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Excerpt from chinadigitaltimes.net
On Monday, May 20, Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party was inaugurated the president of Taiwan. Lai’s election in January was met with dismay by the Chinese government, which views Lai and the DPP as separatist elements. The PRC spent at least tens of millions of dollars attempting to sway Taiwan’s election away from the DPP, and then claimed that the general election was unrepresentative of “mainstream public opinion on the island,” a claim widely mocked on the Chinese internet. The PRC also heavily censored discussion of the election and its outcome on social media, blocking the Weibo hashtags “Taiwan election,” “Taiwan general election,” “2024 Taiwan general election,” as well as “frozen garlic,” a homophone for “get elected” in a dialect widely spoken in Taiwan that has become a stock chant at political rallies. Lai Ching-te’s inauguration has spurred a new wave of censorship. Using a tool created by Citizen Lab, CDT Chinese identified censorship of several related combinations of terms in searches across Baidu, Sogou, and Weibo:
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