Going up against a tyrannical government isn't nearly as fun as the movies make it out to be. There's just something about secret arrests, violent beatings, and the distinct lack of tanks that make an average person somewhat reluctant to go and fight The Man. Thankfully, the following freedom-loving people were anything but average, because when they fought back against their respective regimes, they did it with style ...

5 Chinese Netizens Skirt Censorship With Memes

Toaboa

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China extinguishes free speech like novelty candles on its birthday cake. Which is to say that every time they stomp it out, it comes sputtering back to life again. They've arrested bloggers for exposing the country's rampant corruption, sent journalists on "forced vacations" -- but the will of the people is indomitable. But what can be done by people who are unwilling to risk martyrdom to fight the power? You can't even flip the government the bird, because they will confiscate and imprison that bird forever. But you can flip them the alpaca:

Angelo DeSantis

Some explanation may be in order.

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The "grass mud horse" is a fictitious animal (represented by an alpaca) that was created by Internet users to cleverly insult the Communist Party and bite the massive red hand feeding them propaganda and fear. To understand it, we need to break down the phrase cao ni ma. Depending on the tones, cao ni ma can be translated from Mandarin Chinese as 1) a sequence of seemingly random words ...

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... or 2) a phrase meaning "Fuck your mother":

Oh, did we mention that the Communist Party is often referred to as the "mother of the people"?