Memes for The Masses

For mandarin speakers, the Internet is a linguistic playground. Online experimentation with the Chinese language has expanded the vernacular, while rhetorical techniques such as wordplay and parody have been used to great effect.

But some of that wordplay and parody among Chinese users of the Internet has been shaded with ridicule-and even hints of rebellion. Long-forgotten Chinese characters have been resurrected and curse words disguised in proverbial robes to criticize official corruption. Indeed, language on the Internet has become a veritable weapon for the weak often aimed at misuse of power.

The first stage for this ongoing language experiment revolved around the borrowing and modernizing of individual Chinese characters. It grew to include a broad narrative of double entendre, including the popular crowd-source story of "grass mud horse."

Consider how the Internet changed "lei," which means "lightning." Even off-line, the word has become a popular synonym for "shock." Television news anchors often use "lei." That's just a beginning. Internet users started a campaign reusing ancient Chinese characters and giving these words new meanings. For example, while the word "jiong" means "bright," an ancient form of the character looks like a face with two downward-slanting eyebrows and an open mouth-(囧) indicating a loss for words. On the Internet, this old jiong character started being used to represent the tragic nature of human existence. Its popularity exploded, and now reportedly more than 500 Jiong Forums can be found online. The character "jiong" also appears on shoes and T-shirts.

Recognizing the cultural significance of the phenomenon, an art museum in Shanghai organized a youth exhibit entitled "Jiong: Expression and Posture," centered on attempts to interpret the character's meaning.

Double meaning also crops up in the use of phrases such as"going to buy soy sauce," "doing pushups" and "playing hide and seek." Each phrase began with a random comment in the Chinese media but exploded on the Internet. Some expressed sardonic views of popular culture. For example, after a man on the street responded to a media interview question about a celebrity sex scandal by saying, "Why should I care about it? I only came out to buy soy sauce," the phrase "going to buy soy sauce" became an Internet meme-a way of saying, "It's none of my business."

Others hint at a sense of futility in the face of implausible official explanations. "Doing pushups" became a way to indicate being too self-engrossed to care about others after a friend of a girl who committed suicide, when asked why he didn't stop her, responded "I was doing pushups." And official explanations for death were pegged "playing hide and seek" after a fatally injured prison inmate was said to have died after running into a wall during a hide and seek game.

'Cup Clique'

Homophones are also being used on the Internet for self-expression. The same pair of characters that means "tragedy" and one way of saying "cup"-"bei ju"-pop up on the Internet as well as in text messages to express pessimism among young people. It started with the word "cup," but spread rapidly as disparate voices joined online discussions. Other homonyms and near-homonyms include the use of "tableware" to mean "calamity," "washing utensils" to mean "comedy," and "tea utensils" to mean "rift" or "difference."

Text messages such as, "I told God I was thirsty, and he gave me a big stack of cups" spread quickly nationwide. Substituting "tragedy" for "cups" gives a clear sense of scornful hopelessness behind a simple meme. Other sentences followed writer Eileen Chang's play-on-words, "Life is like an extravagant dress with lice crawling all over it." Now the phrase "life is like a tea table, covered with cups" is an anthem for a so-called "Cup Clique."

"Cup" embraces a depressed outlook that counterbalances the Chinese media's never-ending stream of "happiness indicator" reports and gleeful announcements of GDP growth. Thus, "tableware" narration conveys facts in ways the media cannot. These and other catchwords point to evolving cynicism in the popular vernacular and a gloomy sketch of society's collective depression.

'Grass Mud Horse'

Another sign of the Internet's influence on Chinese language emerged in recent years as a collective narrative formed around a mythical creature called a "grass mud horse" which, not coincidentally, is a near-homonym for "fuck your mother"-the most acute of Chinese insults. Users of the three-character grass mud horse expression are rebelling against language-limit orders used by China's Internet censors to block content including common curse words. The expression is considered vulgar but carries enough linguistic warmth to keep censors at bay.

The story of the grass mud horse also takes aim at a library of words judged obscene by high society. The narrative is built on a new word family that offers a humorous yet biting judgment of the Internet's status.

In the narrative, which spread rapidly after an anonymous posting, the grass mud horse is a magical species resembling the alpaca but hailing from a desert whose name also has double-meaning- one of which is patently crude-in the People's Republic of Tamade, or "goddamn people's republic." The country's grass mud horses are divided by social strata and their enemies are river crabs-a creature whose name is a near-homonym for "harmony," which is often referred to in Chinese government's Harmonious Society initiative.

The Grass Mud Horse narrative differs from the simple ridicule of the past. It expounds on the native land and delves into semantics: The desert where grass mud horses live is both a place and a Chinese chengyu, an idiomatic phrase usually consisting of four characters.

At times the narrative alludes to history by parodying a style of ancient literature. At others times it is serious, even offering biological explanations for creatures of the mythical land. Crowd-sourced texts, poems, cartoon novels, videos and a children's Song of the Grass Mud Horse appeared. Even a new Chinese character was created for grass mud horse: a grass radical at top, a horse radical on the left and a phonetic, "ni" character at right.

In Chinese, words can be created by combining any of the some 70,000 existing characters, but a new character requires official sanction before it can included in keyboard entries. While the grass mud horse character may never get official consent, its existence jabs at institutional language control.

And as the grass mud horse narrative climaxed, someone started making and selling a special doll. It was the first time the mythical creature had gone beyond virtual world linguistics and joined the real economy as a cuddly commodity.

Those behind the grass mud horse narrative are not members of China's lower class, which have been largely deprived of Internet access. Instead, the movement is the handiwork of students and white-collar workers-the Internet's main users and proponents of free expression. Their protest has been called a "hidden transcript."

Within the linguistic shell of a cute, fictional animal is cultural context that conceals the meaning of the obscenity—dissatisfaction. In the tension between obscene referent and the refined significant, irony emerges. It is an incisive admonition wrapped in soft silk.

Zhu Dake is a Professor of Literature Criticism at Tongji University

All opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Caixin Media.