Grass Mud Horse - Formats

Formats

Music videos, "documentaries", and cartoons about the Grass Mud Horse started appearing on the internet in 2009. The original Grass Mud Horse music video's musical arrangement of a children's choir has been compared to It's a Small World, and it scored 1.4 million hits in its first three months. A cartoon about the Grass Mud Horse attracted a quarter million views, a nature documentary on its habits received 180,000 more hits in the same amount of time. Even though some Grass Mud Horse videos were not technically blocked by Chinese censors, some had their sound blocked, with a message saying "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG."

Yazhou Zhoukan (亞洲周刊) reported that Zhan Bin, a teacher at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, created a new Chinese character by fusing the three Chinese character radicals for "grass", "mud", and "horse". The word has no official pronunciation. Official "cleanup" of the internet, which threatens the Caonima, has led Chinese internet users to create other "Mud Horse" variants, such as the "滾泥马" (Gǔnnímǎ, "Rolling Mud Horse") and the "幹泥马" (Gànnímǎ, "Working Mud Horse"). "Gunnima" and "Gannima" are puns for "fuck off" and "fuck your mother" respectively.

The "Grass Mud Horse" became widely known on the English-language web following the 11 March 2009 publication of a New York Times article on the phenomenon, which sparked widespread discussion on blogs. In March 2011, "Grass Mud Horse" themed merchandise, such as plush dolls, began being sold over the Internet. One Guangzhou toy manufacturer reportedly produced its first batch of 150 Grass Mud Horse cuddly toys with official birth certificates issued by Mahler Gebi Mystical Creatures Bureau. The animals come in brown and white, named "Male" (马勒) and "Gebi" (歌碧) respectively, and sell for 40 yuan each. To accompany these, a user's and feeding manual have been created. Whereas they were called 'Caonima' before the crackdown, Internet sellers now list them using the correct Chinese term, '羊驼' (Alpaca).

In 2009, renowned artist Ai Weiwei published an image of himself nude with only a 'Caonima' hiding his genitals, with a caption "草泥马挡中央" ("cǎonímǎ dǎng zhōngyāng", literally "a Grass Mud Horse covering the center". One interpretation of the caption is: "fuck your mother, Communist Party Central Committee". Political observers speculated that the photo may have contributed to Ai's arrest in 2011 by angering Communist Party hardliners. Human rights activists and journalists in Hong Kong believed that Ai offered himself to the authorities on a platter with this provocative art.