【按】如何把一个发生在国外的极其复杂的现象说得一清二楚，下面这篇文章就是一篇优秀的范文。
‘Innocent’ ditty pokes fun at Net crackdown; Childish ‘grass-mud horse’ song lampoons official censors
Ng 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.
Tags: writing
IHT也做了一篇在今天的封面。
A dirty pun tweaks China’s online censors
By Michael Wines
Thursday, March 12, 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.
http://foxnews.proteus.com/content.html?contentId=27957
Chinese Fight Internet Censors With Filthy Puns
From unprintable curse word to cuddly children’s toy – that has been the voyage charted by an imaginary beast invented by Chinese Internet users to poke fun at a new nationwide crackdown against online content deemed vulgar.
The saga of the “Grass Mud Horse” is in fact one of the many puns in which the Chinese language is so rich.
It began at the start of the year when China’s cyberpolice launched a campaign to cleanse pornographic and other content regarded as unseemly from sites viewed by the world’s largest online population.
What began as an entertaining by-product of that Internet clean-up has become a sensation. This is because “Grass Mud Horse” in Chinese is a homonym for an unprintable but widely used phrase.
Both the phrase – “F*** your mother” – and the name of the mythical animal are pronounced as “caonima,” although using different tones.
The identity of the creator of the Grass Mud Horse remains a mystery, but he – or she – has sparked a mini-industry.
The tale now goes that in the desert of “Male Gebi” – a homonym for yet another unprintable curse that means “Mother’s Private Parts” – lives a herd of special alpaca-like animals known as the Grass Mud Horse.
For readers hurriedly flipping through the pages of Index to the Animal World里的hurriedly，感觉可能是比较British的用法。
美式英文里不大这么用。
写得不错。
好文好文，转了
一年多前看到个图片, 一件T恤上印的MLGB.
解释是: Make Life Getting Better.
原来那件T恤的设计是如此有前瞻性，现在又多了层意思~~