With more than 30 million YouTube views, the song 'Fragile' has done something previously unthinkable -- become a commercial success while sending up China's authoritarian leaders.
In the Mandopop industry, poking Beijing can end careers. But Malaysian rapper Namewee and Australian singer Kimberley Chen have bucked that trend.
Days after their tongue-in-cheek love song dropped last month, Beijing's censors scrubbed their online presence, ensuring their blacklisting in the world's largest Mandarin-speaking market.
But across much of Asia and the global Chinese diaspora, the song struck a chord.
'It's an incredibly clever song, the tune is catchy, and the performance is spot on,' DJ Hatfield, an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Musicology at National Taiwan University in Taipei, told AFP.
'As for blacklisting, often censorship is the best advertisement.'
Here are five ways the song mocks China.
Little Pink
To the uninitiated, 'Fragile' sounds like any other saccharine ballad. But even before the music starts the politics are made clear with a warning: 'Please be cautious if you are fragile pink.'
The phrase is a reference to 'little pinks' -- a term for China's online army of nationalist commenters, who go in to bat against any perceived slight.
The music video's set is awash with pink, including the clothes Namewee and Chen wear as well as a giant panda -- a clear reference to China -- dancing in pink camouflage overalls.
The catchy chorus meanwhile centres around apologising to someone who is fragile and cannot take criticism.
NMSL
At one point in the song, Namewee wrestles with the giant panda in an empty pink swimming pool while singing the line 'You say NMSL to me when you get angry'.
For anyone observing online tussles between China's nationalists and their latest target, the phrase NMSL is ubiquitous.
It stands for 'ni ma si le' -- or in simple English 'your mum is dead' -- and is often left in online comments.
Last year a flame war erupted between Chinese and Thai netizens over a Thai celebrity's comments about the
