For years, Chinese internet users referred to “censorship” as “harmony”—a coy reference to Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society.” To censor a term, they’d say, was to “harmonize” it. Eventually, the censors caught on and banned the use of the word “harmony.” As it happens, however, the Chinese word for “harmony” sounds similar to the word for “river crab.” When a word had been censored, savvy Chinese internet users then took to calling it “river crab’d.”
