Grass Mud Horse, a mythical creature from a comedy Youtube children’s song, has apparently spread like wildfire through China’s cyber space. The name in Chinese is a pun on a much ruder epithet involving intercourse with someone’s mother.

To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearly subversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as they appear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do not allow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative, right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — I am a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law.”

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.”

New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?_r=2&hp