Grass-Mud Mutterings

Speaking of censorship, as I did a few posts ago, have you heard about the grass-mud horse?

The New York Times tells us that grass-mud horse in Chinese sounds a lot like an unmentionable obscenity.

Consequently, millions of Chinese have flooded the Internet with blog posts and YouTube videos about the mythical grass-mud horse (which also was called the mud-grass horse in The Times article; is the mud-grass horse just as obscene, or worse?). They flooded the Internet with stuff on this invented creature to test the limits of authoritarian censorship. Censorship had the inadvertent effect of spawning creativity.

I mention this because my previous post discussed a different sort of censorship, one imposed by monetary authority.

In China there's a pro-democracy group called Charter08. The Times article notes that someone wryly suggested changing the group's name to the ubiquitous Wang. Since Wang is so common, like Smith, it would be terribly hard for the authorities to excise all instances of Wang on the Internet.

Incidentally, with Google and Yahoo and other search engines, it would not be hard for you to do a little research and therefore find out exactly how naughty a pun grass-mud horse is, something The New York Times did not touch with a 10-foot Pole (or a 6-foot Swede either).