River crabs

I'm blatantly stealing this post from imagethief, a highly regarded China blogger I read. He links to Rebecca MacKinnon's blog and quotes this:

In China these days, if your website gets blocked, your blog-hosting service takes down a politically edgy post you wrote, or your ISP deletes your site completely, you say: "I've been harmonized." The word for harmony, harmonized, or harmonious (all the same word in Chinese) is pronounced "he xie" in Chinese and is written like this: 和谐. For those without Chinese fonts on their browser.

However, there's a slight problem, which is that since this phrase is so often used sarcastically on Chinese blogs and forums, it has been flagged as a sensitive keyword by many of the blog and forum hosting platforms, increasing the chances that a post using this phrase could itself get "harmonized." So bloggers and chatroom denizens have switched the characters to another phrase, 河蟹, also pronounced "he xie" (with slightly different tonation) which means "river crab".

Thus, when bloggers seem to be writing nonsensically about "river crab," they're actually talking about censorship.

Imagethief also notes that Chinese is an excellent language for puns.