A trojan horse, Chinese style

Once upon a time, there was a forbidden land called Press Freedom. It had become the Shangri-La of a repressed people, a place surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable barrier called the Great Firewall of China.

The guardians of the wall were armed with the most sophisticated weaponry of mass censorship. Breaching the fortress was an unimaginable feat only possible in the wildest dreams of those yearning for liberty.

The tale sounds very much like Homer's The Iliad. In fact, it comes with its own Trojan horse and all. And it is for real and taking place in that fortress of censorship called China's Internet.

Enter the grass-mud horse and the evil river crab, the two stars of a fable —including a YouTube video and a children's song— that has spread throughout China's Internet like wildfire and is beating the all-mighty censors at their own game.

The problem for the censors is not what the stars do but what their names sound like. The Chinese written characters depicting "grass-mud horse" are totally innocent, but when read out loud they turn into a vile obscenity. Same thing with the desert where the horses live.

And to make it all the more interesting, "water crab," the evil nemesis of the heroes of the story and the ones devouring the desert grass, sounds like "harmony," the Chinese censors' code word for censorship.

Since January, when it hit the web via the Chinese portal Baidu, this fantastic play in words has attracted 1.4 million viewers to the YouTube video, and a cartoon depicting the grass-mud horse has been visited by  250,000 more. A documentary about the horse's habitat has been viewed by 180,000, and grass-mud horse dolls are flying off the shelves.

This modern-age Trojan horse, in reality Peruvian alpacas, spells sweet revenge for the world's largest, and also most censored, Internet community. It also comes on the heels (no pun intended) of one of the most virulent censorship offensives launched in China in recent years.

The New York Times:

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.

Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the most vicious crackdown in years.”

The Times quotes a Chinese blogger who came up with a scheme to take this Trojan horse a step farther.

The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue in cheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online democracy advocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and instead choose a different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a ubiquitous surname, and weeding out the subversive Wangs from the harmless ones might melt circuits in even the censors’ most powerful computer.

Who knows, this could be the proverbial arrow that hits Achilles’ heel.