“草泥马”居然都上纽约时报了：grass-mud horse
A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on aChinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than aphenomenon.Songs about a mythical alpaca-like creature have taken holdonline in China.
A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter millionmore views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more.Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals arewriting treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The storyof the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab hasspread far and wide across the Chinese online community.
Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, soundsvery much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely thepoint.
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’sauthoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as animpish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has notmerely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surelydone that.
It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanchthe flow of information over the Internet — a project on which theChinese government already has expended untold riches, and writtencountless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’slargest cyber-community.
Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, huntingfor words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory orseditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can beblocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the Universityof California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors ChineseWeb sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “hasbecome an icon of resistance to censorship.”
“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenileresponse to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that thevast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars tousually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows howstrongly this expression resonates.”
Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said inan interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility ofcensorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want toexpress, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a waterflow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, oroverflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”
China’s online population has always endured censorship, but theoversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracymovement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released anonline petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly onpower.
Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign,ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. Bymid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Websites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but alsoonline discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphonetext messages in which political and other sensitive issues werebroached.
Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down wasbullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers hadwritten in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’smonitoring project at the University of California, called it “the mostvicious crackdown in years.”
It was against this background that the grass-mud horse andseveral mythical companions appeared in early January on the ChineseInternet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in Chinese,were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have differentmeanings in English, their spoken names were double entendres withinarguably dirty second meanings.
So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese,its written Chinese characters are completely different, and itsmeaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only hasdodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own banon 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 — itlives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. Thehorses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficultenvironment,” a YouTube song about them says.
But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that aredevouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds verymuch like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonymfor censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been“harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’sregular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonioussociety.
In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “Theydefeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; rivercrabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.
The online videos’ scenes of alpacas happily romping to theDisney-style sounds of a children’s chorus quickly turn shocking —then, to many Chinese, hilarious — as it becomes clear that the songsfairly burst with disgusting language.
To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearlysubversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as theyappear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do notallow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative,right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic CuiWeiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — Iam a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, youcan’t say I’ve broken the law.”
In an essay titled “I am a grass-mud horse,” Ms. Cui compared theanti-smut campaign to China’s 1983 “anti-spiritual pollution campaign,”another crusade against pornography whose broader aim was to crushWestern-influenced critics of the ruling party.
Another noted blogger, the Tsinghua University sociologist GuoYuhua, called the grass-mud horse allusions “weapons of the weak” — thetitle of a book by the Yale political scientist James Scott describinghow powerless peasants resisted dictatorial regimes.
Of course, the government could decide to delete all Internetreferences to the phrase “grass-mud horse,” an easy task for itscensorship software. But while China’s cybercitizens may be weak, theyare also ingenious.
The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue incheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online democracyadvocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and instead choosea different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a ubiquitous surname, andweeding out the subversive Wangs from the harmless ones might meltcircuits in even the censors’ most powerful computer.
Yang Xiyun and Zhang Jing contributed research.
