Fuck the Year of the Horse! China’s Homophonophobia

Seeds of Fire

馬首是瞻

While many people were enthralled by Kungfu bots— 武bot — of the official Spring Festival song-and-dance celebration, or Chunwan 春晚,  broadcast by Beijing’s CCTV on 16 February 2026, some were just as attentive to what the show says about things IRL. One can’t help but be amused at the thought that the China Maxxers, Kumbayistas and the New China Experts who subjected themselves to the droning hours of the Chunwan probably missed the song that actually got the ‘laobaixing’ talking.

For connoisseurs of China’s ‘culture between the lines’, and there are millions if not tens of millions of them among the Chinese masses, every Chunwan has unexpected delights and the 2026 show was no exception. Below, the writer Wang Liuyuan offers his observations on Tama/ 踏馬/ 他媽, aka TMD, an expression featured in a song that was widely seen as being a surprise middle finger to the status quo. As Wang writes:

On Chinese New Year’s Eve in 2026, a Spring Festival Gala song called “Tama Welcomes Spring” (《踏马迎春》) unexpectedly became the center of attention. The staging itself was simple: a group of young performers in matching bright-red outfits, a giant LED screen behind them reading “New Year Concert,” a light melody, a dense beat, and a stage filled with symbols of “joy,” “blessings,” and “looking ahead.” By the usual logic, it was just another standard New Year chorus in the Gala’s assembly line. What people remembered, though, was a single line that kept coming back—“I tama cheer for you,” “May you tama have no worries,” “Tama sends blessings.” …

The performance of Tama Welcomes Spring 踏馬迎春 immediately led to a rash of people ‘playing with punchlines’ 玩梗 wán gěng, or taking the piss. Such playfulness is, of course, part of the universal language of global social media and memes regularly spawn millions of humorous videos on China’s mobile internet. Although as David Bandurski reports ‘from time to time, stern warnings from state-run media’ might follow, in the following Wang Liuyuan reminds us that:

Homophones, double entendres, reversed readings, and metaphors offer a ready gray zone. On the surface, it is “just a joke,” “just a language game.” If questioned, you can always play dumb and say, “You’re overthinking it.”

[Note: See also Jane Li, The transformation of China’s top memes over a decade reflects Beijing’s tighter grip on speech, Quartz, 21 July 2022; and, RealTime Mandarin, a regularly updated source of online memes, Chinese humour and expressions du jour.]

The Chinese rubric of this chapter in our 2026 celebration of the book Seeds of Fire: Chinese voices of conscience is 馬首是瞻 mǎ shǒu shì zhān which, in the present context, means ‘join the dots’.

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China Heritage marked the lead-up to and beginning of the 2026-2027 Bingwu Year of the Horse with a series of essays, a selection of Other People’s Thoughts, a poem by Xu Zhangrun and a compendium of previous celebrations of Spring Festival in our virtual pages:

This material is also included in The Other China.

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For more on the Kungfu bots of Springtree Technology 宇樹科技 that performed during the 2026 Chunwan, see Afra’s essay An AI-Maxi New Year, Concurrent, 19 February 2026.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
18 February 2026

Second Day of the First Month of
The Bingwu Year of the Horse

丙午馬年正月初二

踏馬迎春

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The Urge to Curse in the Collective Chinese Subconscious

— reflections on “Tama Welcomes Spring”

集體潛意識里的罵娘心理
——從《踏馬迎春》說開去

Wang Liuyuan 王瀏源

18 February 2026

On Chinese New Year’s Eve in 2026, a Spring Festival Gala song called “Tama Welcomes Spring” (《踏馬迎春》) unexpectedly became the center of attention. The staging itself was simple: a group of young performers in matching bright-red outfits, a giant LED screen behind them reading “New Year Concert,” a light melody, a dense beat, and a stage filled with symbols of “joy,” “blessings,” and “looking ahead.” By the usual logic, it was just another standard New Year chorus in the Gala’s assembly line. What people remembered, though, was a single line that kept coming back—“I tama cheer for you,” “May you tama have no worries,” “Tama sends blessings.” On the page, “tama” [踏馬] is just a festive phrase that fits the Year of the Horse; in everyday Mandarin, it is also a near-homophone of a common profanity [他媽 tā mā]. That double meaning put viewers through a strange psychological experience in the space of a few minutes: in front of their eyes was CCTV-style “positive energy,” but in their ears, faintly, was the cadence of street-corner cursing. In the live comments, some people wrote, “The more you listen, the more it starts to taste off color.” Others said, “They call it a blessing, but every line sounds like someone’s swearing.” Why would a New Year song that was supposed to be “safe” trigger so many associations and so much remixing overnight? The problem clearly wasn’t only the language itself. It was also the collective mood that Chinese society has been storing up for a long time.

Surface blessings and a profane echo: two kinds of listeners for one song

On a public stage, it is rare to see a phrase with such an obvious profane homophone repeated on this scale. Whether you look at the creators or the censors, they almost certainly knew how the three characters “踏馬” are used in daily speech. Still, it made it through. That suggests that inside the system, what mattered more was the formal fit with the “Year of the Horse,” not the way it would land on the ear in real life.

This gap—“harmless on the page, awkward in the mouth”—is a miniature of the relationship between official messaging and everyday life in China right now. The language on screen revolves around “family reunion,” “everything going smoothly,” and “leaping development,” but many viewers’ first reaction is: real life isn’t going that smoothly. Growth has been slowing, the job market has tightened, small and midsize businesses are struggling, and young people worry about college degrees, mortgages, and caring for aging parents. In years like this, a line like “no worries” sounds more and more like an ironic reversal.

Against that emotional backdrop, the homophone in “tama” [踏馬/他媽] gets amplified. It is like stuffing a small packet of gunpowder into a blessing: on the surface it is still “I wish you well,” but in the background there is a second, unspoken voiceover—“life is really damn hard.” Many people wrote in the comments, “So now we can finally curse in broad daylight.” They weren’t really cursing a specific target. They were using the line as an exit for frustration that had been pressed down for a long time.

For many internet users, the most addictive part of the song wasn’t the tune. It was the ambiguous, double-edged feel of the phrase: it could be read by officials as an auspicious greeting, and by peers as a profanity. That gray zone carries its own quiet thrill, a shared wink that does not need to be spelled out.

To understand that thrill, you have to look back at everyday life. Over the past few years, China’s economy has faced pressure on several fronts. Pandemic shocks, a property downturn, strained local finances, and fierce job competition have become regular items in the news. A lot of young people have found that studying hard, taking graduate exams, and squeezing into big cities do not automatically bring “upward mobility.” Instead, they are pulled between housing prices and income, and they swing back and forth between “lying flat” and “grinding to the limit.”

For workers, wage growth lags behind prices and rent. For small firms, orders are unstable, costs rise, and policy shifts fast. For families in county towns, the costs of children’s education and parents’ elder care often leave people barely able to breathe. The society at large sits in a state of “the road ahead is unclear, so we just grit our teeth and hold on.”

In an atmosphere like that, mental strain inevitably rises. More and more reports talk about teen depression, workplace burnout, and urban loneliness. Emotion does not always erupt in extreme ways. More often it hangs over the city like a perpetual overcast. People still go to work, still buy groceries, still scroll short videos. It’s just that confidence in the future slowly drains away.

The Spring Festival Gala arrived with this as a backdrop. The producers want festive songs and mass choreography to give the whole country a brief break from anxiety, and to pull everyone back into the “bright picture” that the national narrative has prepared. But the more seamless the cheer is, the sharper the gap with reality becomes. Economic pressure and collective gloom show up through the song itself: the louder the blessing, the more obvious the contrast. The lyrics shout “tama no worries,” and many viewers think, “Where do you find so many people with no worries?”

That is when the profane meaning of “tama” [他媽] naturally clicks into place. “I tama cheer for you” is half pep talk on stage, and half complaint squeezed out through clenched teeth off screen. Language makes a switch here: the same syllables split into two meanings in different ears. One belongs to official ritual. The other belongs to everyday life of people at the bottom of society. The pun reflects two landscapes at once: officials are still using familiar “positive energy” templates, while the public uses misreadings and intrusions to refit those templates into an emotional outlet. The stage and the comment section start to look like two worlds that do not recognize each other.

A tightening speech space, and homophones as a “safety valve”

In recent years, China’s speech environment has become more and more sensitive. Boundaries around public issues are drawn tightly; media coverage proceeds with extreme caution; deletions and account bans on social platforms have become routine. Many ordinary people have developed a reflex: when it comes to politics, institutions, or power, say less, speak vaguely, and talk around it.

In that environment, the cost of expressing anger and dissatisfaction directly keeps rising, but the emotions themselves do not disappear. They have to find new exits. Homophones, double entendres, reversed readings, and metaphors offer a ready gray zone. On the surface, it is “just a joke,” “just a language game.” If questioned, you can always play dumb and say, “You’re overthinking it.”

The Henan TV program made with a game company, “Hooves Rising, Tide Ahead, Leap Forward” (《馬蹄升升潮前躍》), which was abruptly cut off during a live broadcast and later removed from replay, is a typical example. Viewers thought they were simply watching a show with traditional elements, and then the sudden stop reminded them that some unspoken standard is always hanging in the air. Afterward, people remixed the line “It’s too funny—kill it,” adding a layer of black humor to the incident. The laugh was not only for entertainment. It was also a satire of how censorship works.

With that kind of accumulated experience, people learn to look for allies “between the characters.” Only when a word is both “harmless on the surface” and “sharp underneath” can it spread quickly across the whole internet. “Tama Welcomes Spring” happens to hit that point: it fits the festive theme of the Year of the Horse, and it also carries the heat of a profanity in everyday Mandarin. It can be played on the Gala’s big screen and it can be rewritten into a “cursing song ” in bullet comments and comment threads.

The boom in homophone memes shows how public expression has been squeezed into a corner. Truths are harder to say out loud, so they take detours through jokes, memes, and wordplay. On the surface it looks like light entertainment again and again. Underneath it is a collective fear of speaking plainly.

From a psychological angle, when a society lacks channels for open discussion for a long time, emotion slides into the unconscious. Anger, fear, humiliation, and shame—feelings that should be processed through public debate and institutional adjustment—get pressed inward instead. Over time, they come back in distorted forms: dreams, jokes, black humor, conspiracy thinking, and over-interpretation.

“Tama Welcomes Spring” enjoyed an immediate resonance nationally because it accidentally touched that unconscious layer. The “tama” in the lyrics can be taken as a joke, or as a profane verdict on reality. It can be a warm blessing, or an oblique curse at a kind of power. Each person can choose their meaning based on their own life experience. What connects people is not love for the song itself, but the feeling that “at last, there’s something we can curse together—without saying it outright.”

That shared feeling brings comfort, and it also brings danger. The comfort is that in the moment of a knowing smile, people feel they are not isolated individuals, but part of a vast, invisible group. The danger is that if emotion stays stuck at this oblique level for too long, it is hard to turn it into constructive public discussion. Complaints can release pressure for a moment, but they do not push institutional change. Memes can make you laugh, but they do not solve jobs and incomes.

If a society grows used to speaking in homophones and coded phrases, the ability to speak truth plainly can slowly weaken. People become less willing to face problems head-on. Even in private, banter replaces serious talk. Anger gets diluted in laughter, but it does not really disappear. It sinks deeper.

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The Gala stage and Chinese society: two narratives crossing

The Spring Festival Gala is meant to be the most concentrated stage for the national story: great-power rise, national rejuvenation, the merging of family and state—these big ideas return every year. In the past, most viewers took that story passively, at most muttering a few lines over dinner. Now social media has made the comment section into another “venue.” Official language and popular interpretation collide online. What the producers want to present is a carefree picture; what netizens assemble is a wall of reaction images filled with profanity, sardonic laughter, and homophones.

“Tama Welcomes Spring” stands right at the intersection of these two narratives. On one hand, the song meet the broadcaster’s technical requirements—it was festive, catchy, easy to sing. On the other hand, the expression tama offered a small opening in everyday Chinese that could be read in reverse. Netizens quickly made that opening larger and stuffed it with anxiety about economic decline, dissatisfaction with restricted expression, and pessimism about what lies ahead.

In that sense, the song is not, strictly speaking, a “protest song.” Still, the mood of the time pushed it into a protest-like role. It does not directly criticize anyone, yet in countless bullet comments it became a profanity that was aimed at reality. The song is still performed on CCTV as a “joyful and harmonious” segment, yet on social media it has turned into a sourcebook for people to mock the system.

That night, on and off the screen, two different performances unfolded at the same time. One was a celebration of family reunions directed by the authorities. The other was a black comedy directed by the public. Viewers switched back and forth between them, using the remote and the phone to shuttle between two channels. That behaviour is itself a snapshot of China today: people watching the joyful bustling on the bridge while someone is at the helm of boat faced with a precarious future. [這種狀態，本身就是當下中國社會的一幅《清明上河圖》——有在橋上看熱鬧的百姓，也有撐著一艘危船的舵手。]

The popularity of “Tama Welcomes Spring” will likely fade fast, like many memes before it, and replaced by the next hot topic. But the collective psychology it exposes will not vanish so quickly. Economic pressures remain. Political pressures remain. The space for expression keeps narrowing. As long as these structural factors do not change, new homophone memes, new black jokes, and new “something sounds off” programs will keep appearing.

For a society like that of China, the real question is not whether a song like “Tama Welcomes Spring” is “bold,” and not whether its creators had “ulterior motives.” The real question is: why do people read a simple, seasonal New Year song as an oblique curse aimed at their lived reality? Why are so many people willing to join in the “collective mishearing” through online shares, remixes, and jokes? Why are open, serious discussions becoming rarer, replaced by wave after wave of muffled laughter?

A healthier public space should allow people to speak directly about their worries over the economic outlook, criticisms of policy mistakes, and their anxiety about their personal circumstances, instead of always having to hide behind homophones and lexical code. Only when facts can be stated clearly, when they can be discussed openly can pent-up social emotions move from the “unconscious” back to the “conscious”—from muffled cursing into questions of meaningful reform that can actually be acted on.

In such a situation, the kind of language games surrounding “Tama Welcomes Spring” might end up in a more normal space where a New Year song elicits a harmless joke, rather than becoming a mirror that reflects collective unease. For now, the meaning that the song has been given goes far beyond what the Gala’s directors had ever imagined.

That is what makes this year’s song truly worth thinking about.

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