Advertisement

Opinion | To speak up against Western labels, China must first find its own words

  • Whether in differing understandings of ‘democracy’, disagreement over ‘cold war’ or the outright fantasy of Chinese ‘colonialism’, words from the West have trapped China in a linguistic inferno

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
53
Students write Chinese characters on whiteboards at a dictation contest at the Confucius Institute at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia, on February 8, 2017. Photo: TASS via Getty Images

Words matter. But when words fail, they create problems. China faces this challenge with some Western words intended to explain aspects of China. Some words China has adopted into its own language but the West finds this confusing or fails to understand the Chinese context. Some words being thrown at China by the West China considers harmful.

Advertisement

Take how “past tense” is taught in Chinese. The Chinese language does not have a past tense, or any tenses for that matter. But when teaching Western students, many Chinese teachers adopt this term. When students ask how they can express past tense, these teachers say they can just add the Chinese character le (了) to the sentence, to indicate that the action described has already taken place.

The problem is that the Chinese language does not really work like that. There are sentences that describe past events but do not have this character, and sentences that do not describe past events but have this character. Consequently, students are confused even as teachers are trapped into trying to explain “past tense”.

Another example is the word “democracy”. This usually refers to the political system that is safeguarded by the West as a core value. When China uses “democracy” in its official documents, the West treats it with scepticism, to put it mildly. But it helps to understand the context.

Both “past tense” and “democracy” appear to have entered the Chinese language at least by the turbulent late 19th and early 20th centuries. Motivated to seek change, many Chinese scholars looked to the West and tried to superimpose Western grammatical concepts on the Chinese language, and Western social and political terms on Chinese society.

Advertisement

With China’s economic rise, some words are being thrown up to describe its international relations. One example is “cold war”. Some analysts in the West agree that a second cold war has begun between China and the United States.

30:39

What to expect from China under third-term President Xi Jinping | Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo

What to expect from China under third-term President Xi Jinping | Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo
Advertisement