時事解碼： 《草泥馬》VS《操你媽》

Share

註：《 草泥馬 》與《 操你媽 -- fuck your mother 》

《 馬勒戈壁 -- 媽媽的陰部 》




The New York Times


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.

※※※※※※※※ ※※※※※※※※ ※※※※※※※※

諷網路審查 中國網民高歌草泥馬

台灣 自由時報 電子報

編譯陳成良／特譯

自從一月間橫空出世以來，「草泥馬」在中國迅速竄紅，這頭「網路神獸」已不再只是一種現象，而是成了中國網民嘲諷、抵抗當局網路審查制度的象徵。

視訊分享網站YouTube的草泥馬兒歌點閱人次已高達一百四十萬，關於牠習性的紀錄片有逾十八萬人次觀看；商店正在出售草泥馬玩偶；連知識份子也撰寫草泥馬的社會意義，「草泥馬」（操Ｘ媽）大戰邪惡「河蟹」（暗喻胡錦濤所提倡之「和諧」社會）的故事正在網路上廣為流傳。

草泥馬在中文諧音中的意思特別低級齷齪，這也正是它想要表達的，顯示網民對當局的不滿和憤怒，主因之一是去年底中國網路出現聲援連署「零八憲章」的聲音後，北京當局開始積極執行所謂「整治互聯網低俗之風專項行動」。至二月中旬為止，已經關閉了一千九百多個網站及兩百五十個部落格，不只色情網站，連涉及政治與其他敏感議題的線上論壇與即時通訊群組，甚至手機簡訊都遭查禁。

中國部落格界因言論尺度較開放而備受讚譽的「牛博網」，也遭封網，原因可能是有許多自由派思想的部落客在此高談「零八憲章」細節。

在中國極權體制下，「草泥馬」被視為破壞性舉動的例子之一，但卻能以諧音躲過嚴密審查。這種惡搞雙關語不僅凸顯中國政府審查制度之荒謬，也使北京嚴控網路資訊流通的能力面臨考驗。

加州大學柏克萊分校的中國互聯網項目主任蕭強指出，草泥馬已成了反抗中國審查制度的標誌。「這種表達與卡通影片或許是對不合理統治做出幼稚反應，但事實卻是廣大的網路人口，從正經八百的學者到向來對政治冷感的都會白領階級，都加入了這個大合唱，顯示出這種感受有多強烈。」

美國耶魯大學政治人類學家詹姆斯．史考特所著的《弱者武器》（Weapons of the Weak）一書，描述了無力的農人如何反抗獨裁政權。中國知名部落客、北京清華大學社會學系教授郭於華就把草泥馬比喻為網路時代的「弱者武器」。

中國網民把當局整肅網站、限制言論自由，演繹為一場「草泥馬」與「河蟹」的戰爭，而眾多中國網民深信，草泥馬終究會戰勝邪惡的河蟹。

（取材自紐約時報）

Youtube ： 《 草泥馬 》




《 草泥馬 》動畫版 ( 我覺得動畫版內容表達清晰過真實版 )