Caonima! Alpaca to the Rescue.

Today is just another sunny day in Dalian. As I walk down the street I'm enjoying the sunshine and watching the bustling activity of street vendors, deliverymen, school children and other ordinary Chinese people going about their daily lives. However, the means by which I accessed my blog today quickly reminded me of the realities surrounding this country.

Today is not just another ordinary day. It's the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 events the West calls 'The Tian'anmen Square Massacre'. I was only seven when Deng Xiaoping's People's Liberation Army violently suppressed pro-democracy protests in Beijing, killing hundreds of students and civilians. The story is well-known in the Western world, but the Chinese government still tries to keep it quiet within China. One method they use is internet censorship, which has tightened up considerably in the weeks preceding the anniversary. Now a number of popular social networking/blogging/personal video sites are inaccessible. Of course, the government is afraid of word getting out. Youtube has been blocked for the last month. Recently, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr fell victim to the 'net nanny', 'great firewall of China' and other tags referring to the government's censorship mechanism. I have been accessing this blog through a proxy server, which I discovered through a friend. Usually a simple Google search for 'free proxy server' produces a whole selection of options. This time it was a difficult task, because each one I tried, even the old stalwarts, failed me. Sneaky old sneakme was the answer, and I have been 'sneakily' sneaking onto my blog since yesterday. But oddly enough, foreign news sites with front-page headlines such as my current homepage, "Survivors Confront Legacy of Tian'anmen' (Wall Street Journal) are freely accessible. This morning I watched a whole 5 minutes of archive video footage showing the PLA tanks chasing and shooting people in the backs as they tried to run away. It was unreal and I felt detached, as if this wasn't the same Beijing square where I'd often strolled with friends on tourist trips to the capital, watching the dragon kites drifting in the breeze and the happy families playing with kids and photographing each other.

It makes me wonder how much the average Chinese person knows about these dreadful events. I have always been hesitant to ask my Chinese friends, fearing to make them uncomfortable. Those educated in foreign countries usually have some knowledge of 1989's events. However, most of my English-speaking Chinese friends, because of their greater exposure to Western cultural sources, do not really represent the average 'lao bai xing', or common citizen. I wonder about the fruit sellers in the marketplace, the young girl doing my manicure while we chat in Chinese about trivial subjects, and the guy sweeping the streets - do they know anything about 1989? More importantly, do they really care? Sometimes I believe that people are perfectly satisfied with their government, for it has given them a society where they have a roof over their heads and food on the table. Maybe our lofty Western ideals of 'free speech' are lost on a more practical kind of folk, who feel they can do nothing to control the government and anyway, have families to feed.

But there are Chinese people who know full well what happened in Beijing. They want to shout about it, they want to protest about the government's continuing bad behaviour, they want everyone to know the truth. Unfortunately, these advocates of freedom are continually repressed and can suffer all kinds of punishment from house arrest to torture. In an attempt to subtly vent their opinion, people have resorted to satire and irony. Today I discovered the real saviour of media freedom, national hero 'Cao Ni Ma'. This phrase has two distinct meanings; Grass Mud Horse, or an expletive - Fuck your Mother. The Grass Mud Horse takes the form of a cute alpaca. It has popped up all over China as a cult symbol of defiance against government censorship and repression. I'm currently trying to buy my own little Caonima on taobao. It's cute and would be an interesting souvenir of three years living in a police state.