With over half a billion people connected to the internet, China boasts the world’s largest online population—and with this has come a sometimes brilliantly subversive digital culture of linguistic resistance to prevailing orthodoxies.
In 2009 the Chinese government added a process of keyword-based filtering to its arsenal of efforts to censor online content in keeping with its political and cultural values. Shortly after the introduction of this system, a series of mysterious articles began appearing on the much-used online Chinese encyclopedia Bǎidù Bǎikē, detailing the appearance and habits of four “mythical creatures”: the “French-Croatian Squid,” “Grass Mud Horse,” “Chrysanthemum Silkworms” and “Small Elegant Butterfly.”
Translated into English, they sound merely bizarre. In Chinese, however, speaking out loud the characters for each of these names results in a phrase very close to profanity—but, crucially, written using entirely different characters. So, for example, the phrase “Grass Mud Horse” is spoken in Mandarin cǎo ní mǎ—while the phrase “fuck your mother” uses exactly the same syllables but is pronounced with different tones (cào nǐ mā). Mandarin Chinese has four different pitches that can make the same syllable mean completely different things. Similarly, saying “French-Croatian Squid” in Mandarin produces the sounds fǎ kè yóu—a direct transliteration of the English phrase “fuck you.”
Within days of their creation, these satirical “beasts of Baidu” had gone viral. Among other things, they had soon spawned a spoof children’s song on YouTube—complete with shots of cute alpaca-like beasts and a chorus of high-pitched voices—that attracted over a million viewers as it allegedly praised “running grass mud horses” (a homophone for “fuck your mother hard”) and their rivalry with “river crabs” (a complex pun on censorship, due to the similarity between the sounds of “river crab” in Mandarin, hé xiè, and the official phrase for “harmony,” hé xié, as preached by Hu Jintao and his state censors).83
Soon, the ranks of the legendary beasts of Baidu had swelled to ten, introducing citizens to characters including the jí bá māo or “Lucky Journey Cat,” whose name sounds extremely similar to the term for male pubic hair; and the dá fēi jī or “Intelligent Fragrant Chicken,” which resembles a slang phrase for masturbation.
All of which, thanks in large part to their delightedly daft offensiveness, have proved a highly effective way of both mocking and circumventing online censorship in one of the world’s most digitally censorious nations. The “grass mud horse” in particular has become an icon: a homophonic joke that’s also an identifying marker for other subversive words and ideas, as well as an embarrassing reminder of the limitations of those seeking to control language and thought.