Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun

Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.

Comments

First censored post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch the cnut moderators censor this fscking post for all the shirty language it contains!

Hey, mods: kiss my RSS!

Chinese puns

[DNS-and-BIND]

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.

I would be careful reading any subversive meaning into this - they're just tweaking the noses of the net.cops. Most Chinese people think that the government does a good job keeping society clean. To them, unrestricted freedom means chaos, and China certainly has lots of experience with chaos ruining their country. I mean, the 1949 takover by radical lefists was considered an improvement, and they killed 60,000,000 of their own countrymen.

Re:Chinese puns

[MichaelSmith]

Yes its like that in Cantonese as well. I gave up trying to learn my wife's language when I found out that the words for Aunt and Vagina sound exactly the same to me.

Re:Chinese puns

[Anonymous Coward]

Fayle.

Re:Chinese puns

[MadKeithV]

There's something ghoti-y about that comment.

Re:Chinese puns

[Suhas]

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them.

Actually it is the other way around in terms of cause and effect. The Chinese Script (Kanji) evolved because there are very few phonetic variations in the spoken language and they needed a way to make sure that you can mean different things even if essentially the same sounds are coming out of your mouth. Ditto for Japanese as well. The phonetic range is severely limited compared to say English or Sanskrit. You may find this interesting

Re:Chinese puns

[jandersen]

This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.

It is, however, not as bad as you make it sound; the "context" is very often that certain meanings are expressed by certain combinations of words. The main reason why we think of Chinese as very confusing, I think, is that we associate 1 character with 1 word - which was the way it worked originally, but it would be more accurate to say that each character is a "mono-syllabic meme" which can occasionaly stand on its own, but more often is combined to form polysyllabic words. In this sense Chinese is actually not that dissimilar to most other languages.

Thus you have "qiche" (two characters) meaning "car" or "to ride a bicycle" - the ambiguity being an artifact of my inability to conveniently represent the tones of the language. Traditionally the "qi" part of it means "steam" and "che" means vehicle, so "qi" is still used in many combinations that are associated with steam and "che" is used as part of most vehicles.

Re:Chinese puns

[Mattcelt]

The follies of English orthography
achieve heights of linguistic pornography
when the fish that you fry
you spell g-h-o-t-i
for pleasure instead of cryptography...

Re:Chinese puns

[drinkypoo]

This is my freedom we're talking about, right?

Wow. I mean, just, wow. What we're talking about here is subversion of censorship in a tool of government manipulation of information. Per the above-linked (informative) comment, This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. Perhaps you failed to RTFA (shock amazement) and so missed this part of the article: "The resilient and intelligent caonima fight back to defeat the river crabs - yet another play on words. The pronunciation of river crab resembles "harmony" - a favourite slogan of the current Communist Party leadership. It has become common practice among internet writers whose posts have been deleted to say they have been "harmonised" - or "eaten by the river crab". Thus "river crab" has become a code name for internet censors." So in fact the entire battle is over censorship, it is not just a big jerkoff wankfest, and I do not believe that it is a false dichotomy to say that you either can see how this is relevant and in fact positive, or you do not understand the value of the freedom of speech. Perhaps you should read up on Parody and Satire so that you can better understand the concept. He who laughs, lasts. He who laughs last usually didn't get the joke.

Re:Chinese puns

[Lew Perin]

Mandarin (which is the official nation-wide dialect) is much more phonetically impoverished than Cantonese: fewer tones, fewer consonants. So if there's a more lucrative language for punsters anywhere in the world than Mandarin, I'd be surprised.

Re:Chinese puns

[gardyloo]

And yet, if you research the legend even on the Wikipedia page you link to, you find out that the way Kennedy used the phrase is perfectly fine, non-idiomatic, and the people of Berlin loved it. The story is interesting, not as an illustration of bad background research by a foreigner, but as an example of a (literal) urban legend.

Re:Chinese puns

[HungWeiLo]

In the case of "bread" and "full", the Cantonese pronunciation is about the same as Mandarin. They're both "bao", but have distinct intonations that should be pretty obvious.

Mandarin's much easier to learn, as it only has 4 distinct tones, whereas Cantonese has something like 9 or 13. The southern Chinese dialects pretty much require you to go "native" to learn it with the proper intonations.

Re:Chinese puns

[sorak]

Yes its like that in Cantonese as well. I gave up trying to learn my wife's language when I found out that the words for Aunt and Vagina sound exactly the same to me.

Oh. So that's why the Cantonese woman was wanting me to pay $100 to meet her aunt...

Re:Chinese puns

[TheoMurpse]

A cursory viewing of Cantonese phonetics reveals that the near-open front unrounded vowel (the "a" in "cat") doesn't exist. The open-mid front unrounded vowel (the "e" in "bed") does exist in Cantonese.

The reason she doesn't hear a difference is because the difference between the "a" and "e" in those two words is slight at best. The vowel height and vowel backness are nearly identical. The fact that she doesn't have the habituation to hear the difference between them is because her native language doesn't have the sounds as different phonemes. If you don't learn to distinguish certain phonemes by the time you're, say, three years old, it becomes extremely difficult. It's connected to the Critical period in linguistics, but Wiki reports the boundary as sometime between five and puberty. However, that's for acquiring a native language. I think for acquiring the necessary phonological discernment, the cutoff age is much earlier. But IANALinguist.

For fun, listen to the "p" in "happen" (it's called a voiceless bilabial plosive because your voicebox doesn't generate sound (voiceless), you use two lips (bilabial), and you explode air out after building up pressure (plosive)) and the "p" in "parrot."

Rather, you won't hear a difference. Technically, one is aspirated and one is unaspirated.

But I guarantee you native Hindi speakers can hear a difference--in Hindi, they are different sounds that can affect the meaning of words; not so in English.

I'm not sure about native Spanish speakers. In Spanish, the aspirated "p" ("parrot"'s "p") doesn't even exist.

censor mocking a censor?

[joe545]

I find it fittingly ironic that in a story about the nefarious Chinese censorship that the slashdot editors felt it okay to censor the expletive in question.

Re:censor mocking a censor?

[MrKaos]

Hey. Mother-- beats getting "Skull Fucked" in Iceland.

School Forked by Mike Row Soft, I'd love to hear Billy Connelly say that.

Slew tea nurses

[ZeroExistenZ]

I ended up doing this to phonetically construct sentences to pass a filter at someone's job, as you cannot write about less by Anns without it triggering it. And if you have friends who are less by ann, that might be a problem if you decide to write about it.

I hope this doesn't inspire spammers though; Just imagine an inbox with Jew cheese hot who men taking a hot low duh! Now with 5 extra inches of pie Nile mask joule in men lay Ness. With slew tea nurses.

it begins with "mother-"

[El_Muerte_TDS]

mother-in-law?

the description is not complete :D

[xizhi.zhu]

more background is still needed :D besides the "grass-mud horse", another animal, "river crab" is also popular in China now, which is the enemy of the "horse". in Chinese, "river crab" sounds like "harmony", which is what the Chinese government use as an excuse to shut down websites they don't like.

Re:the description is not complete :D

[Creepy Crawler]

What's the difference?

We call it here as "Intellectual Property dispute", "DMCA Violation", "Child Porn", "Meth Making Instructions", or other undesirable works.

In Utah, possession of even a single picture considered to be child porn is 10 years. So, why pretend that Censorship doesnt exist here? It does, just under other names.

Re:the description is not complete :D

[dapyx]

Well, in most of continental Europe, claiming that "The Holocaust didn't happen" will land you in jail for a few years, too.

Re:the description is not complete :D

[mdwh2]

Perhaps - one point of view is that all forms of censorship are wrong.

Another reasonable point of view is that banning something is justified if there is overwhelming evidence of harm. So one might make that argument if child pr0n - but not with "This image/word/etc is disgusting!" One could also make that argument with defamation (where it's shown that the false claims have harmed someone in some way).

Also note that copyright laws are less broad in that they don't ban all forms of an image, just that particular instances can only be distributed it by those who created the work. Also I think it's more sensible to treat this as a civil issue (so yes, I would disagree with places that criminalise it).

Be careful of polarising the issue - yes, there certainly are real examples of censorship in western countries - though then, that does not make it okay! It makes it bad in both cases. But the last thing you want in a debate is to suggest that someone can only be against censorship if they also support allowing child pr0n - that would be a fallacy.

Unfortunately I do feel that, in the UK at least, we are on a slippery slope. In 1978 when child images were criminalised, people questioned whether it was needed (and IIRC, it was only punishable with a fine). It applied only to under-16s. Three decades on, and laws are now being rushed through that criminalise things such as images of consenting adults, and cartoons that appear to depict under-18s, all on the grounds that they are "disgusting".

Censorship

[jopet]

Of course no one would censor "motherfucker" or "fuck your mother" in the west on a website or in public television. Must be pure chance that everytime somebody says "cock" or "fuck" on TV in the US there is a beep sound.

Re:Censorship

[cyfer2000]

And the beep sound is exactly the same pronunciation of vagina in Chinese.

Obligatory SNL Reference

[roelbj]

That is Sofa King Awesome!

Bite The Wax Tadpole

[ciderVisor]

To allow the mouth to be able to rejoice !

Oh c'mon, did they just discover this now?

[Opportunist]

I mean, George Carlin has been doing things like this ages before I was born. Like the "you may prick your finger but doooon't finger your prick" bit. Not to mention the ancient song about the rooster, the donkey, the dog and the cat.

Well, maybe the difference is that those words don't just sound "bad". They are. But it depends on the context, and when you insist that you use them in a benign context, it's funny because you can "cheat" the censors. Can't censor that, I was just singing about a rooster, a donkey... whyyyyy, what did YOU think? Is it me that's naughty or is it your thoughts?

I think that's what any of those songs are about. They should show you that you, and only you, are "naughty" here if you consider this naughty.

Maybe we can learn a bit about who's the pervert from the Chinese. The one that (maybe even actually innocently) sings a tune, or the one that wants to hear something naughty in it.

some backgounds

[gzipped_tar]

As a Chinese, lemme explain some background..

The "grass-mud-horse" thingy used to appear in the Baidu Baike, Baidu's Wikipedia-like project. The Baidu Baike is widely regarded as part of government's effort to control Chinese people's source of information and a central hub of the whole "harmonization" stupidity, for Baidu is at the same side with the govn't. By creating a new webopedia it gives them more control over it. Naturally the contents in Baidu Baike are heavily censored against politically incorrect material but no one gives a shit about factual accuracy or copyright violations that's rampant there.

Some anonymous person thus put the articles for "grass-mud-horse", along with other jokes of this kind, to Baidu Baike. Unsurprisingly they stayed there for quite a long time without being removed, because there was no "political" stuff in them, even if the contents were outrageously out of touch with reality. This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. After the "grass-mud-horse" became widely known the Baidu Baike articles were removed but the meme went wild.

So much for the background. I hope I made some points across the Great Language Barrier.. It's kinda surprising to see you guys here discussing the caonima stuff at /. ;)

Re:some backgounds

[sakdoctor]

Weird, I stumbled across this subject completely at random just last week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures_(Internet_meme)

Re:More proof of lack of Chinese innovation

[Shrike82]

They even copy Briney Spears.

Is she Britney's pirate cousin?

Youtube censorship....?

[weeeeed]

So what's up with Youtube censoring that ..censorship subverted with a popular pun... video all the time?

China has it's firewall, we have big corporations doing the censorship... i'm not sure what's better.

Re:More proof of lack of Chinese innovation

[Viceroy Potatohead]

Yeah, but unfortunately her best album "Arr!... I Did It Again" never made it to the top twenty. Her second album: "...Lubber One More Time" was even less successful. Sad but true.

what does the word "scale" mean to you?

[circletimessquare]

pretty much all the same you point out above is illegal in china. and then you get additional limitations: the worst being, no political free speech. this grass-mud horse revolt started because china was instituting a major crackdown on pornography. and then used that crackdown as a cover to shut down a number of pro-democracy sites, like charter 08

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08

The Chinese government has said little publicly on the Charter.[8] On 8 December 2008, two days before the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Liu Xiaobo was detained by police. His detention came hours before the online release of the Charter.[9] He has been retained at an undisclosed location, though he has been allowed to meet his wife on one occasion.[10] [11] Several Nobel Laureates have written a letter to President Hu Jintao asking for his release.[8] In reponse, the Chinese government is trying to crush[10] the dissidents: at least 70 of its 303 original signatories have been summoned or interrogated by police while domestic media have been forbidden to interview anyone who has signed the document.[10] Police have also searched for or questioned a journalist, Li Datong, and two lawyers, though none have been arrested.[8] State media has been banned from reporting on the manifesto.[12] A blogging website popular with activists, bullog.cn, has been shut down which may have had ties to the Charter.[13]

can you see that happening in the west? i'm talking prison JUST FOR SAYING YOU WANT POLITICAL CHANGE. people like you really bother me because you have no perception of scale, and you see a little censorship in the west, and therefore you find that a draconian harsh censorship practice elsewhere is the same thing. utter pure 100% bullshit. your point of view is logically incoherent, ignorant, and plain wrong. no, china and the usa aren't even in the same league. your comparison is utter busllshit

for example: you can't criticize the leaders in china. that will get you tracked and possibly arrested. but here in the west, i can call barack obama anything i want, and no one is going to arrest me. go ahead and try to say the kind of things you can freely say about barack obama in the west, and compare that with what you can get away with criticizing the leadership of china, or iran

that ACTUALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE AND MEANS A LOT. the censorship in the west is nothing like that in china or iran, and that it is perfectly appropriate, acceptable, and logically coherent to criticize the draconian censorship in china or iran while at the same time celebrating the free speech in the west

the absurdity is that you wish to propose that SOME censorship, regardless of quantity, is the issue, rather than the RELATIVE amounts of censorship

look: in every society that ever existed, for all time, going in the past, and going to all of the future of mankind, there will be SOME rules about not being able to say something. so that means we can't criticize and compare the RELAITVE freedoms of one society to the next?

you really believe that?

your entire point of view on the issue is complete bullshit. you compare societies on the SCALE of their censorship, and then you arrive at a coherent and 100% factually true observation: that you have a lot more freedom of expression on the west. and that MEANS something. ESPECIALLY in regard to politics

you will NEVER have ABSOLUTE freedom of expression in ANY society, forever. and because there might be a few limits here and there in one society you honestly want to say that that society with few limitations on free speech is equivalent to one with draconian and severe limits on expression?

really? you think that's a valid and coherent belief on your part?

you're reasoning abilities have been found to have fallen short