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.
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.
Zhang Jing contributed research.
2009年3月13日星期五
草泥马登陆纽约时报（译文转载）
《纽约时报》：草泥马，戈壁，河蟹——双关语调侃中国网络审查制度
译者：pestwave 来源
北京报道-仅仅一月份才首次现身于中文网站，现在已经名声大噪，它就是“草泥马”。
一段有关该动物的YouTube童声合唱已经吸引了近140万次浏览量。一幅草泥马漫画的浏览量超过了25万。一份有关该动物习性的介绍文档吸引了 18万次浏览量。商店里开始销售草泥马玩具。中国知识分子也撰文讨论草泥马的重大社会意义。草泥马和河蟹大战传遍了整个中国互联网。
这些事情对草泥马这种神秘的动物算不得什么坏事，只不过它的中文名字听上去像是一句非常下流的脏话。这才是画龙点睛之笔。
按照中国官方的标准来看，草泥马属于破坏行为。这匹小马的名字不太雅观，它通过一种顽皮的方式来表达对网络审查制度的不满，让审查制度变得十分荒谬（确实做到了这一点），当然不只这些。
它还引出了真正的问题：中国有能力控制网络信息吗？中国政府已经为此投入了巨额开支，并且编写了无数软件算法，目的就是消除这个全球最大互联网社区的不和谐声音。
政府电脑在不停地扫面中国网络，寻找那些被审查制度认为是煽动和反动的关键词和句子。一经发现，“肇事”博客或对话几分钟就可以“安息”。
肖强（音）是加州大学伯克利分校一名新闻学副教授，正在负责一个监测中文网站的项目。他在一封电子邮件中称草泥马“已经成为一个对抗审查制度的偶像”。
“这种表达方式以及这些卡通视频，看似是对不合理制度的青春叛逆，但实际上有大量网民加入，既包括严谨的学者，也包括一向不问政治的城市白领，说明这种表达方式引起了强烈的共鸣。”他写道。
王小峰是北京一名记者兼博客作者，他在一次采访中称草泥马形象地说明了审查制度的徒劳无用。他说：“当人们有情绪或感情时，人们就想发泄，他们需要一个空间或渠道。这就好比是水，如果你挡住了一个方向，它就会流向别处，或者溢出。总要有个出口。”
中国网民一直处在审查制度之中，但是去年12月份审查制度急剧收紧。在此之前，“07+1=宪章（一场由德高望重的知识分子领导的一次亲民主运动）”发表了网络请愿，号召结束执政党共产党的独裁统治。
此后不久，政府审查者开始了一场战役，表面上针对网络色情和其它异常行为。到二月中旬，政府已经关闭了1900多家网站和250个博客，不仅包括公开色情网站，还包括在线论坛，即时通讯小组，甚至还包括含有政治和敏感内容的手机短信。
最引人注目的被关网站要算著名的牛博网：思想开明的博客作者在这个论坛里详细介绍了07+1=宪章宪章。《中国数字时报 （China Digital Times）》（肖先生负责的加州大学网站监测项目）称其为“近年来最无耻的取缔行为”。
草泥马与其神秘伙伴也正是在这种背景下于一月初出现在门户网站百度上的。这些动物的中文书面名字没什么不妥。但正如“bear”和“bare”在英语里有不同含义一样，“草泥马”的发音还有另外一个肮脏的含义。
所以，“草泥马”听上去像是骂人的话，但它的书面写法却完全不同，并且其字面含义是褒义的。这样，这种动物不仅躲过了审查电脑，而且还巧妙地避开了政府所禁止的“破坏行为”。
正如网上写的那样，草泥马从一开就是纯洁的。
该动物长似羊驼（实际上视频里出现的就是羊驼），生长在沙漠里，该沙漠的名字和另外一句脏话谐音。这些马儿“顽强克服艰苦环境”，一段YouTube歌曲里提到它们时唱到。
但是马儿们面临一个问题：入侵的“河蟹”正在吞噬它们的草地。在中文里，“河蟹”和“和谐”同音，在中国互联网上是审查制度的同义词。遭到审查的博客作者经常称自己的文章被“和谐”了，该词直接出自胡锦涛主席经常提到的构建和谐社会的训导。
最后，这首歌唱到，马儿赢了：“它们打败了河蟹，保护了自己的草地；河蟹从马勒戈壁（Ma Le Ge Bi）沙漠里永远消失了。”
视频里活蹦乱跳的羊驼配上迪斯尼风格的童声合唱，瞬时让人为之一震，接下来，对很多中国人来说，就是欢呼雀跃，因为显然歌里充斥着不堪入耳的语言。
对中国知识分子而言，这首歌传达的信息显然是具有破坏性的，这让他们明白即便是看似遵守规定，人们还是可以揶揄政府的。北京电影学院教授、社会评论家崔卫平（音）在她的博客里写道：“这首歌的潜台词是：我知道有些话你不让我说。你看，我完全配合，对吧？我在唱一首动听的儿歌，我是一匹草泥马！尽管全世界都听到了，但你不能说我犯法。”
在《我是一匹草泥马》一文中，崔小姐把此次扫黄打非运动比作1983年中国的“反精神污染运动”，当时这场运动也是打着扫黄的旗号，实际上更广泛的目的是粉碎西方对执政党的批评言论。
另一位知名博客作者，清华大学社会学家郭玉华称草泥马是“弱者的武器”，《弱者的武器》也是耶鲁政治学家James Scott一本书的名字，书中讲述手无寸铁的农民如何对抗独裁统治的。
当然政府可以删除网络上的所有“草泥马”相关的内容，这对审查软件来说是小菜一碟儿。中国网民或许是弱者，但他们也是天才。
上海博客作者Uln已经提出了一个办法。他在文章中似是而非地（或许他是认真的）建议提倡民主的网民不要再提07+1=宪章宪章这个名字了，用另外一个绰号来代替。比如：王。“王”这个姓非常普遍，区分破坏分子“王”和无辜分子“王”足以烧毁计算机的电路，即便是最强大的审查计算机。
杨逸云（音）和张静（音）对此文有贡献。
纽约时报 原文链接：http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
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