By popular demand from the netizens who loaned him money, dissident-artist Ai Weiwei sings an ode to the caonima, or Grass Mud Horse. The phrase is the homonym of a profanity you use to greet the mothers of people you don't like. Today is the deadline for Ai's 15million RMB tax bill. Watch this space. more ›

One of our favorite web comics, xkcd, has updated their map of the internet if it were represented as a planet and - lo and behold - there's an entire section dedicated to the Chinese internet. Love the details like a "Ma Le Ge Bi desert" and "Grass Mud Horse Bay" - somebody's been reading up on Chinese internet issues! The entire map can be found here. more ›

If there's one thing that gets our blood boiling, it's protest songs. And while we've usually got American folk music in mind, we can appreciate the fineries of the cutesier, punnier Chinese netizen versions too. In our favorite veiled resistance video since the days of the grass mud horse ballads, "My brother's at the bare bottom" has all the workings of a great angry netizen meme: you've got an infectious pop ballad with incomprehensible amounts of T-Pain-esque autotune, clever puns on Google and China's censorial administration, and of course, the harmonizing "river crabs." more ›

Chinasmack is currently working on translating some of the most popular Chinese internet memes from 2009, and they want your help to think of good ones the netizens of Netease may have missed. We've already seen some of our favorites: "What brother is eating is not noodles, but loneliness," "Believe in Brother Chun for everlasting life and "Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you home for dinner"; but we were surprised by the omission of one of the best memes of the year, the infamous Grass Mud Horse. more ›

The deviant little grass mud horse has struck again - only this time, it's a real alpaca rather than an internet one that's the center of this controversy. According to Forbes Asia, two Chinese men used an elaborate scam to trick an oblivious 74-year-old Tennessean Alpaca farmer into giving them business visas. more ›

We've already reported on the current darling of the internets, the Grass Mud Horse (草泥马), last week. But after a bout of Youtube surfing over the weekend, we realized that we weren't doing the almost religious fanaticism to this new meme justice. So we've included some more "Cao Ni Ma" ballads to lighten up your Monday morning. more ›

The Net Nanny makes all of our lives a little more annoying, providing hours of infuriating slow and often inaccessible browsing. more ›