RNN
China has a long history of protest songs. Even back in ancient China, farmers sang a song about ‘fat rats’ in protest at exploitation by the authorities. Now two more controversial animals have reared their heads in the rich culture of Chinese song: the grass mud horse and the river crab. Neither is quite as innocent as it sounds. Welcome to Part 5 of the Radio Netherlands Worldwide series about protest songs.
The grass mud horse is an amusing imaginary creature that looks something like a llama. In a new Chinese song it does battle with a dangerous river crab.
If you’re wondering whether there might be something more to this unlikely scenario than meets the eye, you’d be right. The words “grass mud horse” are a literal translation of three Chinese characters which sound like “cao ni ma”. Cao is “grass”, ni is “mud” and ma is indeed “horse”.
Innocent?
All innocent enough, but Chinese is a tonal language. If you pronounce these syllables in a slightly different tone, all of a sudden it sounds like “f*** your mother”. Then there’s the river crab. The Chinese name for this creature sounds like “he xie”.
Alter the pronunciation slightly and it sounds like the Chinese word for “harmony”, a word bandied about by the Chinese authorities to justify their campaign against dissidents. But there is no state monopoly on playing with semantics and Chinese internet activists have adopted the word “harmony” (or “river crab”…) as a euphemism for “censorship”.
RNN for more