Don’t be “river crabs”! How China cracks down on banal dissent

Recently, an online blogger from China asked: How to clean a flask? But the Mandarin word for flask is xi-jing-ping, which sounds like the name of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Government censors suspected that the writer was really asking: “How to get rid of the Chinese president?” They removed the request.

If someone online in China refers to President Xi as a “paratrooper,” they may not be hailing him as tough and resourceful. Paratrooper in Mandarin is san bing, which sounds very similar to the word “idiot”.

The Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Education have launched what they call the “Bright and Clear” campaign to rid China’s web of what they see as “irregular and uncivilized language.”

Language bureaucrats don’t just watch criticism of President Xi, references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, or demonstrations in Hong Kong. They want to destroy the seemingly innocuous phrases that many Chinese have naively appropriated to express their disapproval.

Wenguan Huang, a Chinese writer, translator and author of the acclaimed memoir The Little Red Guard, now living in Chicago, gave us some examples.

Xiang jiao pi, which means banana peel in Mandarin, shares the same abbreviation as President Xi’s name. The word for shrimp moss is sia tai, similar to the Mandarin phrase “to step down.” When someone on the Chinese network dares to declare: “Banana peel, shrimp moss!” it sounds like a call for President Xi to resign.

When the Chinese censor finds an “irregular” phrase, they remove it, but call it “harmonizing.” He-xie, the Mandarin word for harmony, sounds like the word for river crab, so the censored people report that they were “river crabs.”

Then there is Cao Ni Ma, the Mandarin name for the mythical Mud Horse. It sounds like a phrase that is so blasphemous that I can’t even hint at it. The Mandarin phrase “cover your middle”, dang zhong yang, sounds close to the name of China’s Party Central Committee. And so artist Ai Weiwei created a music video in which voices sing, “Grass mud horse and cover your midsection!” in “Gangnam Style” and “Mud Horse and River Crab!”

Wenguang Huang says that this video cannot be seen in China, of course. But the people there heard about it, and could hum quietly. The melody is catchy and catchy — like freedom of speech.