{"id":5201,"date":"2015-06-02T21:58:38","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T01:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=5201"},"modified":"2015-05-30T22:00:28","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T02:00:28","slug":"murong-xuecun-corrupting-the-chinese-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/murong-xuecun-corrupting-the-chinese-language","title":{"rendered":"MURONG XUECUN: Corrupting the Chinese Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"27murong-articleLarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

May 28, 2015<\/p>\n

Andy Wong\/Associated Press<\/p>\n

On a recent walk along a street in the southern Chinese city of Sanya, I heard a shop pumping out a rock version of the famous Communist Party anthem \u201cSocialism Is Good.\u201d Although I loathe this song, as the music became louder, I still found myself singing along under my breath. \u201cThe reactionaries toppled \/ Imperialists flee with their tails between their legs. … The Communist Party is good \/ The Communist Party is good \/ The Communist Party is a good leader of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

For decades, Communist Party songs like this one have been ringing in Chinese people\u2019s ears. For many people, myself included, these songs formed the soundtrack to our youth. Even today, though the party has become Communist in name only, they still flood the airwaves. It\u2019s difficult to overestimate the extent of their influence not only on the Chinese spirit, but on the Chinese language itself.<\/p>\n

More than 60 years of Communist hate education, inane propaganda and the comprehensive destruction of classical civilization have spawned a new style of speaking and writing. The Chinese language has become brutalized \u2014 and the Communist Party is largely to blame.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only government proclamations that clank with harsh cadences and revolutionary fervor, but also literary and scholarly works, and most disturbing, private speech.<\/p>\n

The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, \u201cto be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.\u201d Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of \u201csocial harmony\u201d and the \u201cChinese spirit.\u201d In addition to promoting the \u201cChina Dream\u201d and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, \u201cNever allow eating the Communist Party\u2019s food and then smashing the Communist Party\u2019s cooking pots.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: \u201cStop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.\u201d Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, \u201cdyed with martyr’s blood,\u201d and many grow up singing the young pioneers\u2019 songs: \u201cAlways prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.<\/p>\n

Decades of this party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people\u2019s minds and into the Chinese vernacular. In recent years, I have even heard many friends, some dissidents, using the language of our propagandists, and not ironically.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a \u201cmetaphysicist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It\u2019s fair to assume these two farmers didn\u2019t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like \u201cidealist\u201d and \u201cpetit bourgeois sentimentalist\u201d have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.<\/p>\n

Revolutionary language is ubiquitous among normal Chinese people. We commonly refer to economic sectors like industry and agriculture as \u201cbattle fronts.\u201d (Most workplaces, in fact, are called \u201cfronts.\u201d) Continuing to work while sick is likened to \u201cthe wounded not leaving the front line.\u201d Many big enterprises talk about their marketing teams as \u201carmies\u201d or \u201ctroops,\u201d and their sales territories as \u201cbattle zones.\u201d<\/p>\n

The literary scholar Perry Link and others have called this \u201cMao language.\u201d In a 2012 essay on ChinaFile, the Asia Society\u2019s website, Mr. Link wrote that such talk is \u201cmuch more freighted with military metaphors and political biases than most.\u201d In that same article, he gave some pointed examples of how Mao language has seeped into everyday usage: \u201cAt the ends of banquets, even today, mainland Chinese sometimes urge their friends to xiaomie [annihilate] the leftovers; a mother on a bus, the last time I was in Beijing, answered her little boy, who said, \u201cMa, I really need to pee!\u201d by saying, \u201cJianchi! [Be resolute!] Uncle bus driver can\u2019t stop here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The roots of this New Chinese Language naturally go back to Mao. In his 1942 Yan\u2019an speech exhorting authors and artists to \u201cserve the people,\u201d Mao called for writers to use language people can understand. Even in essays he wrote before the Communist Party took power, Mao rebuked the use of \u201cshady\u201d words that \u201cthe masses\u201d wouldn\u2019t understand. In direct response to Mao\u2019s dictates, the party apparatus promoted \u201cthe people\u2019s language\u201d \u2014 a plain and easy to understand style.<\/p>\n

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