So here it is, the new "character" created to embody Chinese retalliation against internet censorship. It is not a real character and there are several pronunciation suggestions : jia4 or yu2. This is the new Chinese language or the new Chinese protest?
This is an invented character that encapsulates/represents the "mud grass horse", a mythical internet creature whose pronunciation "cao ni ma" is a homonym for, well, "f*#k your mother." According to Shanghaiist, "The 艹 radical refers to 'grass' (草), 尼 resembles 泥 and both are homophones, while 马 is the character for 'horse'."
We have all been following this because it is a deliberate attempt by Chinese netizens to catch the internet moniters and censors off-guard. This homonymn tactic is pretty clever and portends many changes. Hilarious, as well....
From the New York Times, March 11, 2009:
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.
...
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.
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