The Great Firewall Gets Raided By The Grass Mud Horse

Or at least, the Grass Mud Horse can’t give a damn about the Great Firewall.

In China, Googling the country’s president — as in his name — is an offence punishable by an instant connection reset on Google.com. It is also an offence to make reference to the Tian’anmen incident, as well as to believe in a “certain kind of qigong cult”. The government punishes those online hors-la-lois with the ubiquitous connection reset or the former Google China refrain of fame: “By law, certain search results are not shown”.

That’s the Chinese Great Firewall, blocking you the content you really need. With censorship worsening since the Beijing Olympics (outside sources have warned at the North Korea-ization of the PRC), the Netizenry aren’t simply harkening to Zhongnanhai’s newest commandments about what is considered verboten content online. Instead, they’re venting their anger by means of a Grass Mud Horse (a Net species only), which in spoken Chinese sounds very similar to a common curse: f*ck your mother, most often heard in the streets of the capital, Beijing.

As of late, we’ve been alerted to a new T-shirt coming out, with the Grass Mud Horse “flying” over the Great Firewall. The Chinese Netizenry started with proxies and now are onto more “advanced technologies” for those determined to get to — say — the latest stories about corrupt railway officials and their third wives, which the government’s all about suppressing.

Not sure where you can get that T-shirt — but it’s one your tech blogger has his sights set on. There’s, of course, also the danger that by wearing this, you’re probably going to be arrested for wearing “reactionary propaganda” — if the policeman has a bad day.

Geeks on a Pl… wait… Subway?

The fact that your tech blogger is Beijing’s biggest Subway fanboy is no State secret. He has flooded his timeline with tweets about the up-and-coming Beijing Subway Line 4 (Daxing) so much that about ten folks left the Subway maniac. Oh well, that’s life.

Apparently @gabyu warned your blogger that… @davemcclure and gang seem to have gotten Subway mania as well. This pic captures just some of the #goap (Geeks on a Plane) folk in the Shanghai Metro…

Yes, it’s Geeks on a Plane Subway. Please get ready for your arrival.

Geeks on a Plane is made up of Dave McClure, George Godula, Benjamin Joffe, Dan Gould, Elliott Ng, Jeremiah Owyang, Kris Klug, Christine Lu, William Bao Bean, and a fair bit more.

Ai Weiwei’s Grass Mud Horse Bag

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”.

Tianjin Now Has A Grass Mud Horse, Too

It’s amazing just what kind of a zigzag journey the Grass Mud Horse, otherwise known in Chinese as the Caonima (草泥马), has been through. Born in early 2009 after online resentment of censors shutting down websites which supposedly had “low-brow content” at all (these sites, in fact, were just critical of those in power; is that “low-brow”?), the Grass Mud Horse was immediately harmonized (or censored) along with YouTube after a song praising the animal, which in actual fact turned out to be a virtual animal and was merely represented by the alpaca, went online at YouTube. To this day, YouTube remains blocked in China — but the animal has made a comeback.

Named after a Chinese expletive targeting — of all persons, someone’s mother — the alpaca-turned-animal-God became a cyberpet that represented contempt on the side of the average Net surfer — simply because the authorities seemed to be in much of a mood to shut down sites at random. Yet amazingly enough, zoos in China, notably that in Beijing, have the animal “in stock” — but labelled merely as an alpaca (羊驼), not the Caonima.

The Grass Mud Horse (in real life an alpaca) made a comeback earlier this year in Shanghai, when it appeared at an expo and was immediately greeted with people eager to snap pictures with the “mythical beast”, as the alpaca was also known in cyberspace. The beast has now come to Tianjin — just a 30 minute right by high speed rail from the Chinese capital, Beijing, and attracted 60,000 onlookers in just one morning in the Tianjin Water Park (水上公园).

Folks who’ve visited the alpaca in person tell of the animal being very cool, very peaceful and always watching you — regardless of you throwing it food or just teasing the animal. And while that’s a bit uncharacteristic of some of the more “active” folks in Chinese cyberspace, who would not hesitate going on an anti-#GFW hashtag rampage as soon as their favourite site got “harmonized” again, it is characteristic of much of those folks who are more interested in stealing cyber vegetables. They live in a censored world online, yes, but they’re more interested in getting a better cyber car than trying to kick that Great Firewall.

Meanwhile, zoo authorities told the libre-leaning NetEase, who broke out the story (see, we told you it was more open than its rather “restrictive” big brother, Sina), said that they got the Caonima here simply because they never had anything like it in the zoo. They also wanted more people at the Water Park, and they got precisely that — and more, with queues over 100 metres in front of ticket offices during the three-day May Day break. In fact, with the alpaca being this popular, zoo management actually is thinking of letting the alpacas stay for good.

Just don’t stick a river crab next to the thing — they go by the Chinese name he xie (河蟹), a pun on the characters for “harmony” (和谐; pronounced just about the same), which has been Beijing’s excuse for blotting out offensive content “just to ensure social harmony”. @isaac (one of the earliest bloggers in China) has been seen fitting three watches on the river crab — so done to make fun of the “Three Represents” (which in Chinese sound close to “wearing three watches”), a 2002 ideology which to the average man on the street has no meaning whatsoever. It goes to show that in a country still dominated by political control, polit jokes are slowly catching on.

Even the Beijing Subway Doesn’t Like the Great Firewall

Beijing’s Subway has recently been hit by at least one count of — anti-censorship stickers. It looks like one of those passengers had so much against the net blocks in force that he — resorted to George Carlin language, sticking a sticker (pardon the pun) that read: https://f***.gfw”.

The hashtag #f***GFW is often used in protest of the net censorship measures, which have removed direct access to Twitter, YouTube and a number of other social networking and Web 2.0 sites in China. And while the seemingly innocent Beijing Subway is just being hit by this, it just goes out to say how much an inconvenience the blocks are.

The sticker was found on a ticket fare gate on Line 13 — and may have been removed — but it lives on here in this picture (warning: strong language). It may have been removed as a result — after all, isn’t this micro-vandalism?

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Beijing A to B (English only), techblog86