ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Hu Jintao's version of a harmonious world is being challenged and reproduced by a particular form of Chinese egao wordplay that works through deploying official language against itself. The redeployments make visible how Hu's Chinese dream of harmony has come to work through violent harmonization' of others. In exploring this quasi-suicidal interplay of harmony and river crabs, it has shown how they are intimately linked to party-state attempts at spatial and temporal bordering as a means to maintain a cleansed/harmonious time space. Returning to the question of the political in harmony/river crabs, it seems the claim that the online world of egao offers a free and unrestricted' time and space of Bakhtinian carnival is premature. Thus the point of the chapter is to open back up the question of egao as potentially political even if it does not lead to a revolutionary politics.
