Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies

143 Pages·1995·3.159 MB·English

by  Michael Schoenhals

Doing Things with Words in
Chinese Politics
For my parents
CHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH 41
c I æ INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES
as UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA • BERKELEY
CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES
Doing Things with
Words in Chinese
Politics
Five Studies
MICHAEL SCHOENHALS
A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California,
Berkeley. Although the Institute of East Asian Studies is responsible for the
selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the
opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their
authors.
Correspondence may be sent to:
Ms. Joanne Sandstrom, Managing Editor
Institute of East Asian Studies
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
The China Research Monograph series, whose first title appeared in 1967, is
one of several publications series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian
Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The others include the
Japan Research Monograph series, the Korea Research Monograph series,
the Indochina Research Monograph series, and the Research Papers and Pol­
icy Studies series. A list of recent publications appears at the back of the
book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schoenhals, Michael.
Doing things with words in Chinese politics : five studies /
Michael Schoenhals.
p. cm. — (China research monograph ; 41)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55729-036-9 (pbk.) : $10.00
1. China—Politics and government—1976-----Terminology.
2. Chinese language—Political aspects. I. Title. II. Series:
China research monographs ; no. 41.
DS779.26.S36 1992 92-53463
CIP
Copyright © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California
ISBN 1-55729-036-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-53463
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved.
Contents
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................vii
1. Formalized Language as a Form of Power...........................................1
2. Party Circulars Proscribing and Prescribing Terminology.............31
3. Ghost-Writers: Expressing "The Will of the Authorities".............55
4. Direction of the Press: Hu Qiaomu's 1955B reakfast Chats............79
5. Censorship, Humanities,a nd Social Sciences...................................103
Bibliography.....................................................................................................127
Dr. Michael Schoenhals is a researcher at the Institute of Oriental
Languages, Stockholm University. He is the author of Saltationist
Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward 1958 (1987) and
The Practice behind the 1978 'Truth Criterion" Debate (forthcoming).
Acknowledgments
While living in Beijing in the early eighties, I made friends with a
former cellmate of one of XX's cooks. My work at the time involved
translation and interpreting, and I had become intrigued by the uni­
form way in which Chinese officials expressed themselves. I must
have told my friend about this because one day he presented me
with a book he had picked up at a second-hand bookshop and said,
“You will enjoy reading this!" I did. The book—a desk-top reference
work for propagandists on how to speak and write—made fascinat­
ing reading. I decided then and there that in due course I would use
it as the basis for a study of politics and language in the People's
Republic.
This is the study. It began uninformed by any particular theory
or grand paradigm. In fact, it took quite some time for me to
develop a dear idea of how to understand and represent the material
I had been given. The existing literature on China turned out to
have little to say about the political uses of language, and the litera­
ture on language in politics was rarely ever about China. Eventually,
I discovered that one of the few scholars who had anything enlight­
ening to say about doing things with words in contemporary Chinese
politics was the British anthropologist Maurice Bloch. Chances are he
is not aware of this, since he really writes about the Merina on
Madagascar. But far more than any of the works on propaganda,
persuasion, “hegemonic discourse," and censorship in socialist states
I read, Bloch's writings on political oratory in traditional sodety and
formalized language as a form of power provided me with analytical
and descriptive tools that needed only minor hot-rodding to fit
Chinese realities.
A first draft of the greater part of this study was completed dur­
ing a year as visiting assistant research linguist at the Center for
Vlll Acknowledgments
Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley. For her initial
support and generous encouragement, I wish to express my gratitude
to Joyce Kallgren. Wen-hsin Yeh and Jim Williams impressed upon
me the importance of intellectual rigor; and Annie Chang, C. P.
Chen, Jim Lockie-Brown, Sue Pruyn, Melanie Fields, and Patty Fron-
tiera provided invaluable practical help. During a year as a postdoc­
toral fellow at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian
Research, Harvard University, while working on a related project, I
benefited from the congenial intellectual company of lunch-table reg­
ulars Christina Gilmartin, Merle Goldman, Roderick MacFarquhar,
Jean Oi, Tony Saich, Benjamin Schwartz, Larry Sullivan, Andy
Wälder, and David Zweig. I finalized my study at the Institute of
Asian Research, University of British Columbia, and wish to ack­
nowledge the kind support of its director, Terry McGee.
I have exchanged ideas about politics and language with a
number of Chinese intellectuals. For positive feedback and intellec­
tual stimulus, I first of all want to thank Wang Ruoshui. Sun
Changjiang and Ruan Ming also deserve special thanks for their
readiness to share insights and opinions. I hope my modest attempt
at cultural translation will not disappoint them. I express my grati­
tude for comments on earlier incarnations of this study or parts of it
to Julian Chang, Tim Cheek, John Fincher, Tom Hart, Carol Lee
Hamrin, William Joseph, Thomas Kämpen, Torbjôm Lodén, Michel
Oksenberg, Lars Ragvald, Gilbert Rozman, Hans van de Ven, Alex­
ander Woodside, and Mayfair Yang. For help with locating obscure
material, a very special thanks to Nancy Hearst at the Fairbank
Center Library. Also, many thanks to the helpful staff of the Far
Eastern Library in Stockholm, the Hoover Institution East Asian Col­
lection, the Yenching Library, and the U.B.C. Asian Library. Finally,
I want to thank my editor at the Institute of East Asian Studies,
Joanne Sandstrom, for seeing this manuscript through its production
so quickly and beautifully.
Work on this study was in part supported by a grant from the
Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
(HSFR).
CHAPTER ONE
Formalized Language as a Form of Power
This study is about formalized language in contemporary Chinese
politics. It looks at the way in which formalized language and for­
malized speech acts help constitute the structure of power within
China's political system. The word formalized here refers to a partic­
ular quality of linguistic "impoverishment." Unlike the language of
everyday speech acts, the language of politics can be shown to
include only a selection of the many different kinds of statements,
propositions, and incantations distinguished by logicians, grammari­
ans, rhetoricians, and other students of utterance and meaning. The
language of politics is a restricted code, one in which options with
respect to formal qualities such as vocabulary, style, syntax, and
trope are far more restricted than in ordinary language.
Formalization is part of politics everywhere, and comparative stu­
dies have shown a striking recurrence of similar patterns of speech
norms for politics in totally different cultures.1 Among New Guinea
highlanders and Tswana chiefs, as well as among members of the
Japanese Diet and White House "spokespersons," it manifests itself
in the form of partial vocabularies. Certain words are taboo, and cer­
tain figures of speech are avoided at all costs. American politicians
today prefer to speak of "the l word" rather than spell out "liberal"
and to speak of "the r word" rather than spell out "recession."
Members of the White House staff do not refer to the American
president as someone who is "frank" since—as one of the president's
chief aides once told a startled speech writer—"the use of T wifi be
frank' carries with it the suggestion that our president is not always
frank, which is untrue as we know."2 Aside from the taboo words
1 Maurice Bloch, ed.. Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society (London:
Academic Press, 1975), introduction, 13-14.
2 Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Ufe in the Reagan Era
2 Formalized Language as a Form of Power
and taboo expressions conspicuously absent, there are the verbal con­
densation symbols that are present everywhere—names, words,
phrases, and maxims that stir vivid impressions and involve the
listener's most basic values.3 In the United States words such as
“communist" and “terrorist" trigger conditioned responses. In
Sweden the public never get tired of hearing elected representatives
utter their magic spells in defense of the nation's “neutrality" and
“vàlfârd." In George Orwell's ironic characterization clichés like these
are devices with which a politician reduces the state of consciousness
of his audience, “and this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.“4
In premodem China political philosophers studied language for­
malization extensively. In the Analects Confucius argued that when
names are not correct—and what is said is therefore not
reasonable—the affairs of state will not culminate in success, and the
common people will not know how to do what is right. Conse­
quently, “the Prince is never casual in his choice of words.“5 Succes­
sive imperial dynasties institutionalized complex systems of language
formalization that included the compilation of official lists of taboo
characters (bihui). For example, in the early 1850s the Taiping
Court—or “insurgents" in Manchu terminology—banned all use of
the characters sang (funery) and si (death). In Taiping texts “fun­
erals" (sangshi) are hence referred to as “weddings" (xishi), and the
expression “prior to his death" (siqian ) is replaced by “prior to his
birth" (shengqian ).6 In Taibei officials with the “National Govern­
ment" still go to great lengths to avoid the use of words already
appropriated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or otherwise
tainted with “bandit" overtones. Even the mainland term for formu­
lations as such is shunned and a synonym used in its place. “We
know what they mean," a Guomindang propaganda cadre once
(New York: Random House, 1990), 120.
3 For a discussion of verbal condensation symbols, see Doris A Gräber, Verbal
Behaviour and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 289-321.
4 George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus, eds.. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4: In
Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1968), 136.
1 Analects, 12, iii, 5-6.
4 Wenzhaibao 478 (1987): 7. Use of "prior to his birth" has persisted and is now ac­
cepted by native speakers as the idiomatic way of saying "while so-and-so was still
alive"!