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The Jordan Harbinger Show

1299: Laowhy86 | Decoding the Secret Slang of China's Censored Internet

The Jordan Harbinger Show

Jordan Harbinger

Education, Science, Business

4.8 β€’ 12.3K Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 17 March 2026

⏱️ 90 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The China Show's Laowhy86 reveals how millions of Chinese citizens disguise dissent as puns, memes, and mythical creatures to dodge censors.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1299

What We Discuss with Laowhy86:

  • China's internet operates as a closed ecosystem where apps like WeChat handle everything from payments to communication β€” and the government monitors all of it. Citizens who default on debts, post the wrong opinion, or even discuss banned topics can lose access to trains, flights, and basic services overnight.
  • Chinese citizens have built an ever-evolving coded language to dodge censorship β€” from "grass mud horse" (a pun on a profanity) to calling lockdowns "square cabins" and using "talk egg prices" to vent about the economy. What started as playful wordplay has become a high-stakes survival tool as punishments have escalated to years in prison.
  • The government now deploys AI β€” through campaigns like "Clear and Bright" β€” to predict and pre-emptively ban future slang before it even catches on. Large language models scan for creative workarounds, making the cat-and-mouse game between citizens and censors increasingly lopsided.
  • China's unwritten social contract β€” surrender your freedoms and we'll make you prosperous β€” is fracturing. Factory workers haven't been paid in months or years, youth unemployment data has been suppressed, and movements like "lying flat" reflect a generation that's checked out of a system that stopped holding up its end of the deal.
  • Even under the most sophisticated censorship apparatus on the planet, human creativity keeps finding cracks β€” blank paper protests, "deep-fried" videos, emoji puzzles, and cross-strait livestream trolling all prove that when speech is compressed, it doesn't vanish β€” it adapts, and understanding how that works sharpens your ability to read between the lines anywhere.
  • And much more...

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This episode is sponsored in part by Cup of Justice Podcast.

0:03.2

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0:22.4

This trio brings together a blend of legal expertise,

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0:41.2

Cup of Justice wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show.

0:46.5

We're watching China's crime rate in real life go up through the roof. And we're watching

0:51.8

weekly cases where people are getting in cars and running

0:55.5

over pedestrians. It's become like a massive problem. It's almost an epidemic at this point.

1:00.8

I mean, one guy ran over like 90 something people. So yeah, if you ever get into an argument

1:05.3

with a tankie and authoritarian supporter, they'd be like they don't have gun violence or

1:09.5

or whatever. They have people running over mass crowds of people in cars.

1:16.5

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories,

1:20.9

secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical

1:24.9

advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

1:28.2

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations

1:32.4

with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers,

1:37.8

even the occasional chess grandmaster, legendary, actor, or Emmy-nominated comedian.

1:42.6

And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search

2:01.7

for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, if you've ever posted something

2:05.9

online and thought, huh, this could get me in trouble, imagine doing that in a country where

2:10.4

your real name, your national ID, and possibly your future are tied to that post. Today, we're

2:15.5

going deep into the coded, chaotic, weirdly poetic underground language of the

...

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