Oscars 2021: Sidestepping media blackout, China fans use internet tactics to hail Chloe Zhao's historic win for Nomadland

Chloé Zhao’s historic Oscar win should have been met with jubilation in China, the country of her birth. On Sunday night, she became the first Asian woman — and the first woman of colour — to be named best director, for Nomadland, which also took home the prize for best picture. Instead, the Chinese government imposed a virtual news blackout, and censors moved to tamp down or scrub out discussion of the award on social media. Chinese state-run news media outlets — which are typically eager to celebrate the recognition of its citizens on the global stage — made nearly no mention of the Oscars, let alone Zhao. Chinese social-media platforms raced to delete or limit the circulation of articles and posts about the ceremony and Zhao, forcing many internet users and fans to use homonyms and wordplay to evade the censors. No reason has been given for the suppression, although Zhao has recently been the target of a nationalist backlash over remarks she had made about China in the past. Hung Huang, a writer in Beijing, said the state news media blackout appeared to be the latest symptom of the recent escalation in tensions between the United States and China. “People should be celebrating — both Americans for giving her credit as a film director, and Chinese, for the fact that one of their own won a very prestigious international award,” Hung said. “But the politics of the US-China relationship seem to have filtered down to the cultural and art circles, which is a shame.” By midafternoon Monday, the Global Times, a Communist Party-owned newspaper, broke the silence to urge Zhao to play a “mediating role” between China and the United States and “avoid being a friction point.” “We hope she can become more and more mature,” the paper wrote in an editorial published only in English. Although some posts about Zhao’s success made it through the filters, for the most part, the censors made it clear that the topic was off-limits. Searches on Weibo, a popular social media platform, for “#Chloé Zhao wins the Oscar for best director” returned only this message: “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the page is not found.” Among the many posts deleted on Weibo were ones that expressed frustration at the attacks on Zhao. “At a time we should be celebrating Chloé Zhao, who has talked about the influence of Chinese culture on her life, there are still some people who are anxious to disassociate themselves from her and her Chinese identity. I think this phenomenon is not good at all,” wrote one user on Weibo in a post that later disappeared. The controversy that had engulfed Zhao last month centred on remarks she made in 2013 to an American film magazine in which she criticized China as a place “where there are lies everywhere.” Nationalist trolls had also homed in on a more recent interview in which Zhao, who grew up partly in the United States and now lives there, was quoted as saying: “The US is now my country, ultimately.” (The Australian site that interviewed her said later that it had misquoted Zhao and that she had actually said “not my country.”) After the uproar last month, searches on social media for hashtags related to Nomadland in Chinese were blocked, and Chinese-language promotional material vanished as well. Although the film, a sensitive portrait of the lives of itinerant Americans, had been scheduled for release in China last week, there were no screenings in theatres as of Monday. Chinese reporters working at state-controlled news outlets had been ordered weeks ago to refrain from covering the awards ceremony altogether, said two employees of Beijing-based news outlets, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the issue. On Monday afternoon, there was no mention of the Oscars in the entertainment section of the flagship People’s Daily website. Instead, the top stories included a report on rural tourism in China and another on a “World Tai Chi Day” event in Malta. But Zhao’s fans were undeterred by the censorship. On social media, they resorted to tactics that are by now familiar to many Chinese internet users: blurring out the names of Zhao and the film; writing backward; turning images on their side; and adding slashes or exclamation marks between Chinese characters. In their posts, many people praised Zhao’s acceptance speech, in which she said she had been “thinking a lot lately about how I keep going when things get hard.” For inspiration, she said she often looked to a line from a 13th-century classical text that she had memorized as a child growing up in China: “People at birth are inherently good.” Amy Qin and Amy Chang Chien c.2021 The New York Times Company. Austin Ramzy and Joy Dong contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Claire Fu contributed research.