Beware of any escalatory rhetoric over South China Sea situation
- Trite tropes, metaphors and analogies used to describe what is going on may be more misleading and dangerous than apt or enlightening
Following Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Thatcher famously disdained the use of metaphor in political discourse. She believed politicians should be pragmatic and factual. But like the 17th century philosopher, her distrust of a rhetorical flourish didn’t stop her from turning to it when the need arose.
After all, Hobbes’ most famous work, Leviathan, used a biblical monster to stand for an absolutist government. Thatcher’s famous “the lady’s not for turning” was a clever play on “U-turn” commonly used by the news media, and which she promised she wouldn’t do in her neoliberal economic revolution then blamed for causing skyrocketing unemployment.
Besides being a metaphor, it was also a reference to The Lady’s Not for Burning, a then well-known play by the poet Christopher Fry about a witchcraft trial. My enemies and critics, Thatcher was telling them, you can forget about burning me or making me a scapegoat for your lack of direction and conviction.
Most politicians, democratic or authoritarian, however, have no qualms about using rhetorical devices to manipulate public opinion. These are often far more effective than outright lies.
A lie either convinces or it doesn’t. However, rhetorical devices such as metaphors, analogies and tropes, when they are well-crafted and effectively used, lead the targeted audience to reach the intended conclusion or conviction all by their own trains of thought, like well-laid rail tracks, to their predetermined destination. That is far more convincing in the long run.
US-led alliance adds to Beijing’s challenges in East and South China Seas
Using one thing to stand for something else, which may otherwise be completely unrelated is how metaphors work. That’s why the mental and linguistic connections they make can be pedagogical and enlightening, or misleading and dangerous, depending on what that “something else” turns out to be.
Now, consider the way some Very Important People have been discussing conflicts and face-offs in the South China Sea and Taiwan with leading metaphors, just like leading questions. Note that metaphors don’t have to be good, literary or even original to be effective; sometimes quite the opposite, especially in populist politics.
Admiral John Aquilino, the commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific, has accused China of pursuing a “boiling frog” strategy, by raising tensions in the region with progressively more dangerous military activities. Other Western politicians and pundits have described the same alleged Chinese strategy as “salami slicing”.
Wu Shicun, founding president of China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies, has warned of a “domino effect” if more countries follow the Philippines’ example by seeking international arbitration over rival claims in the region. He said Beijing must “let them know that there’s a price to pay if the Philippines takes the step [of a second arbitration], not merely at sea but also in every aspect of China-Philippines relations”. “A price to pay” is another trite metaphor, but a metaphor still.
In Taiwan, independence advocates or secessionists openly discuss jiàn dú, which literally means independence by a “gradualistic” approach. It may not be a metaphor − though every Chinese character, in its ancestral pictorial meaning, is arguably a buried or forgotten metaphor − but it is similar in meaning to such common metaphors as the Chinese cán shí, meaning “a silkworm nibbles” or the English “salami slicing”.
Clever, literary or creative metaphors can help you see things you didn’t see before and extend your mental horizon. Generally, though, trite and cliched ones, well-loved by politicians and pundits, tend to do the opposite, which may be exactly why they are used.
Here I am less interested in whether those trite metaphors − frog boiling, dominoes, salami slicing − are apt or misleading in describing the current dangerous situation in the South China Sea. Rather, it’s their implicit aim in pretending to warn against something being done without our being aware because it’s supposedly gradual.
The implication is that they need to be “nipped in the bud”, apologies for yet another cliched metaphor! Implicitly, they are calling for an escalation.
