La paronomasia omofonica su Internet: la satira come rovesciamento dei temi della propaganda e interventi di contenimento

Since the arrival of the Internet in China, the Chinese government had adopted many measures in order to limit dissent, e.g. the Great Firewall, which automatically blocks sensitive words. Thanks to homophonic puns (xiéyīn shuāngguān谐音双关), the Netizens are able to bypass censorship, replacing the blocked characters with homophonic or semi-homophonic characters. In our contribution, we analyse a few homophonic puns from the database of sensitive words created by China Digital Times, in order to illustrate the way the Netizens overturn propaganda slogans. Furthermore, we analyze official documents issued by State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT, and then since 2013 SAPPRT, “State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television” ), in order to highlight the difficulties in defining, and therefore limiting, the concept of “parody”, firstly referred to the content, then correlated with “evil intention (è yì恶意)”. We conclude that the strategies adopted by the Internauts and by the Government are all deeply rooted in the Confucian tradition: the ones adopted by the Internauts recall the tabooing of names, the ones adopted by the Government recall the harmony and the rectification of names.