"word hell"

清朝屢行文字獄，起初由康熙一朝就有，「清風不識字，何故亂翻書」，本為風流倜儻之作，但是有心人一曲解，就會變成是諷刺清朝本為滿州夷狄，不識文化的民族，「詆毀聖朝，莫此為甚！」。其實，聖朝哪是幾個字就能詆毀？然而當政者對自己沒自信，黎民當然就得跟著遭殃。往後，中國大陸的文化大革命也大多類似於此，舉個最荒

"word hell" (wenzi diyu), or more accurately, "(chinese) character hell," is an interesting term describing getting into political or legal trouble for writing words that can be misconstrued as an attack on a leader. in the Qing dynasty, there was a charming old saying, "the clean wind cannot read; why, then, are you (the wind) turning the pages of my book?" the character "qing," or "clean," was also the name of the Qing dynasty: hence, the saying could be misconstrued as a veiled attack on the non-Han Chinese Qing authority. the blogger i quote above goes on to give a more modern example (cut off by my bad pasting skills). during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, in some places traffic lights switched the red and green lights. "red," with its positive revolutionary meaning, was to indicate "go," and "green" was to mean "stop." i had never heard of this, but some pretty absurd things happened during those times.