China: Goodbye Grass Mud Horse · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Last week the story of Grass Mud Horse has traveled to the U.S.A via the New York Times and re-imported back to China with new ideas for reproduction, such as the marriage of two legendary creatures: Grass Mud Horse and FaKe Squid into FaKe Mud Horse.
As imagethief pointed out, the New York Times may have over-interpreted the Grass Mud Horse for criticizing the repressive censorship mechanism. Instead of mechanical blocking, there are some other soft tactics (summarized by “The Seven Possible Fates Of An Internet Post”), and the Chinese censor team is ready to show how with its latest notice about “Grass Mud Horse”.
The administration's notice to forum managers has been tweeted and re-tweeted many times in twitter:
草泥马相关内容不得进行任何推荐，不得炒作（包括××神兽、河蟹），点名批评猫扑。目前该事件已上升到政治高度，境外媒体炒作该事件为网民与政府对抗。
I searched through Baidu, and found two forums posted the administration body's notice. MaJia One put up a a post in lehu BBS:
和我告别吧~~真理部最新通知：封杀草泥马
Master Lao Ke posted the notice in mop.com's game BBS and warned others:
别的地我管不了,骑士区让我看到类似字眼一律XHW一天.
各位都是良民,对吧?
There are a number of comments:
大魏镇西将军郝昭：政治高度了。。。真是防民之口，甚于防川 啊。。。
拯救三俗位面的八戒：杀马了
成步堂·龙一: 主要是标题里不要出现太多不和谐内容，我会重点照顾一下标题党
威风堂堂：我一直良民，可是咱们这里有禁令意义不大啊。9C都不管，频道里经常有出来吧XX马，带我去XX戈壁。
索性直接添加到过滤名单里吧？~！MOP后台有这个功能没？’
commando8489：我现在每天晚上睡觉如果睡不着都是数羊驼~
6912214: 内部矛盾遇到外部矛盾自然要让步，再怎么也不能让那些境外媒体利用了
超级机战饭: …文字狱就是这样的
巴鲁巴托斯: 悲剧。。。唉。。。难道要政治镇压=。=？搞文革？
It may be true that the Grass Mud Horse has been politicized in the past two months, but such politicization is made possible by mass participation of netizens, intellectual, new and old media workers, both from within and outside China. And the most crucial role is played by the Chinese censor / river crab, without which the Grass Mud Horse is nothing more than a dirty joke.