River Crabs and Mud Horses

october 5th, 2009 at 1:41 am

I got bored a couple days ago and started reading random Wikipedia articles, something I find myself doing far too often. I ended up reading about China's censorship of the internet and its 30,000+ internet police. Basically, China has been censoring anything that might hurt the CPC, including the following:

Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder;
Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
Injuring the reputation of state organs;
Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.

My favorite recent example is what they did for the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests: they declared it "National Server Maintenance Day."

In order to improve the internet content and provide a healthy environment for our netizens, we have designated 3 to 6 June as the national server maintenance day. This move is widely supported by the public.

Sounds fun, right? Actually, some of it kind of does because Mandarin is such an awesome language; like any tonal language, puns are incredibly easy. My favorite censorship-related pun is the river crab. The Mandarin word for "harmonious" (as in "harmonious society," one of the CPC's favorite excuses for censorship) is very similar to the word for "river crab" (héxié and héxiè, respectively). Another fun concept is the Three Represents (sāngè dàibiǎo), a political philosophy invented by Jiang Zemin in 2002 that the CPC is using as its guiding principles. This is almost exactly the same as "wearing three watches" (dài sān ge biǎo), hence the river crab wearing three watches.

So now we have one fun euphemism: river crab = harmonize (e.g. if something gets censored in the name of the harmonious society, you could say it's been river crabbed). That's not the best one though. The Communist Party also censors profanity and anything sexual from their little corner of the internet, so if you wanted to say, for example, "fuck your mom," (cào nǐ mā) you might run into some trouble. That's where the river crab's friend, the grass mud horse (cāo nì mǎ) comes in. He sounds almost exactly the same, but is perfectly acceptable to the censors for now. Baidu Baike did a list of these things that you can read about; it's pretty neat.

After I read about all that cool stuff, I started reading about profanity in Mandarin. It is AMAZING! Here are some of my favorites for you to impress all your Chinese friends with.

fēijīchǎng (飞机场 [airport]) — flat breasts
qù nǐ mā de (去你妈的) — your mom (go to your mother)
jiào nǐ shēng hàizi zhǎng zhì chuāng (叫你生孩子长痔疮) — "May your child be born with hemorrhoids"
gōng gòng qì chē (公共汽车 [public bus]) — slut (because everyone has had a ride)

There are some more fun ones in the article, but I didn't feel like ruining the surprise. Finally, here's an article about how the pope is a terrible person.