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How Chinese use NFTs to bypass censorship



 NFTs are widely known as hype - hype that, after all, allows artists to make money through tokens on the blockchain. What is much less well known is that NFTs are playing an increasingly important role in breaking the Great Firewall in China.


The Wall Street Journal recently reported extensively on how Chinese are using Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to subvert pervasive internet censorship.


This became particularly important in the wake of the mega lockdown in Shanghai. While there is a consensus in this country that Corona is "over" because we are all vaccinated and the sun is shining, the Communist Party (KP) is sticking to its zero-Covid strategy. When the number of cases rose in Shanghai, she promptly sealed off the entire city.


On April 22, the "Voices of April" video went viral on social media. It shows the empty streets of Shanghai while listening to the conversations and lamentations of residents. As always, the Chinese leadership reacted to criticism – they censored the video, just like Orwell: If you want to control the future, you have to control the past.


But this time she couldn't get away with it. Chinese internet users have been using NFTs for some time to prevent media from being forgotten.


The blockchain takes away the power of winners to make history

Numerous NFTs are listed on OpenSea under the title "Voices of April" , siyuezhisheng in Chinese. The associated NFTs link to the video.


In addition, one can find NFTs with photos, videos and audio files that document the experiences of the Chinese with the last lockdowns. You can also find NFTs on Li Wenliang, the doctor who first discovered Corona before he died of Covid-19. The Chinese government suppresses his memory, the NFTs preserve it.



The old adage that history is made by the winners may be coming to an end. Orwell's saying that he who controls the past who controls the present also no longer quite applies if there is a part of the present that eludes controllability - a blockchain. The losers have a space to document their experiences in a way that the winners can't erase from memory. Your memories and voices survive.


But how does it work? Do NFTs really create permanent censorship resistance? And do the memories remain in a circle of nerds who surf the western internet via Tor and VPN anyway – or do they reach everyone? And anyway – why use NFTs?


Undeletable Files

First of all, you really can't delete an NFT. It is a token on a blockchain associated with information. In the simplest case, this information would be a photo, a message or a video.


If you store messages directly on the blockchain, you would not need a token. The large blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, are of course far too expensive for this. But there are numerous smaller blockchains, or blockchain projects, designed to store information censorship-resistant. In China, Arweave and LikeCoin seem to be popular at the moment; they have seen rapid growth since the pandemic began. China is ramping up censorship, Chinese users are flocking to blockchains.


LikeCoin even has a WordPress plugin that allows you to permanently save posts on the blockchain. It is said to be used by 8,000 websites in China and has archived more than two million articles, including many from Apple Daily, a former Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper shut down by the government last year.


However, you do not necessarily need a blockchain for this. Networks such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) also store information and files in a decentralized manner, which does not make censorship impossible, but makes it more difficult. There are reports that the IPFS is blocked in China by the Great Firewall, but there are also other reports that it is available.


But then why an NFT? And why did NFTs even become the gold standard in circumventing censorship?


The NFT as an anchor

The answer can be found in another question: How to find the files? Block explorers, especially on smaller blockchains, rarely have direct search capabilities; IPFS stores files using a hash. While both make it possible to store information easily and securely, they make it difficult to find.


And this is where the NFTs come into play. You don't save the files - these are usually in the IPFS - but a link to it. You associate the link with an easy-to-find search term, such as “Voices of April”.


The easiest way to search is through OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. But it's blocked by the Great Firewall, so you need a VPN to access it. You could therefore say: If you use a VPN, you can save a file on Google Drive right away. But that's not entirely true. Because an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, for example, can be found on a variety of platforms.


If the KP blocks OpenSea, then you go to SuperRare , and if that is also blocked, then to NFT-Stats and so on. NFTs are like the needle that breaks through the firewall—you can patch the holes, but you can't prevent them from poking through again and again.


Cat and mouse or breakthrough?

The combination of NFTs and IPFS makes it impossible to completely eliminate objectionable content, and makes it very difficult to prevent that content from being shared in a reasonably user-friendly way. Once there is a keyword – say “Voice of April” – knowing an uncensored NFT explorer is enough to find the content.


Perhaps this is just another round of the usual cat-and-mouse game between censorship and the people. But maybe it is also a breakthrough that permanently shifts the balance of power to the disadvantage of the censors.


By the way, another not entirely meaningless side finding is that the Chinese continue to use cryptocurrencies. You need Ether to mint NFTs, and if you're releasing them on a sidechain like Polygon because that's cheaper, you need MATIS tokens. Despite all the bans, the Chinese apparently continue to keep trading in cryptocurrencies alive.

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