We are all suffering from the Xi variant
This inability to contend with the most serious of issues facing us is one of the fundamental problems in Western society. We shy away from anything of substance, instead forever indulging in trivialities.
There aren’t many cognates between English and Chinese. They do like to say 酷 (kù) though, meaning ‘cool’, but that’s about the only one that springs to mind.
Indeed, the languages are so far apart on the family tree that even thinking about learning Mandarin for any non-native speaker can induce a severe headache.
While in English we must watch our Ps and Qs, in Chinese you need to watch a whole lot more. If I say ‘māma mà mǎ ma?’ (‘妈妈骂马吗?’), I am asking whether mother is insulting a horse. It’s designed to boggle the mind.
Words matter a great deal to the Chinese. For some perverse reason, they generally take pride in the language’s difficulty, which is primarily rooted in its use of characters. Chinese, as far as I understand it, is the only modern language not to use an alphabet of some kind. From the perspective of a language learner it is linguistic sadism, pure and simple.
Once upon a time – around about the same period when China was undergoing its ‘century of humiliation’ where things got so bad for the Middle Kingdom that even the Italians and Austro-Hungarians were muscling in – Chinese reformers were keen to adopt a Latin alphabet. It never happened, though they did simplify the characters.
This is better than nothing. Compare, for example, the characters for ‘listen’ in simplified (听) and traditional (聽) scripts, or maybe something quintessentially Chinese: ‘dragon’ (龙 vs 龍).
After all, as time wears on we are finding that we have to listen to the Chinese dragon more and more. Having fed it up on a diet of our money and industrial knowledge, it’s grown at an alarming rate.
Increasingly, the Chinese seek to control our own language too. While they are unlikely to get many loanwords adopted into the Saxon tongue, they can still muzzle us. A work email recently is testament to this. It reminded us in no uncertain terms that we were never to refer to Taiwan as a ‘country’.
Instead, it was merely an ‘island’, ‘province’, or ‘territory’. That this island/province/territory has its own parliament, president, currency and armed forces is neither here nor there: although Taiwan is our natural ally, we must be careful not to upset the omni-offended cadres of Beijing.
The same pussyfootedness applies across the board now. Witness how our new breed of Covid-19 is not the ‘Xi’ variant but instead ‘Omnicron’. Or the lengths Hollywood goes to ensuring its films get past Chinese censors.
Or, for a more recent example, the grovelling apology offered by JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, after quipping that the company would outlast the Chinese Communist Party. Desperate to placate the Chi-coms, he pathetically weaseled the other day: “I regret my recent comment because it’s never right to joke about or denigrate any group of people, whether it’s a country, its leadership, or any part of a society and culture.”
As an investment banker we should not expect Mr Dimon to have an ounce of moral fibre in his body, but the point remains: Western crony-capitalists will do anything to avoid incurring the ire of the descendants of Mao. The West’s economic and financial elites are utterly under the thumb of Beijing. This goes a long way in explaining our spectacular failure to deal with the issue of the red dragon.
This inability to contend with the most serious of issues facing us is one of the fundamental problems in Western society. We shy away from anything of substance, instead forever indulging in trivialities.
Yet ultimately this is not a problem of linguistics; we have the words to do the job. It’s just that we no longer have any principles to guide us. It’s the equivalent of rocking up to a battle completely unarmed.
Yet, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum. Many appear to regard the great gaping chasm where our Christian moral framework once stood to be nothing worth worrying about whatsoever. ‘Just, like, whatever, man.’
The minor flaw is that others do care. As American dominance wanes and China’s rise continues unimpeded – nay, hastened by the West’s idiocy – we may one day come to realise that we collectively squandered the greatest civilisational legacy bestowed unto any people in history.
Very, very not kù, as they say on the streets of China.
