River Crabs and the Chinese Internet

The majority of what we hear about the Internet in China paints a gloomy picture. Censorship, online police and the planned introduction of real-name registration for microblogs; it’s an Orwellian nightmare. Despite the image of repression, there are a surprising number of ways in which the online Chinese are evading the censors and making themselves heard. Recent events could not be more relevant in showing the huge impact social media can have on social movements and revolutions. It’s no wonder the Chinese government are uncomfortable about the freedom of discussion that the internet provides.

A Chinese Mitten Crab

The internet has given Chinese netizens a taste of free speech, which they will now resolutely defend. In response to the proposed built-in censor ‘Green-Dam Youth Escort’ software of 2009, tens of thousands of China’s online population signed up to proxy servers that allow them to ‘climb’ the firewall. At the last moment, the government pulled the plug on the Green Dam.

A recent glitch in China’s ‘Great Firewall’ allowed netizens access to the normally forbidden social network Google+, which is banned alongside Facebook and Twitter. Swarming towards the leader of the free world, they began a movement to occupy President Obama’s Google+ account. The fissure was sealed up within five days, but the ‘Occupy Obama’ movement continues. His page has become a forum for thoughts that the censored Chinese people want to express; some call for Western style democracy, some the release of China’s victims of conscience, others want tougher reproof of China’s human right’s record.

However there are ways around the firewall that do not need proxy servers or VPNs, that rely on the nuances and complexity of the Chinese language, as well as a bit of humour. If you search expletives or forbidden topics, an error page or forbidden content page will appear. Now, imagine a language where you can find a homophone for anything. Although it sounds the same, it will have a completely different character with an entirely different meaning. When Hu Jintao introduced the ‘Harmonious Society’ (héxié shèhuì) ideology in 2004, its clauses came to justify the growing internet exclusion of topics that ‘undermine social stability’. Before long, it became synonymous with censorship. Under the erratic eye of the censors, ‘harmonisation’ (héxié) became a taboo topic. Chinese netizens circumvented this blockage with a pun, ‘harmonisation’ was substituted with ‘river crab’ (héxiè). Thus the lowly Chinese Mitten Crab arose as the champion in the fight against censorship.

Similar puns have emerged, one former expletive is so popular that there are now cuddly toys of its new rendering as ‘grass mud horse’, an ancient mythical animal resembling an alpaca. As fast and as complex as the firewall is, Chinese netizens have developed a constantly mobile vocabulary ready to adapt to it. With an online population of 300 million and counting, and a language of over 80,000 characters, censorship will be a constant game of catch-up for the government from here on.

Cao ni ma 'grass mud horse' fluffy toys