Source: China Media Project (10/20/23)
The Visual Language of China’s Official Press
Understanding the political messages of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requires much more than mere summary and translation — and more even than close textual readings. Here’s a walk through the basics, looking at today’s edition of the Party’s flagship newspaper.
By David Bandurski

In the official Party-state media in China, design is driven by politics — and it is a crucial aspect of the political discourse. Want to see this principle in action? Today’s edition of the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offers a prime example.

The oddest and most prominent feature of the front page of the People’s Daily today is the large vertical headline running down the left-hand side. The headline, which announces that top leader Xi Jinping met with international leaders attending the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, ties the rest of the headlines on the page together. All are announcements of separate meetings, each with a different foreign leader.

As has been the case all week in the official state media in China, the top story is the Belt and Road. Coverage has touted its great benefits for participating countries, and for the entire world — emphasizing the growing economic and political centrality of China and its top leader.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the global infrastructure development and trade promotion program, which has been a pillar of China’s foreign policy, and the forum this week is the year’s most prominent opportunity for state-run media to roll out related domestic and international propaganda.

They have not missed the chance. Coverage of the Belt and Road Forum has eclipsed all other stories, including one of the world’s most pressing concerns, the unfolding conflict in Gaza and its potentially disastrous implications for security in the Middle East. Continue reading →

Source: China Digital Times (8/25/23)
Words of the Week: Xi’s Obscure Nicknames, from ↗↘↗ to ‘2-4-2’ to ‘N’ to ‘N-Butane
By Cindy Carter

With hundreds of documented (and censored) online sobriquets, Xi Jinping is arguably the most nicknamed leader in recent Chinese history. To stay ahead of the censors, online Chinese have long resorted to using homophones, variant characters, intentional typos, and a range of typographical tricks when referring to China’s “core” leader.

Image shows the tonal marks for the three Chinese characters in Xi Jinping’s name. The order of the tones is rising (2nd tone), falling (4th tone), and rising (2nd tone).

Over time, as evading online censorship has become more difficult, the nicknames have trended toward the abstruse. When a recent “Soviet-style” joke about a man asking a genie to “make blah-blah-blah blah-blah-blah” went viral, the first string of three nonsense syllables were interpreted by many to mean “Xi Jinping,” and the second was thought to mean something like “hurry up and die” or “step down soon.” Despite the vagueness of the joke, references to it were quickly censored on social media and the original poster (@怪以德服人猫) had their account summarily deleted from Weibo for allegedly violating platform policy.

Even the tonal marks used in Xi Jinping’s name (习近平, Xí Jìnpíng) have become a roundabout way to refer to him online. In May of 2023, Chinese Twitter and social media was abuzz about a sequence of three arrows ↗↘↗ said to represent the three tones (second/rising tone, fourth/falling tone, and second/rising tone, respectively) in Xi Jinping’s name. This usage had originated with a screenshot, purportedly from QQ, showing a post that read: “You know what’s depressing? When random netizens who do your job as a hobby are smarter and more competent than you.” Someone in the comments section had responded, “Those keyboard warriors are more competent than ↗↘↗.” Many who read the comment were shocked and amused that they managed to correctly interpret the three arrows as a reference to Xi Jinping, although others had to ask, “Can anyone explain this?” Among the comments of those in the know: “I understood that!” “How was I able to read that? Someone save me,” “God, I’ve been pronouncing it →↘→ all this time, guess my Mandarin isn’t that good,” and “I got it at first glance. Does this mean I’m going to hell?” Continue reading →

Source: China Digital Times (6/28/23)
Word(s) of the Week: “I Don’t Raise Pigs” (我不养猪 WǑ BÙ YǍNG ZHŪ)
By Alexander Boyd

“I don’t raise pigs” (我不养猪 wǒ bù yǎng zhū), a Hunan police station’s nonsensical comment on the death of a woman in their custody, is the latest incidence of “gobsmacking rhetoric” (léi yǔ 雷语) to go viral. “Gobsmacking rhetoric” is online slang that can be used to describe inappropriate official rhetoric that bowls over readers. In a popular culture context, it is solely humorous.

On June 14, a woman died in a Cili County police station. Police attributed the death to sudden cardiac death caused by malignant arrhythmia. The woman’s daughter then posted a video in which she alleged that her mother had died while under interrogation. The news went viral on Weibo, spurring investigative journalists to look into the claim. A reporter for Benliu News, a Gansu state-controlled outlet, called the police station in question to ask whether anyone had died there and received this odd response: “I don’t know. Our sow didn’t have a litter. I don’t raise pigs.” The bizarre police response massively increased attention on the case, prompting authorities to announce an investigation into the death. Many online called for the investigation to look into the “I don’t raise pigs” comment. The WeChat public account @犯犯之谈 posted an article titled, “She went in living, she came out dead,” that castigated the police for their bizarre comment:

“I wonder whether those officers are just used to treating the station like a pigsty and the people like swine, or whether that officer [on the phone] was putting on a performance and feigning mental illness? Oh wait, that’s right—if you’re mentally ill, you can get away with murder!” [Chinese] Continue reading →

Source: China Digital Times (6/6/23)
Word(s) of the Week: “Objects Placed in a Row” (物体排成一排, WÙTǏ PÁICHÉNG YĪPÁI)
By Cindy Carter

“Tank Man” stands before a row of four enormous yellow rubber ducks.

The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring image to emerge from the Tiananmen Protests of 1989. Photographs taken on June 5 of that year—one day after PLA troops crushed the protests, killing and injuring untold numbers of Chinese citizens—show an unidentified man dressed in a white shirt and black trousers and holding two shopping bags, standing before a line of tanks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. The identity and fate of the individual who has come to be known as “Tank Man” are unconfirmed.

Images of Tank Man are completely censored on the Chinese internet and social media. This heavy-handed censorship has given rise to many variations on a theme, in an effort to evade censorship. Photoshopped permutations of the “objects in a row” theme are manifold: in some, the line of tanks has been replaced by enormous yellow rubber ducks, Lego figures, cartoon characters, or food items such as zongzi (glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves.) In others, “Tank Man” himself has been replaced by a cartoon or video-game character, a Lego man, a “grass-mud horse,” or another animate or inanimate object. Typographic and ideographic tricks also abound: strings of Chinese characters such as 占占人 and 占占占人 have been used to represent a person standing in front of two, three, or more tanks, while the combinations 占占点 and 占点占 resemble a person being crushed by tanks. In June of 2012, a Sohu Weibo user had their account blocked after posting this extraordinary string of characters representing a person being crushed under four tanks: 占占占占人 占占占点 占占点占 占点占占 点占占占 灬占占占占. Continue reading →

Source: China Digital Times (2/13/23)
Word of the Week: Huminerals (人矿 RÉN KUÀNG)
Posted by Alexander Boyd

The new word “humineral” (人矿 rén kuàng) has taken the Chinese internet by storm and is now a sensitive word subject to censorship. First introduced in a now-censored Zhihu post on January 2, 2023, “humineral”—a portmanteau of 人 rén (“person”) and 矿 kuàng (“ore,” “mineral deposit,” or “mine”) in the original Chinese—describes a person relentlessly exploited by society until they are eventually discarded on the refuse pile. The original Zhihu post elucidated 10 tenets of the “humineral,” three of which CDT has translated below:

1. Huminerals: You are a resource, not a protagonist. You are a means, not an end. Your life’s work will go towards the fulfillment of others instead of the pursuit of your own desires.

2. The life of a humineral can be divided into three stages: extraction, exploitation, and slag removal. Investment in your education over your first decade or so is oriented at extracting your potential—turning you into usable ore. The middle decades are a process of exploitation and consumption. When you’re finally useless, they’ll use the least polluting method possible to dispose of you.

8. Huminerals power the motors that turn the wheels of history. Huminerals have few other choices: either fuel history’s engine, or be ground beneath its wheels. Of course the inverse is true. If huminerals were to stop propelling history, then those other huminerals who abstained would not be crushed. Yet there are always huminerals who see more value in a lifetime of being fuel than to risk being flattened.  [Chinese] Continue reading →