Editor’s Note: The Word of the Week comes from China Digital Space’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.
If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the CDT editors at CDT [at] chinadigitaltimes [dot] net.
官二代 (guān èr dài): governing second generation
Just as families hand down wealth from generation to generation, they also pass down the keys to political power.
One prime example of this is Bo Guagua, the son of former Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Chongqing Bo Xilai. Photographs of the younger Bo embracing British women in various degrees of inebriation have recently made the rounds of the Chinese blogosphere.
Sometimes the children of officials are referred to as princelings or members of the Crown Prince Party.