Decoding China’s doublespeak

13:53Krassi Ivanova Twigg:And that's why all the Chinese leaders after him has come up with their own personal thought. We had the Deng Xiaoping thought, which is socialism with Chinese characteristics.

14:11Krassi Ivanova Twigg:And his successor, Zhang Zemin, would have three represents.

14:22Krassi Ivanova Twigg:And then his successor, Hu Jintao, will have the theory called Scientific Outlook of Development. And then Xi Jinping, yeah, the Xi Jinping Thought, but the full name of it is called Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era. The new era of Chinese culture, Where does Xi Jinping? Oh my God, it's too long. So that's why it's like...

14:53Tom Lam:Even you get it wrong. Yeah.

14:56Krassi Ivanova Twigg:So the full name is

15:03Krassi Ivanova Twigg:习近平生新时代中国特色社会主义思想, which is very long and mouthful.

15:06Tom Lam:There's another example that keeps popping up, and it's translated in our work in monitoring. community with a shared future for humankind, another kind of mouthful phrase. And it's to do with China seeing itself as the leader of the global South in a supposedly multi-polar world, where China being Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, is this kind of superpower magnet attracting these constellation of nations. It's a bit vague in English though. What's in the original?

15:36Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Chinese leaders want to present themselves as a thought leader and a philosophical king. Like the Xi Jinping thought, he coined his name in the thought because he wanted to position himself as the same left as Mao. And since Mao and Deng, we haven't seen a concrete world view. And Xi came up with this idea to share this destiny of mankind with other countries.

16:12Krassi Ivanova Twigg:It shows the ambition of Xi wanting to cement his legacy at the same level as Mao, as well as a worldview that could be competing with the U.S. But somehow, I guess, when you're being too abstract and too sophisticated, it's hard to attract audience beyond its country borders.

16:38Tom Lam:So they can congratulate themselves on being smart and sophisticated. But when the message is lost in translation, it kind of defeats the purpose of the communication, really.

16:51Krassi Ivanova Twigg:At the end of the day, what Chinese leaders value is authority and legitimacy. And so the nature of the CCP is not a democratic party and it doesn't need to communicate with the people.

17:08Tom Lam:It doesn't need to win voters.

17:10Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Their intention, I think, is more to present itself as the leader of the country, as well maybe even the world, as they come up with these broad, grand, abstract philosophical ideas of their shared destiny, even though it doesn't have much substantial meaning.

17:35Tom Lam:You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring.

17:43Tom Lam:If we look at the building blocks of these phrases, they tend to be made out of four characters, and they're very idiomatic in nature. And this is the thing about Chinese language, it has so many such idioms, and it all goes back to the ancient language. And there are these wonderful expressions, which is one reason why studying Chinese is so much fun, like admiring flowers while riding a horse, which means basically Mission Impossible, you can't pay attention to the details, or playing the lute to a cow, which is very similar in spirit to the biblical casting pearls before swine. So these four character idioms, they are very important kind of linguistic scaffolding of the concepts we are talking about today.

18:30Tom Lam:Would you agree?

18:31Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, definitely. I think some statistics say Chinese language has more than 50 ,000 idioms. A lot of them actually came from ancient texts, such as Zi Ji, which is the first history text in Chinese history written around 9 BCE. And then they came from historical events, some of them being important historical figures. and so there's a lot of like a rich cultural and historical reference in many of them. And people like to use them in their literacy works to show them like I'm educated and...

19:14Tom Lam:To show your linguistic prowess.

19:16Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, and it's also very good when it's used to make things a bit ambiguous to get the poetic feeling and in international relations the ambiguity also can use as a tool to maneuver, as you can see in Wang Yirubio's case.

19:36Tom Lam:What you just described, this kind of ambiguity, reminded me to my favorite teacher in ancient Chinese who was saying in order to translate the ancient Chinese text, you've got to meditate. This kind of translation work is meditation. It's almost this kind of philosophical thinking process to get the meaning, to feel it almost. And it strikes me it's an incredible contrast, really, when you compare this kind of level of sophistication to the language that Donald Trump uses, which is the exact opposite, kind of very simple, almost childlike, but very effective in terms of pressing the right buttons in the intended audience.

20:16Tom Lam:But with the Chinese diplomatic language, you almost see this effort to go back to the ancient script. It's like some kind of a stamp of legitimacy, this level of sophistication and nuance?

20:28Krassi Ivanova Twigg:I think it's because of the stark differences between the Chinese and American system. In the Chinese authoritarian system, the more sophisticated the leader looks, the more legitimacy and authority they could project. Whereas in the US political system, because it's a democratic system, you need to connect to the voters, especially when you are a populist figure. you need to use your language as simple as possible. That results in a very different kind of way of using language in their political messaging in the US and China.

21:05Tom Lam:Very different. But then when we look at how things are translated into Chinese, and this is another fun example from my university days when I was studying Chinese, not only the original meaning is not lost but extra meaning is added and the result can be really fun if you take coca-cola and the way it's well not translated transliterated cacao color but there's an effort to create this meaning and it's tasting good and bringing joy even the original doesn't have that or vitamin wei sheng su which means a substance to preserve of life. You know, these are not simple transliterations. They sound close to the original, but they also convey something new.

21:52Tom Lam:So a lot of thought goes into these.

21:54Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, I think the ke le example is a very good one, because if you hear that in Chinese, you would definitely want to buy. I think it's kind of in line with the traditional Chinese principle of translations. Back in the late 19th century, when a lot of Chinese intellectuals were hungry for new Western ideas, they came up with the three principles of translation. 信, 雅, 打. 信 means faithfulness. 雅 means elegance. And 打 means expressiveness. So faithfulness means that translation should be faithful to their original meaning. Elegance means the translation must be aesthetically pleasing. and the expressiveness means the translation should be intelligible and in accordance with the language rules of the original text.

22:49Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Wei Shen Shu is a good example because it's like preserving life. It's a very good translation, I would say, in line with the Xin Yada principles.

23:00Tom Lam:But these principles, this kind of reminds me, and it must come from the same idea of what's at the bottom of the majority of Chinese characters, which are idiophonograms, meaning one component of this character has the clue about the meaning and the other component has the clue about the sound. So this kind of amalgamation of meaning and sound. Like if we have an example, the character for mother, ma, has woman on the left hand side and horse on the right. So the woman has the clue that this is a mother and the horse is just the sound. Unless there is a hint that women are supposed to work as hard as horses.

23:37Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, I think the Chinese language is a very interesting language because there are a lot of idiograph and pictograph. Ma, which is the one you just suggest. I think the pronunciation came before the creation of the character. When there's baby, ma, ma, ma, it's like similar to any other language. ma is kind of related to mother because the baby could pronounce when they first speak. That's why they put the ma, like the horse.

24:10Tom Lam:Like the horse, but it's not very flattering.

24:12Krassi Ivanova Twigg:It's not. Actually, there are some feminists saying that a lot of Chinese characters with negative meaning has the nu, which is female in it. For example, nu, which means slave, is a woman with you, meaning like again. So jian, which means evil. It also has like a nu zipang, which is a female character.

24:38Tom Lam:So all these negative concepts have got woman in there.

24:41Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, some feminists actually say that there should be a reform to correct this perceived sexist undertone in this character. But I think it wouldn't be easy because some of these characters have been used for more than 3 ,000 years.

24:57Tom Lam:But there's something else that I came across. This desire to, instead of translate, stick to the Chinese, you know, pin in the Chinese transliteration system for certain things like the year of the dragon. The Chinese became reluctant to translate this wonderful mythical Chinese beast into this horrible thing called dragon.

25:21Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yeah, I think in recent years, we see a lot of Chinese media using the word long, which is the pronunciation of the Chinese dragon, instead of dragon, which is usually seen as evil. Dragon is the one who should be killed because they would breathe fire. And then Chinese dragon never hurt anyone. So it's a kind, majestic, mythical animal that represent China because Chinese people call themselves the descendants of the long. So they didn't want to associate with the Western dragon, which are evil.

26:00Tom Lam:So this is an attempt to avoid this process of losing the meaning in translation. And they're suggesting we're not going for the year of the dragon, it's the year of the lung. Have there been other examples like that?

26:14Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Yes. In recent years, China started using the Mandarin pronunciation of Tibet, to refer to the Tibetan majority autonomous region because Tibet is a Western translation firstly, and then it has a colonial undertone. And at the same time, I think China wants to proclaim its sovereignty over the region. So that's why they're using the Chinese pronunciation, Sijang, to replace the Western name, which is Tibet. During the visit, she met with representatives of officials aiding Sijang's development, regional leaders, and veteran comrades. He also met with representatives from the police, legal workers, patriotic religious figures, and monastery management committees.

27:10Tom Lam:So by giving it the Chinese name, Tibet is now China.

27:13Krassi Ivanova Twigg:Exactly, yeah.

27:15Tom Lam:How tricky must it be for you when you're doing this job to kind of come across these really ambiguous, full of nuance, phrases, and you kind of almost feel like you have to provide lots of linguistic advisories and lots of footnotes as you go along.

27:31Krassi Ivanova Twigg:I think it's actually the interesting part of the job because sometimes Chinese official readout or political messaging could be very dull and repetitive. And it's only when they use this ambiguous language or some ancient Chinese phrases or idiom that we could read between the lines to see what the subtle meanings behind or what's the intention when they use these phrases. It brings a little bit of joy in our daily routine of reading Chinese documents and statements.

28:14Tom Lam:This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Thank you to Tom Lam for guiding us through the linguistic labyrinth of the Chinese Communist Party. The team behind this episode was exec producer Krista Shaturi, technical producer Elchin Suleymanov, and me, Krasi Ivanova-Twig. The man at the sound desk was Martin Appleby. Thank you from all of us for listening. And if there's another example that has tickled you curiosity that we could shed light on, please get in touch. Our email address is theglobaljigsaw, all one word, at bbc.co.uk.

29:15Tom Lam:a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. ANJ predominantlyrire Natalia