The Golden Shield Project (The Great Firewall) is estimated to directly employ 50,000 Chinese. In addition to government employees, individual internet service providers (ISPs) are also responsible for content they deliver; so, they hire staff to screen content as well. The screening utilizes a host of methods but the important fact is there are both IP blacklists as well live/active content filtering. Unsuprisingly, content that contradicts the encouraged world view ends up disappearing or more accurately, never appearing.
When a user triggers the system by attempting to access restricted content or searching for offensive terms (subversive, pornographic, political), internet access is temporarily rescinded for a random unspecified interval. Meaning, you not only are prevented from accessing the censored content but you are fully cut-off from even state run websites and completely approved publications. For report preparation, this can be extremely frustrating when seemingly innocuous terms result in temporary outages.
Technologies used in Golden Shield are routinely sold and exported to other governments (Zimbabwe and Cuba being two likely recipients) making the Great Firewall profitable both monetarily and socially (for those in power).
In response, crafty Chinese netizens have protested through several different channels, but the mascot for their cause is a fictional animal named the Grass Mud Horse. Spoken Chinese contains an absurd number of homynims. This is due to Chinese being a tonal language. Unlike English, which uses tone to express the flavor or emotion of the sentence, Chinese uses tones for the denotation of individual words. Thus saying a word one way may mean 'parcel' while another way means 'embrace' (this is an actual example of the chinese word 'bao'). Of course, when written, they use completely different characters so confusion only occurs in the spoken form.
Returning from the aside, Grass Mud Horse（草泥马） with different tones translates to "F*** your mother". So, while the Chinese netizen may type Grass Mud Horse, they are referencing the alternative meaning. In addition, "river crabs" represent the Chinese Government with the spoken words sounding like "harmony". Those familiar with Chinese leader's speeches will often here references to the creation or growth of a "harmonious society".
Think you are lucky for living somewhere that doesn't take such an active approach to information control? The Harvard Business Review recently posted an article about proposed legislation that is currently making its way through the American legislative branch. It is exceedingly unfortunate that American politicians seem unable to rationally approach technologies spawned after 1960 (remember the VCR/recording hu-ha that culminated in Mr. Rogers arguing for the legality of time-shifting? ).
The video below is NSFW due to extremely strong language (of course, only the captions are in English so...maybe it is somewhat safe for work). It will introduce you to the wonderful animal known as the 草泥马。你看看。
The song used is the theme song to the Smurfs in China. To help cleanse your pallet that video is below:
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