Friday 4 June 2010

River crab (河蟹)

河蟹. 1. noun. Literally, river crab; 2. adj. Cantonese-derived pseudo-Mandarin for 和諧, adj. Harmonious, to be in concordance.

To be 河蟹-ed in social media means to have your post on Sina Weibo (China's own version of Twitter), or similar, deleted by admin, probably because the message touched upon 'sensitive' issues like the June 4 Tian'anmen incident in 1989, like mine.

Soon after I tweeted, I got a direct message from 系统管理员:

您在2010-06-04 16:19:05发表的微博“What if I want to give some...”已被管理员删除。给您带来的不便,深表歉意。

My 'tweet' was actually a retweet of someone else who said remarked that the candle and flower icons/emoticons (used like smileys) we unavailable today, and I added, "what if I want to give someone a flower today?"

That was all it took.

So remind me, how is China the world's next superpower?