Song of the Grass-Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma)

What can I say? This is definitely one of the most creative, contemporary, on-line, popular Chinese poetry I have ever encountered. Best to the authors and those who are forever looking for ways to break the system.

March 12, 2009
A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
By MICHAEL WINES

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.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.

Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the most vicious crackdown in years.”

It was against this background that the grass-mud horse and several mythical companions appeared in early January on the Chinese Internet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in Chinese, were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have different meanings in English, their spoken names were double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings.

So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only has dodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own ban on so-called offensive behavior.

As depicted online, the grass-mud horse seems innocent enough at the start.

An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The horses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult environment,” a YouTube song about them says.

But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “They defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; river crabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.

The online videos’ scenes of alpacas happily romping to the Disney-style sounds of a children’s chorus quickly turn shocking — then, to many Chinese, hilarious — as it becomes clear that the songs fairly burst with disgusting language.

To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearly subversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as they appear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do not allow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative, right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — I am a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law.”

In an essay titled “I am a grass-mud horse,” Ms. Cui compared the anti-smut campaign to China’s 1983 “anti-spiritual pollution campaign,” another crusade against pornography whose broader aim was to crush Western-influenced critics of the ruling party.

Another noted blogger, the Tsinghua University sociologist Guo Yuhua, called the grass-mud horse allusions “weapons of the weak” — the title of a book by the Yale political scientist James Scott describing how powerless peasants resisted dictatorial regimes.

Of course, the government could decide to delete all Internet references to the phrase “grass-mud horse,” an easy task for its censorship software. But while China’s cybercitizens may be weak, they are also ingenious.

The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue in cheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online democracy advocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and instead choose a different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a ubiquitous surname, and weeding out the subversive Wangs from the harmless ones might melt circuits in even the censors’ most powerful computer.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Bleeding Love

Bleeding Love from Leona Lewis, one of the Grammy Nominees this year. Quite a powerful song, yet I don't wholeheartedly agree with every word of it. Love doesn't have to bleed and love is compromising mutual respect. No need to get hurtful over love. I guess that's why I'm not yet in love. :D

Song: Bleeding Love
Singer: Leona Lewis
Album: Spirit

Closed off from love
I didn’t need the pain
Once or twice was enough
And it was all in vain
Time starts to pass
Before you know it you’re frozen

But something happened
For the very first time with you
My heart melts into the ground
Found something true
And everyone’s looking round
Thinking I’m going crazy
But I don’t care what they say
I’m in love with you
They try to pull me away
But they don’t know the truth
My heart’s crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding
I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open

Trying hard not to hear
But they talk so loud
Their piercing sounds fill my ears
Try to fill me with doubt
Yet I know that the goal
Is to keep me from falling

But nothing’s greater
Than the rush that comes
with your embrace
And in this world of loneliness
I see your face
Yet everyone around me
Thinks that I’m going crazy,
maybe, maybe
But I don’t care what they say
I’m in love with you
They try to pull me away
But they don’t know the truth
My heart’s crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding
I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open
And it’s draining all of me
Oh they find it hard to believe
I’ll be wearing these scars
For everyone to see
I don’t care what they say
I’m in love with you
They try to pull me away
But they don’t know the truth
My heart’s crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding
I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding-
Keep, keep bleeding love

You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding
I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love

China Calls for Closer Ties With Taiwan

Hopefully China is sincere and down-to-earth about this; otherwise, we're going to have a lot of problems. But still, the definition of China is quite outstretched and their definition don't usually match with ours.

March 6, 2009
China Calls for Closer Ties With Taiwan
By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China called Thursday for closer political and economic relations with Taiwan, but he offered few specifics and did not expand on a previous suggestion by President Hu Jintao for improving communication with Taiwan on military issues.

In his opening speech to the National People’s Congress, Mr. Wen clearly signaled the Chinese leadership’s support for a series of economic measures that negotiators from Beijing and Taiwan were already discussing. These include the gradual integration of banking and other financial services across the Taiwan Straits, and the drafting of a “comprehensive agreement on economic cooperation” that could eventually become the basis for a free-trade agreement.

Mr. Wen also called for “fair and reasonable arrangements” on Taiwanese participation in international organizations and a formal cessation of hostilities with Taiwan, without providing any details on how these thorny goals could be achieved. And he did not mention any specific measures of military cooperation, like a possible hot line between the People’s Liberation Army and Taiwan’s military that had been previously mentioned. President Hu of China and President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan had each expressed some interest in this in recent months.

Taiwanese officials said they were satisfied with focusing on economic issues for now. “On the political aspects, when the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland reaches a certain level of mutual trust, only then can discussions be move forward,” the island’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement.

Mr. Wen’s address represented a modest olive branch to Taiwan and avoided the more hostile language the mainland had used in the past. The stock market in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, jumped 2.1 percent as investors responded to Mr. Wen’s suggestion for closer cross-strait economic ties.

Mr. Wen’s clear endorsement of such ties could help accelerate economic talks, which have been dragging along more slowly than expected. Critics in Taiwan have suggested that the mainland is reluctant to make any concessions, but Taiwanese officials have themselves been constrained by the skepticism of a large section of the island’s population about the need for closer cross-straits ties.

On military cooperation, Mr. Wen’s speech included an offer to hold talks, but did not provide any specifics that would advance the issue beyond previous comments by President Hu. In his annual policy address on Taiwan on Dec. 31, Mr. Hu had suggested that the two sides could engage in “contacts and communications on military issues when appropriate, and discussions on building a trust mechanism for military safety.”

Military analysts have suggested that the People’s Liberation Army has little interest this winter in improving relations with Taiwan, particularly because preparations for a possible conflict with Taiwan are central to the mainland military’s budget and training. When President Ma was asked in an interview last month if he was disappointed that the mainland military showed little enthusiasm for cooperation, he quickly replied that President Hu had specifically endorsed security cooperation and confidence-building measures in his Dec. 31 policy speech.

But Mr. Wen’s speech on Thursday included only a general statement on those matters: “We are also ready to hold talks on cross-straits political and military issues and create conditions for ending the state of hostility and concluding a peace agreement between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits.”

President Ma has ruled out any peace agreement for the foreseeable future, and no talks are planned on ending the formal state of hostilities that has endured ever since the Nationalists lost China’s civil war to the Communists in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan.

Prime Minister Wen said that political talks would have to be based on the principle that there is only one China, but he did not suggest how this principle should be interpreted — a longtime stumbling block.