Disturbed

心神不宁 (xīn shén bù níng): disturbed

This word was made famous in an interview of university student Gao Ye (高也) on CCTV's Focus Report program. The interview occurred when Google was threatening to withdraw from China, while China was stepping up its criticism of Google. In the interview, Gao Ye discussed the negative impact pornographic content in Google's search results was having on his classmate, saying that it caused him to be “disturbed.”

After the interview, China's human-flesh search engine kicked into high gear and it was discovered that Gao Ye was not a random college student, but an intern with the very program that interviewed him. This incident is reminiscent of a CCTV interview of a young schoolgirl who complained about a website that was “very erotic very violent.” Both incidents called into question CCTV's journalistic integrity.

Netizens supportive of Google pointed to this incident as an example of the government unfairly targeting Google. They also maintained that Chinese search engines produced a similar volume of pornographic search results.

After the word distrubed went viral, Gao Ye, the name of the student/intern, became a sensitive word in China and search results containing “Gao Ye” were heavily filtered by domestic search engines.

In current online usage, the term “disturbed” has become a sort of catchphrase, just as “very erotic, very violent” has. For example, a comment beneath the picture of a scantily clad woman might read, “Wow, this really makes me 'disturbed.'”

Gao Ye

My classmate tried several search methods until he discovered that Google's search results made him feel the most "distrubed."