It’s a slow but… revolutionary Sunday it is… now that we’ve been alerted to @aiww’s (Ai Weiwei) newest concotion, the Grass Mud Horse / Caonima bag. The Caonima or Grass Mud Horse (an alpaca in real life) is one of those godlike symbols for the Chinese citizenry, for its close pronunciation (in Chinese) to a common Chinese curse has landed the magical animal the position of being some kind of an animal mascot for the average Chinese netizen, who has to deal with an increasing amount of Internet censorship.

Ai’s bag is quick, monochrome (I guess?) and simple. All that’s seen is the revered Caonima — plus Ai’s name in Chinese characters in the upper right hand corner.

If you follow Ai on Twitter, he seems to be one of those more notable fanboys behind the revered alpaca (much like everyone else online in the People’s Republic). One of his tweets tweeted out when Obama visited Beijing late last autumn (2009) basically sounded like “the Obama horse has come out a thousand miles to visit the grass mud horse” (this being the case as both Obama and the Caonima end with the Chinese character for horse (马); it’s Obama’s 奥巴马 (or 欧巴马 / 歐巴馬 from Taiwan) and the alpaca’s 草泥马. In late January 2010, when the whole Chinese Twitterverse mounted a campaign against online censorship, Ai somehow came up with what the Twitterverse termed alpacaspeak to vent against the censors.

Ai can at times be super-sensitive. Secret police reportedly attended a tweetup along with other Hangzhou tweeps just recently (look up hashtag #57tea for more in Chinese) because Ai, who is politically active, became increasingly visible after he and others who in effect were forced out from their art residences, took the march out onto Chang’an Avenue, the first time in just over 21 years. The Beijing police announced a 24-hour surveillance programme on much of the whole stretch of the avenue right after the February 22 march happened.

Meanwhile, back onto the bag: we’re not sure where or when the average guy on the street can probably grab one. Given how sensitive Ai is, a “harmonized” version (with Ai’s name removed but the alpaca kept intact) might emerge.

But that’s still fueling the flames here. The alpaca has come to represent repressed Netizens sick of cyber controls. The government, claiming to be “harmonious”, is instead represented as a river crab (河蟹), a pun on the Chinese pronunciation for “harmony” (和谐), an excuse we hear too often when a site “goes under”.