Would Sg netizens be as ingenious?
A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
By MICHAEL WINES, New York Times
Published: March 11, 2009
BEIJING — Since its first unheralded
appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse
has become nothing less than a phenomenon.
A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4
million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter
million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted
180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese
intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social
importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the
evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online
community.
Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds
very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the
point.
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s
authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as
an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse
has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it
has surely done that.
It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to
stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on
which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches,
and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought
from the world’s largest cyber-community.
Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting
for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or
seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be
blocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University
of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors
Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud
horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”
“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile
response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the
vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars
to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows
how strongly this expression resonates.”
Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said
in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the
futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they
want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is
like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other
directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”
China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the
oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy
movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released
an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s
monopoly on power.
Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign,
ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of
deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more
than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic
sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups
and even cellphone text messages in which political and other
sensitive issues were broached.
Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was
bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had
written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s
monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the
most vicious crackdown in years.”
It was against this background that the grass-mud horse and
several mythical companions appeared in early January on the
Chinese Internet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in
Chinese, were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have
different meanings in English, their spoken names were double
entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings.
So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese,
its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its
meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only has
dodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own
ban on so-called offensive behavior.
As depicted online, the grass-mud horse seems innocent enough at
the start.
An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it
lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The
horses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult
environment,” a YouTube song about them says.
But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are
devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds
very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a
synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts
have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu
Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a
harmonious society.
In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “They
defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; river
crabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.
The online videos’ scenes of alpacas happily romping to the
Disney-style sounds of a children’s chorus quickly turn shocking —
then, to many Chinese, hilarious — as it becomes clear that the
songs fairly burst with disgusting language.
To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearly
subversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as they
appear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do
not allow me to say certain things. See, I am completely
cooperative, right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social
critic Cui Weiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute
children’s song — I am a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard
by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law.”
In an essay titled “I am a grass-mud horse,” Ms. Cui compared
the anti-smut campaign to China’s 1983 “anti-spiritual pollution
campaign,” another crusade against pornography whose broader aim
was to crush Western-influenced critics of the ruling party.
Another noted blogger, the Tsinghua University sociologist Guo
Yuhua, called the grass-mud horse allusions “weapons of the weak” —
the title of a book by the Yale political scientist James Scott
describing how powerless peasants resisted dictatorial regimes.
Of course, the government could decide to delete all Internet
references to the phrase “grass-mud horse,” an easy task for its
censorship software. But while China’s cybercitizens may be weak,
they are also ingenious.
The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue in
cheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online
democracy advocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and
instead choose a different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a
ubiquitous surname, and weeding out the subversive Wangs from the
harmless ones might melt circuits in even the censors’ most
powerful computer.