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First-place winner in the Nonfiction Essay/Article category of the 95th Annual WD Writing Competition, “Our Ancestors’ Script, Today’s Minefield.” The post Writer’s Digest 95th Annual Competition Nonfiction Essay or Article First Place Winner: “Our Ancestors’…
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From the WinnersWriter’s Digest 95th Annual Competition Nonfiction Essay or Article First Place Winner: “Our Ancestors’ Script, Today’s Minefield”First-place winner in the Nonfiction Essay/Article category of the 95th Annual WD Writing Competition, “Our Ancestors’ Script, Today’s Minefield.”
Moriah Richard
Published Oct 24, 2026 11:00 AM EDTCongratulations to Chenchen Lian, first-place winner in the Nonfiction Essay or Article category of the 95th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s their winning article, “Our Ancestors’ Script, Today’s Minefield.”
Our Ancestors’ Script, Today’s Minefield
Observations on Chinese Characters, Censorship, and the Space for Expression
by Chenchen Lian
In early 2017, I read an essay on “Mao Yan Kan Ren,” the political forum of KDNet, then one of China’s most influential public‑affairs platforms. The author, calligrapher Ma Zhiquan, described his first visit to Beijing to meet legal scholar He Weifang and the deep impression that meeting left on him.
The essay was sincere and vivid, yet halfway through I sensed something wrong—more than twenty sentences were broken, as if someone speaking suddenly choked mid‑sentence. The text felt jagged and stumbling. I knew Ma Zhiquan was a skilled prose writer. Why, then, did this piece read so incoherently?
Rereading it from the beginning, I suddenly understood: every instance of the name “He Weifang” had been silently erased.
There were no asterisks, no blank squares—just total erasure, complete “invisibility.” It was like pulling several links out of a long chain and welding the ends back together so neatly that the surface looked intact. If not for the fractured meaning, the tampering would have been nearly impossible to detect.
At that moment, I froze before my computer and wondered: If Cangjie, the legendary creator of Chinese characters, could see this, would he ever imagine that twenty‑first‑century Chinese people would be unable to freely use the script their ancestors created?
The one most harmed was not the scholar whose name vanished—he was already accustomed to flickering in and out of China’s public sphere. The real casualties were the readers, the author, and the text itself. Readers encountered vague, incoherent writing; the author’s carefully crafted prose became the ramblings of someone deranged; a once‑clear article was chopped into ambiguous fragments. All of this was caused by a hidden system of keyword filtering—no warnings, no explanations, operating silently, making you believe “nothing happened.”
This is one of the most typical—and most insidious—forms of Chinese internet censorship. Its danger lies not in letting you know what has been removed, but in making you believe nothing was removed at all.
An Invisible Sieve
Chinese characters are a visual symbol system invented by our ancestors—a tool for conveying thought and emotion, recording events, and describing the world. They are also a cultural emblem, carrying the genetic code of Chinese civilization. Through centuries of upheaval, the writing system has remained remarkably stable, like an anchor securing cultural continuity.
But internet censorship and keyword filtering have quietly compressed the expressive space of Chinese characters, distorting their original function as carriers of thought.
The silent deletion of He Weifang’s name was not accidental but a routine manifestation of institutionalized censorship. Through keyword matching and algorithmic detection, the system identifies terms deemed “harmful” and automatically intercepts or deletes them before publication. Since the 1990s, this technology has been deeply embedded in social media, search engines, messaging apps, and email services.
Behind this system stand multiple government departments—public security, state security, press and publication, telecommunications, broadcasting—forming a comprehensive surveillance network. Their tools include domain hijacking, keyword filtering, packet sniffing, and IP blocking.
In 2023, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto reported that Chinese search engines contained more than 66,000 censorship rules. According to The New York Times, eight major Chinese platforms—including Baidu, Sogou, Bing, Weibo, Douyin, and Bilibili—had built internal censorship systems to keep up with shifting political red lines.
Researcher Jeffrey Knockel noted:
“If the topic is highly sensitive, you may get no results at all. You think you’re seeing normal results, but actually you’re only seeing content from pre‑approved websites.”
Censorship has become not only pervasive but also concealed. Sensitive‑word databases are never disclosed. Users can only grope forward through endless trial and error: write a sentence, post it, see if it survives; if it disappears, guess which word triggered the filter, revise, and try again.
The Many Faces of Censorship
Beyond invisible deletion, censorship takes several other forms:
- Asterisks or blank squares
- “Visible only to the sender”
- Warning pop‑ups
- Manual review and account suspension
In 2007, I posted a long excerpt on KDNet about freedom and constitutionalism. Initially ignored, it went viral after I retitled it “Anti‑Brainwashing Studio.” Just as I felt pleased, the post vanished. Soon after, every article I had ever published on KDNet—over a hundred—was wiped clean.
Playing Hide‑and‑Seek with Censorship
Chinese netizens did not surrender. Over years of confrontation, they developed creative strategies to outmaneuver the censors—using the flexibility and ambiguity of Chinese itself.
Common tactics include:
- Pinyin substitution
- Abbreviations
- Homophones
- Character disassembly
- Posting text as images
Even film subtitles mutate: “blood” becomes “snow,” “kill” becomes “shark,” “death” becomes “S.”
Mixed‑language writing also proliferated:
“Today I went to the shopping mall and ate ramen with friends—such a happy day.”
“Can someone explain: yysy, your tg’s shzy is really ts…?”
Netizens lamented:
- “Sometimes I understand English better than Chinese.”
- “Reading Chinese forums feels like decoding classified intelligence.”
- “Chinese characters are shattered; I survive in the cracks.”
Others mocked the contradiction:
“They preach ‘cultural confidence,’ yet force everyone to write Chinese with pinyin, symbols, and homophones.”
But these tricks are temporary. As censorship technology advances, homophones, pinyin, and disassembled characters are increasingly detected. The space shrinks; the words diminish.
A Language in Pain
Most people merely grumble when their posts are deleted. But some articulate deeper anguish.
Writer Murong Xuecun described how his book China: Missing a Cure was repeatedly censored—words, paragraphs, entire chapters removed—before publication. He said: “In a Chinese language riddled with landmines, I choose each word with fear. Safe words grow fewer; every character feels suspicious.”
Another netizen wrote: “To evade filters, people mix English, pinyin, symbols, or dismember characters. The result resembles a corpse dismembered and scattered in the wilderness.”
Someone else reminded us: “‘He’ (和) is ‘grain’ entering ‘mouth’; ‘xie’ (谐) is ‘all’ able to ‘speak.’
Harmony originally meant everyone can speak.”
The Vanishing Voices
The injury to language ultimately becomes injury to people.
Many public intellectuals, scholars, and writers have been banned, silenced, de‑platformed, or prevented from publishing. Their disappearance from public space is not voluntary.
A blogger wrote: “My WeChat public account was called ‘Fly Free.’ But my best articles often couldn’t be posted, or vanished after posting.”
One observer called this trend: “The disappearance of the last public intellectuals.”
Not because they changed their minds, but because every place where they could speak has been filled in.
Brains Under Compression
This is not just the plight of intellectuals. It is a systemic project targeting the expressive space of 1.4 billion people.
By 2012, China Mobile alone had blocked more than 600,000 websites. YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, The New York Times—all inaccessible.
More shocking is this: Chinese is the world’s most spoken language, yet Chinese‑language internet content accounts for only 1.3 percent of global online information. And even within that 1.3 percent, much is censored.
A netizen wrote: “Years inside the Great Firewall have trained us to decipher hidden meanings and express ourselves through tricks. It feels clever, but it’s actually a deep sorrow.”
Another lamented: “The time that could have gone into real discussion is spent circling around censorship.”
Thought needs soil—pluralistic information, open expression, free public space. None of these exist.
The purpose of censorship is to extinguish the desire to speak. After enough deletions, people stop expressing themselves. Eventually, they forget what they once wanted to say.
Looking Back to Cangjie
Legend says that when Cangjie created Chinese characters, grain fell from the sky and ghosts cried—symbolizing abundance and the power of writing to shake the order of heaven and earth.
Thousands of years later, the characters remain, but their users—Cangjie’s descendants—now walk through a vast minefield.
Some characters cannot be sent;
some words make posts vanish;
some sentences erase entire articles instantly.
You never know where the mines are. No one tells you.
You can only probe forward, step by step.
Sometimes I wonder:
If the heavens could see today—Cangjie’s characters scanned, filtered, dismantled, drained—
would he weep again?
Only this time, not for the birth of writing,
but for its slow, silent death in the land where it was born.
Moriah RichardAuthor
Since obtaining her MFA in fiction, Moriah Richard has worked with over 100 authors to help them achieve their publication dreams. As the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, she spearheads the world-building column Building Better Worlds, a 2023 Eddie & Ozzie Award winner. She also runs the Flash Fiction February Challenge on the WD blog, encouraging writers to pen one microstory a day over the course of the month and share their work with other participants. As a reader, Moriah is most interested in horror, fantasy, and romance, although she will read just about anything with a great hook.
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