China’s on-again-off-again relationship with Youtube continued its volatility last week. On Tuesday 24th of March, Youtube reported that it had been blocked in China and the video-sharing service was not restored until Friday 27th, only to become unavailable again today. World media has speculated that the Youtube shutdown was due to a posted video that purports to show Chinese police brutally beating Tibetans during the March 14th riots in Lhasa last year. The China Daily has quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Qing Gang as claiming that the footage is doctored and is “misrepresentative”. Below, P has embedded the controversial video, but viewers may need to login to Youtube to view it.

It was originally uploaded by a group positioning itself as the Tibetan government in exile and their website can be reached here. The Chinese police can be seen savagely beating what seem to be already subdued protestors. There are other videos which can be seen in Quicktime format here  which purport to show the torture of a Tibetan man who was trying to stop a monk from being attacked (P doesn’t have Quicktime, so can’t view the videos).

The Chinese channel CCTV has responded with this news broadcast, which emphasizes the death and destruction caused by the rioters.

The Chinese government has had a long tradition of censoring out net content that it doesn’t like. The latest clever strike against such censorship has been the Song of the Grass Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma), which is, you guessed it, circulating on Youtube (no wonder they keep blocking access). In a Disney-esque montage, a childrens’ choir sings about the happy Grass Mud Horses that live in the MaLe Desert and the menacing river crabs that come to devour their grass. Each phrase is a pun and most of the song is distinctly X-rated. Cao ni ma, ‘though written in characters as grass mud horse, sounds like the chinese phrase for F*** your mother and the Male Desert is a similar obscenity. The river crabs (he xie) sound like the chinese word for harmony which has often been used by the government as a synonym for censorship.

Below find the 2 (X-rated) videos (both have subtitles). Clever using puns to prevent censorship!