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Censorship has been a long-standing issue in China, but its citizens continue to fight for self-expression through clever linguistic circumvention of Internet restrictions. Much of Chinese Internet lingo involves codewords, and the corpus of codewords is constantly changing to accommodate new topics and avoid smarter, stricter censors. It has reached the point where a simple understanding of Chinese vocabulary, syntax, and grammar is no longer enough to fully understand Chinese Internet discourse. On today's Chinese Internet, fully comprehending the language requires a thorough knowledge of current events, a deep respect for historical implications, an agile mastery of cultural conventions, and more often than not, a healthy appreciation of topical humor.

In order to evade government censors blocking free expression, Chinese social media posters utilize homophonic (same sound) and logographic (character) resemblances in order to voice controversial/politically-charged content.

This Wikipedia article details several categorical contexts, e.g. Internet posts, text messages, Chinese New Year, in which Chinese homophonic punning is used.