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Old 2009-03-14, 06:15   #1
__HRB__
 
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Dec 2008
Boycotting the Soapbox

2D016 Posts
Default grass-mud horse vs. river crab

@harmonizers

If you harmonize this post, you can go and grass-mud horse.

From http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132247.html

Quote:
Online dissidents in China have invented a mythical creature called the "grass-mud horse" whose name is innocuous in print but sounds an awful lot like "F--- Your Mother" (or, as The New York Times puts it, "an especially vile obscenity") when pronounced in Mandarin. The joke is on the government's Internet censors, who are using an anti-porn campaign as an excuse to squelch unapproved opinions. The superficially juvenile grass-mud horse stories, songs, YouTube videos, and dolls are ostensibly neither smutty nor political, but the underlying message is pretty clear:

An alpaca-like animal—in fact, the videos show alpacas—[the grass-mud horse] lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word ["your mother's c---"]. 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.

Here is a translation and exposition of "The Song of the Grass-Mud Horse...."
I have developed the irresistible urge to tell as many people as possible to go and grass-mud horse. Clever little devils those Chinese. I wonder how much personality surgery I'll need until they let me immigrate.

Last fiddled with by akruppa on 2009-03-14 at 16:10 Reason: no matter how much you adore juvenile language, stick to forum etiquette please
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