Chinese Wall Breached by a Very Unusual Horse
As impressive as it is, the Great Wall of China never actually accomplished its goal of repelling invaders. The so-called Great Firewall of China is another story altogether.
The government’s cyber-censoring system works with amazing efficiency, as any website or posting that officials disapprove of simply disappears or becomes inaccessible in the blink of an eye.
At least that was the case until last January, when a sly group of dissidents discovered that penetrating the Great Firewall isn’t so difficult after all. All you need is a horse. But not just any horse: A task this challenging calls for a very special horse, a Grass Mud Horse.
The three Chinese characters for “grass mud horse ( cǎo ní mǎ)” look innocent enough. But pronounce them out loud and it sounds as if you’re saying… ‘F*ck Your Mother’ ( cào nǐ mā), a fairly common curse in Chinese.
It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in polite conversation or a children’s song.
So imagine a video in which a chirpy children’s chorus sings an Alpine-sounding song (but without the yodeling) whose lyrics repeat that troublesome expression over and over again. Pretty hilarious, if you know what you’re listening to.
The video, which found its way to YouTube after appearing on the Internet in China, depicts the alleged Grass Mud Horses (what we see are actually alpacas, but who’s checking?) frolicking in the desert they inhabit—the name of which, incidentally, also happens to be an obscene pun.
The word play keeps piling up as the children sing of the fun-loving, intelligent, and courageous Grass Mud Horses battling against the River Crabs, in an effort to protect their grassland. “River Crabs,” it turns out, is a pun on “censorship,” while “grassland” refers to “free speech.”
Are you with us so far?
It may all sound harmless and playful, even childish, but the Grass Mud Horse has proved to be one of very few successful means of airing protest in Chinese cyberspace. The online reaction has been huge, and as Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, says, “The fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus..shows how strongly this expression resonates.”
By DanBing on 19-05-2009
Comment by count duckula
May 19th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Would you censor the Venus de Venus just because you can see her spewers?
Comment by Borsia
May 20th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I lived in China for 2 years and what was really out there are the English subtitles for TV programs and televised movies. They swear like drunken sailors the F word and mother F@@ker are used over and over along with numerous other swear words. Frequently having nothing to do with the action on the screen.