiful 晋善晋美 jìnshànjìnměi was used in ads promoting tourism to Shanxi province. The slogan is a pun on the Chinese expression meaning perfection 盡善盡美 jìnshànjìnměi. Cute!
• acutely urgent 刻不容緩 kèbùrónghuǎn was rewritten as coughing may not linger 咳不容緩 kébùrónghuǎn to advertise a cough medicine. I'd get that, honestly.
• Swept by the anti-nuclear sentiment, Taiwanese held large scale protests against Nuclear energy with the slogan Use love to generate electricity 用愛發電 yòngàifādiàn. Sadly, after closing the nuclear power plants and the reality of coal power plants and pollution kicked in, the original protests were mocked with the similarly sounding phrase 用癌發電 yòngáifādiàn, which translates to Use cancer to generate electricity.

After a tiring day of puns, I will leave you to rest!