China’s culture of shunkouliu (“slippery jingles”) offer a rare — and witty — outlet for political frustrations.

Perry Link and Kate Zhou describe the shunkouliu in their book Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Invented by Chinese farmers, and once devoted to simple lessons of earth and toil, the medium mutated in the Great Leap Forward into bitter and closely guarded satire. The numbing repetition of Maoist propaganda fueled the transmission of shunkouliu: a clever wordplay that skewered the official message could resonate with citizens from Shanghai to Chengdu. With a cultural opening in the 1980s and 1990s, the form exploded into a national phenomenon, now further fueled by distribution technology like email and text messages.

Via the Washington Post, the author of the following shunkouliu is safely anonymous:

The Olympics arrive
Beijing’s alive!
The torch on display!
(The people make way.)
The foreigners are here
So the sky’s suddenly clear!
And here’s a new treat:
Fewer cars on the street!
Of course we are moved
That the food has improved.
And: no beggars, no riff-raff,
No petitions, you see,
No jails, no beatings
Just sweet “harmony!”
Who cares if the locals
Are kicked and repressed
So long as the world
Is duly impressed?
When the Olympics are done
We’ll be back to square one:
Corruption and privilege
Won’t that be fun?
Secrecy, strong-arming
Brainwashing, tax-farming
Mugging protesters
And hiding their tears;
Ruling by thugs,
But arresting “by law”
A new “Chinese model”
For many more years!

— Jonathan Werve