Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page,
the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.
Songs about a mythical alpaca-like creature have taken hold online in China.

Global Motherf*ckers
Does every culture use the suggestion of maternal incest as an insult?
A mythical beast known as the "grass-mud horse" has become an Internet
phenomenon in China. The New York Times reported Thursday that the alpacalike
creature's Mandarin name just happens to be a very, very dirty pun. Times style rules
prevent the paper from clarifying the joke, but other, less-dignified outlets expla in
that the phrase Cao ni ma is a homonym for "fuck your mother" in Chinese.
Is some variant of motherfucker used all over the world?

Pretty much. While it's not quite a universal insult, variations on the command to
commit incest with one's mother appear in every region of the globe. Anthropologists
note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes:
your opponent's family, your opponent's religion, sex, and scatology.

个人无聊之作，笑笑开心一下而已。绝无除字面以外的任何奇怪的含义。请勿认真。
认真你就输了哦（笑）

歌词如下：

在那荒茫美丽马勒戈壁
有一群草泥马，
他们活泼又聪明，
他们调皮又灵敏，
他们由自在生活在那草泥马戈壁，
他们顽强勇敢克服艰苦环境。
噢，卧槽的草泥马！
噢，狂槽的草泥马！
他们为了卧草不被吃掉 打败了河蟹，
河蟹从此消失草泥马戈壁 The mud-grass horse

 A grass-mud horse cartoon object width="445" height="364">

The popularity of the grass-mud horse has raised questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information.

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 resonate."

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."