The New York Times featured an excellent article last week about an Internet meme sweeping across mainland China: the grass-mud horse!
Videos of this mythical creature (in most videos it's simply a llama) have become incredibly popular in China and everyone from intellectuals to artists are discussing the subject and making their own tributes.
So what gives? Why is anyone enthralled by a horse-like, llama-wannabe? And, why is it muddy?
You see, in Mandarin Chinese, grass-mud horse (草泥马) is pronounced almost exactly the same as the phrase, "Fuck your mother!"
Think of the words "sea" and "see" in English. They're pronounced the same, but they have totally different meanings and spellings. In Mandarin, grass-mud horse sounds similar to the foulest of curses when uttered aloud, but it's actual meaning, and the characters used to write it, are benign.
Because Chinese is a tonal language, there are countless chances to mess up the meaning of a word simply by changing the tone at which it is pronounced. In fact, there are whole comedy routines, known as cross-talk, built around this fact. It's like Abott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine, except in Chinese.
But, the grass-mud horse hasn't become a phenomenon solely due to it's comedic value. Like most great comedy, this joke has an edge.
According to the NY Times,
"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." "Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the grass-mud horse is an icon of resistance to censorship."
Subversion and llamas all in one? Well done Chinese Internet crawlers!
Want to bypass web censors? Easy! Just hide behind cute animals, singing and dancing!
If any of this seems familiar, maybe it's because you've heard the latest Britney Spears' song in which she pulls the exact same shenanigans! The song is officially titled "If you seek Amy," but Spears, the confused little trollop she is, pronounces the line so that it sounds like, "F-U-C-K me!"
I wonder if she learned this trickery from the Chinese?
You can now add Flickr to the growing list of websites that China has blocked in the past few weeks. Actually, I can access the Flickr website itself, but I can't see any photos (which makes the website pointless) because the server that hosts photos is what has been blocked. Photographers are a rowdy bunch, and my fellow photo enthusiasts who live in China and use Flickr are furious about the block.
Fortunately for us, an industrious Iranian photographer, who found himself blocked from Flickr in his home country, designed an awesome Firefox extension that seamlessly shatters any block on Flickr images. It works like a charm and I can once again browse and post photos! This all further proves my point that trying to restrict information on the web is a futile exercise.
As a teacher, the most frustrating thing for me about internet censorship in China is that it often prevents me from accessing teaching materials for my students. This week I was blocked from downloading pictures of American teenagers for a lesson on American high school customs and slang. The Communist party claims that they want to open China to the world in preparation for the Olympics and for the country's further economic development. And, to this end, every year thousands of foreigners journey to China to teach English and to share their knowledge and culture with eager Chinese students. Yet, the government doesn't acknowledge that opening yourself to the world and learning from other cultures, necessarily requires a free and uninhibited exchange of information. You can't learn much from others if you don't believe in intellectual freedom and allowing access to information. The communist party has taken an intractable position here by saying, "We want our country to learn from the world and to improve. But, you can only learn what we deem permissible." How, I ask, is that learning at all?
If you're wondering whether or not a specific website is being blocked by the government in China you can check out the awesome website www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, which, appropriately enough, is itself being blocked in China. And yes, for those of you wondering, my blog is still blocked in China... I'm honored?
I leave you with this excellent picture taken by my friend, and fellow volunteer teacher, Lance. I feel it pretty accurately expresses the political and intellectual climate in China at present.
Sorry again for the time it's been since I last posted an entry, but, this time, I'm not totally to blame. The powers that be in China--most likely some Communist party lapdog who can hardly speak English, is greatly overpaid and has no idea what he is doing-- have once again decided to restrict access to my blog. I wish I could tell you why they've done this, but honestly I have no idea. I haven't posted anything recently that is even remotely controversial. But, trying to figure out the logic of the Communist party in matters of what speech they ban is tantamount to trying to decipher why people care about Paris Hilton. It simply makes no sense. The Chinese government has a constant internet block of Wikepedia and and BBC news. Meanwhile, the NYtimes, which routinely feature stories critical of the Chinese government, has never been blocked while I've lived here. My friend Vivienne in Shanghai was recently infuriated when her LiveJournal blog was blocked. I certainly feel her pain. The great thing about the internet though, is that there is simply no way to block all access to any site or information without completely restricting access to the web. If people want to know something, and or access a site, they will find a way. There is always a backdoor, and with a little digging and internet sleuthing it isn't so difficult to circumnavigate a block. After all, I am posting right now to my "blocked" blog. Of course, I'm also crossing my fingers that I'll continue to find ways to do so. And, on that note, I'll leave you with some promised pictures of the week. I shot the following pictures at a flower market during my recent trip to Hong Kong about a month ago. Enjoy!
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