{"id":172729,"date":"2014-05-13T16:35:56","date_gmt":"2014-05-13T23:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=172729"},"modified":"2014-05-13T16:35:56","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T23:35:56","slug":"catch-22-enters-chinese-lexicon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2014\/05\/catch-22-enters-chinese-lexicon\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Catch-22’ Enters the Chinese Lexicon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catch-22<\/em><\/a>, the title and starring-rule of Joseph Heller’s 1961 satire of bureaucratic folly in\u00a0the U.S. military, has become a\u00a0commonly-used English idiom to describe logically circular and contradictory rules. At Tea Leaf Nation, Rachel Lu explains that\u00a0a translation of the term (\u7b2c22\u6761\u519b\u89c4) is now taking hold in\u00a0China, a\u00a0land rife with bureaucracy and\u00a0liberally\u00a0decorated with red tape<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

[…] A recent search on\u00a0Baidu<\/a>, China’s largest search engine,\u00a0found\u00a0over 4.9 million\u00a0mentions of the term, which literally translates as “military rule clause 22.”<\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0For a petitioner lining up outside Beijing’s State Bureau of Letters and Calls (the highest rung in the petitioning ladder), or a newspaper editor grappling with the baffling intention of the latest censorship directive, or a migrant worker sifting through layers of bureaucratese to decipher the conditions he must fulfill to gain an urban residency status, a different culprit bedevils daily life: the onerous laws and nonsensical policies baked into many forms of Chinese social control.<\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0In\u00a0April 2010, the southern city of Kunming released a\u00a0draft regulation<\/a>\u00a0that forbade employers from hiring migrants who did not hold a residency permit there. Yet in order to obtain the permit, the regulation decreed, a migrant must first hold a steady job. With its circuitous logic, the regulation would have essentially banned millions of migrants from settling in the city. It\u00a0ignited<\/a>\u00a0a fierce public outcry,\u00a0prompting newspaper editorials with\u00a0headlines<\/a>\u00a0such as, “Does Kunming have its own version of Catch-22?” City authorities eventually\u00a0revised<\/a>\u00a0the regulation in its official version the following year, granting migrants a short window between finding housing and employment and applying for a residency permit.<\/p>\n

In another case, the Fengtai district government in Beijing\u00a0ruled<\/a>\u00a0in March 2011 that individuals under collective residency status — a type that registers one under a school or company as opposed to under one’s own name — were not allowed to purchase apartments in that district. Affected citizens were incensed,\u00a0pointing out<\/a>\u00a0that according to existing law, an apartment is required before one is eligible to convert a collective residency status to an independent one. Even Xinhua, the Communist Party’s official wire service,condemned<\/a>\u00a0the policy, calling it “a Catch-22-style ruse” in an editorial, and wondered if “certain uninformed officials pulled it out of their heads.” The government later\u00a0rescinded the restriction<\/a>\u00a0under public pressure, though it still excluded those registered under their schools — namely, recent Beijing college graduates from other provinces — from the ranks of local homebuyers. […] [Source<\/strong><\/a>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catch-22, the title and starring-rule of Joseph Heller’s 1961 satire of bureaucratic folly in\u00a0the U.S. military, has become a\u00a0commonly-used English idiom to describe logically circular and contradictory rules. At Tea Leaf Nation, Rachel Lu explains that\u00a0a translation of the term (\u7b2c22\u6761\u519b\u89c4) is now taking hold in\u00a0China, a\u00a0land rife with bureaucracy and\u00a0liberally\u00a0decorated with red tape: […] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":985,"featured_media":172733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10,14744,14745,14746,100,5],"tags":[2650,5162,730,1289,223,14923],"class_list":["post-172729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law","category-level-2-article","category-level-3-article","category-level-4-article","category-politics","category-society","tag-bureaucracy","tag-government-agencies","tag-language","tag-literature","tag-petitioners","tag-regulations","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n'Catch-22' Enters the Chinese Lexicon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2014\/05\/catch-22-enters-chinese-lexicon\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"'Catch-22' Enters the Chinese Lexicon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Catch-22, the title and starring-rule of Joseph Heller’s 1961 satire of bureaucratic folly in\u00a0the U.S. military, has become a\u00a0commonly-used English idiom to describe logically circular and contradictory rules. At Tea Leaf Nation, Rachel Lu explains that\u00a0a translation of the term (\u7b2c22\u6761\u519b\u89c4) is now taking hold in\u00a0China, a\u00a0land rife with bureaucracy and\u00a0liberally\u00a0decorated with red tape: […] […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2014\/05\/catch-22-enters-chinese-lexicon\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"China Digital Times (CDT)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ChinaDigitalTimes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-05-13T23:35:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/catch22.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"189\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"267\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Josh Rudolph\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" 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