A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors in the World's Largest Cyber-Community

BEIJING -- The number of China's Internet users increased by 40 million to 338 million in January-June 2009, exceeding the total U.S. population, according to official news agency Xinhua. About 95% of towns and cities are connected to broadband Internet, Xinhua said. China has a population of over 1.3 billion people compared with the U.S. population of 307 million. The number of broadband Internet users in China increased by 10 million in the first half of the year to 93.5 million.

NY TIMES-- Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior (see video above). 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.