The Sin of Words, Part 1

This blog post (or blog post series, if I somehow wrote a second one) has no central idea; I just want to talk about a few personal observations on how people use words. I would say I'm quite sensitive with words, since way too many online conversations on the Chinese Internet has this nasty quality of being a way for people to (literally, as the kids could've said, -) assert dominance. Sometimes they twist logic, sometimes they twist words, anything that could bring down their opponent they will do, and right or wrong doesn't nearly matter as much as any righteous man would like to believe. I'm sick of all this, and that's why I want to try to analyse it and tear it down.

Speaking of words, just about everyone who's grown up in China know about that famous piece by Lu Xun; since it's quite unlikely that I can out-write the master on this topic, I shall quote a part of his piece here:

"Foreign slaves speak foreign languages. If you advocate reading foreign books, you're a foreign slave, and your integrity has collapsed! The value of those foreign books worshipped by slaves with collapsed integrity is clear! But I study foreign languages because it's part of the school curriculum and the government's mandate. Anyone who opposes this is opposing the government. A government-opposing party with no father or ruler deserves to be eliminated by all."

…

"You say Person A has sores. Person A is Chinese, so you’re saying Chinese people have sores. Since Chinese people have sores, and you're Chinese, then you have sores too. Since you also have sores, you're just like Person A. And since you only talk about Person A's sores, it shows your lack of self-awareness. What value do your words still have? If you don't have sores, then you're lying. Traitors are liars, so you are a traitor. I scold traitors, so I am a patriot. The patriot’s words are the most valuable, so my words are correct. Since my words are correct, you are undoubtedly a traitor!"

…

"Person C only talks about revolution for personal gain. If not for personal gain, why would he talk about revolution? I saw with my own eyes 3,791 and a half boxes of cash carried into his house. You disagree? You oppose me? Then you must be his accomplice. Alas, the winds of factionalism and suppression of dissent rage fiercely today, and advocates of Westernization cannot escape blame!"

…

"Don’t use exclamation marks—they can bring about the downfall of the nation. But the few I use are exceptions."

You get to know things that you'd be better off not knowing by staying around on the Internet for way too long. For example, you get to know there are people out there who refuse to take any vaccines; the "anti-vaxxers", as they are called, are people who reject vaccines out of religious reasons, distrust of anything backed by the government, or plain stupidity. There had been news about unvaccinated people carrying disease into countries that had once been free of that disease, and it doesn't matter if they think of themselves as some kind of defender of truth and justice because to people like us who are fine with "normal" (i.e. proven to be effective, like for measles and whooping cough) vaccines their behaviour is like a bunch of irresponsible assholes and we understandably consider them as such.

Now, a very strange phenomenon happened. After the vaccines for COVID-19 has been invented, a lot of people understandably supported getting the vaccine; but the ones who refused it (and let's not forget there were those who refuse to get new shots after it was proven that having the vaccine doesn't necessarily mean you wouldn't have the same symptoms and you wouldn't spread the virus around) were being called as "anti-vaxxers" by the former group of "science-believing" people and was being lunged together with the actual nutjobs. Me myself did not take any COVID-19 vaccines - not even one - and I have my own reasons. The reasons are as follows:

• It was never really required by China's zero-COVID policy (other than local authorities forcing you to take them, which I was lucky enough to successfully dodge). In China, the COVID situation was controlled (or fail to control, as often happened in 2022) by lockdown and restricting movements, permissions for entering spaces are given by having very recent negative PCR test results (back in Shenzhen you were often required to do it every single day), taking vaccines didn't really offer much advantages.
• Despite what you might think, I was planning on getting vaccine, it's just that I don't trust domestic ones and the foreign ones weren't available in China even if you had the money - you need to go to Hong Kong or Macau, where things were slightly different and foreign COVID vaccines were tolerated to be available to the general public. I did plan to go to Hong Kong for this, but due to the reason mentioned above, it didn't really worth the trouble, so I didn't go.

As you can see I'm clearly not against all vaccine as the proper OG anti-vaxxers are, and that's why calling people who don't want to have COVID vaccines as "anti-vaxxers" doesn't sit right with me. The "crime" (obviously not having COVID vaccines is nothing but a personal choice, but to some nutjobs you would seem like a borderline terrorist fully intended on spreading the virus) of not having one kind of vaccine got inflated into the "crime" of not having any vaccine so that the phrase "anti-vaxxer" could be tagged onto you.

I'm genuinely afraid of these conflations. Not just the conflations that are used to putting people down, but also the conflations that put people "up" - I've seen people arguing about whether FSF being an inherently political organization, and the main idea of their argument is that the ideal of FSF is socialist (doubtful, it's more libertarian than anything), thus FSF is something that aligns themselves with socialist ideas, and since they (the people arguing) are themselves socialists (doubtful, as it turns out in many cases it's often power-hungry individuals), not only should FSF's good deed be considered socialism's good deed, FSF should also listen to whatever they say, or else whatever FSF does to not listen to what they say is an opposition to the socialism that supposedly gave birth to all the positive things that they've done throughout the years. It was such a disgustingly disingenious argument, sometimes you just have to stop and appreciate the psychotic antisocial mind that could pull that argument off that effortlessly as if it was another daily walk to the nearest breakfast sandwich joint.

Another thing that has come to my notice is the phenomenon that words can be subjected to the influence of the context they're in; this in my opinion is particularly bad: it means that with enough repetition one could change the meaning of any word they want, especially when it comes to words that describes people.

I should've noticed this sooner, since I've experienced this first hand. Not long after Xi Jinping has risen to power, the word 公知 (short for 公共知识分子 lit. "public intellectuals"), a term that was commonly used to refer to liberals (as in Francis Fukuyama "the end of history" kind of liberal) and liberalism-leaning intellectuals in China in the late 2000s to early 2010s - i.e. during the reign of Hu Jingtao, was stigmatized on a nation-wide scale: at first it was one or two individuals being accused of having a few very radical remarks towards the Chinese and the CCP; then they were constantly tagged as 公知 by nearly everyone on the Internet (it was very big and very sudden - the kind of suddenness that one could reasonably to assume was only possible through massive online psyop); and then gradually, the word 公知, from having this image of liberty-loving knowledgable people who want to bring more freedom to the Chinese people, went to become a derogatory term commonly used on individuals who oppose CCP and are thus traitors to the Chinese people.

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Last update: 2024.10.24