没想到这生物出名了
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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.The popularity of the grass-mud horse has raised questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information.
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.
原文地址：[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=5[/url]
注：某马的翻译是grass-mud horse
想看地址的自己注册。 -
‘Innocent’ ditty pokes fun at Net crackdown; Childish ‘grass-mud horse’
song lampoons official censorsNg Tze-wei — South China Morning Post , March 6, 2009 Friday
In the harsh but beautiful desert of Ma Le Go Bi, a special herd of
alpaca sheep known as caonima (grass-mud horse), lived happily. But
their happiness is fading.Their habitat has come under threat lately because of a sudden
migration of river crabs. But the brave caonima are resilient and
intelligent, and they are fighting back - through the mainland internet.For readers hurriedly flipping through the pages of Index to the Animal
World, this tale of survival is not a real ecological crisis, but
rather a creation of smart mainland netizens who have turned the
government’s sweeping internet crackdown into a national laughing
stock. And it all started with an innocent-sounding little song.The song of the caonima’s epic struggle with the river crabs has become
such a popular hit on the mainland that toy shops have started to sell
caonima dolls.Almost everyone, except the authorities, knows this is a dig at the
mainland’s internet censorship. The word for river crabs, hexie in
Putonghua, sounds almost the same as “harmony” - the central theme of
President Hu Jintao’s governing philosophy. It has lately become a
euphemism for government censorship.Caonima is pronounced like an unprintable slang phrase people use to
show their anger and frustration. The innocent-seeming song turns out
to be not what the internet censors think it is, and netizens, angered
by the internet crackdown launched late last year, have adopted it.By the end of last month, nearly 3,000 websites and about 270 blogs had
been closed down. While the authorities say the crackdown is to cleanse
mainland websites of “vulgar and pornographic” materials, many liberal
or anti-establishment sites or blogs have also been targeted, including
the well-known Bullog.com and many current affairs discussion groups
carried on Douban.com.The crackdown soon sparked anger, with many saying it was actually a
drive to control freedom of speech in a year of sensitive anniversaries.Using homonyms, or words of similar pronunciation, to bypass the great
firewall of China is not new. But none of the previous attempts has
achieved such widespread success as the cute little ditty about caonima.The Song of Caonima, sung by angelic children’s voices, had registered
more than 1.2 million hits on YouTube alone by yesterday.Since January, when it first appeared on the internet, the song has
quickly gathered a large following. It soon branched out into many
different forms as netizens poked fun at the clueless “river crabs”.In one episode, the caonima galloped around freely before the river
crabs showed up. Then the crabs, equipped with ultra-hard shells,
arrive and ruthlessly pulled up every single blade of grass they come
across. The Caoni people, who herd the grass-mud horses, sing in a sad
melody that they “used to sell horses, but now have to slash purses”.The mainland media have played their part in spreading the popularity
of the caonima.The Southern Metropolis Daily printed a story yesterday detailing how
two grass-mud horse toys had become hot items on the mainland. Called
Ma Le and Go Bi, they were designed by five Guangdong youngsters and
sell for 40 yuan ($45HK) apiece.Ma Le Go Bi sounds like another crude slang phrase.
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翻译XSKkira
北京———自“草（和谐）泥马”第一次默默地出现某个中国网页上后，这只“草（和谐）泥马”就成为了一种现象。
一些关于类似羊陀的神秘生物的歌曲在中国的网络上流行着。
倍受欢迎的“草（和谐）泥马”们已经对中（和谐）国（和谐）政（和谐）府对信息流动的控制力提出了质疑。 在“有土拨”网上，一首关于这只动物的儿童歌曲视频已经吸引了140万人的眼球。另一个关于“草泥马”的动画片也吸引了超过25万的点击量！还有一段关于“草泥马”们自然习性的资料介绍也超过了18万的点击量!商店现在还有卖“草泥马”的布玩具呢。中国的知识分子们还在撰写“草泥马”对于社会重要性的论文呢! “草泥马”和邪恶“河蟹”之间较量的故事也同时在中国各网络社区内疯传着。
上面这些个有关此神秘生物的事情还不算坏，但是“草（和谐）泥马”中文听起来却像是一句非常龌龊淫秽的话。这，才是关键！
“草（和谐）泥马”就是那种中国权威系统所认定的破坏行为的典型例子！被玷污了的小马驹的名字不仅仅让中国的网络审查员很没面子，而且这被认为是挑战中国审查制度的一场恶作剧，但他们确实已经这么干了。