David Bandurski of China Media Project has written a satirical piece in the style of George Carlin, who died last month, for The China Beat blog. The piece, according to the blog, is a riff on the idea of banned words in China:
There are more than 40,000 characters in the Chinese language. Fortunately, basic literacy requires only about three to four thousand of these words, which makes it much easier for us to keep an eye on the ones that matter. The most important thing is not the characters themselves, but rather how they are put together. Words are like chemicals. You have to mix them carefully. I’m sure you would agree that’s just good science.
Take, for example, the character for “people,” min (民). When we place it behind the character for “person,” ren (人), we get a very nice word that means generally “the people.” We can use it in sentences like, “The Party cannot do without the people and the people cannot do without the Party,” in which the Party and the people are more or less interchangeable.
On the other hand, if we take this harmless character min, and place behind it the character for “host” or “master,” zhu (主), the result, “democracy,” is a dangerous discharge that upsets the harmony of our first sentence. One simple character rips the Party and the people apart. We must not let words come between us, dear citizens.
This word, “democracy,” is a perilous word that must be handled with great care. The only ones we can trust to use “democracy” safely are trained Party scholars. They are able to neutralize the word by sealing it up in proper contexts. Phrases like “intra-Party democracy” and “developing socialist democratic politics” are some of the more advanced ways the Party has managed to quarantine this word and keep all of you safe. On the Web, we have more sophisticated technical means of protecting you – by blocking, for example, searches of words like “constitutional democracy.”
