the grass-mud horse

[Mark Mandel]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html

A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors

By MICHAEL WINES
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.

(see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html for the
whole story)

m a m

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