CRITICISM OF PRC

DDI SS MMVII
KATZ

PRC Kritik Shell

A. The phrase peoples republic of china is a corruption of language designed to mask
violence and tyranny
VANDERMEER 5 (Jeff, Author, has taught writing at Trinity Prep School," Jan 26,
http://vanderworld.blogspot.com/2005/01/swan-song-of-octopus.html )
Because what concerns us as writers and readers? The words .

The words, and the power that they have, the power to
move us and the power to make us laugh, cry, shout, fling the book across the room - and the power that they have to
change the way we think. Or the power that they have to make us not think, to bedazzle and
hypnotise and redefine the redefinitions until all meaning is bleached from the language. To
make us ignore what lies behind the words. "Political language -- and with variations this is true
of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". So the bloody
deaths of families in cars are referred to as 'incidents', as if they are nothing more than a drunken scuffle in a queue for a taxi, cities are sanitised and smart bombs fall with
precision, children are killed in the name of various gods, hands are wrung over collateral damage, and everyone, on every side, tell us that they're doing whatever they are
doing in the name of freedom, because we all know that freedom is good - how could it not be - and therefore if we're doing things in the name of freedom they must be...good
things. Doubleplus good.
So torture becomes officially defined as only an act that leads to death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function. Which gives men of

The murderous
oligarchs of China rule a People's Republic which is neither and which means that anyone who
opposes them is an enemy of the people by definition, and if you call legislation the Patriot Act then what does that
imagination and no soul plenty of scope for hours and lifetimes to be spent inside their rooms with bare walls and wires and buckets and chains .

make anyone who argues against it? Exactly. Expect the Loving Family Act and the Honesty Act and perhaps the Kind To Fluffy Animals Act to follow.

"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up
all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between
one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and
exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." Use the right words, often enough, and
you've got a bait and switch that means that people can even confuse entire countries with one
another and go to war with one for revenge for the actions of others. You've got people in boxes who can't be
treated as prisoners because they're prisoners of war and can't be treated as prisoners of war because they're not that either, just unprisoners. So
words are debased and degraded to serve these ends, and Orwell's essay shows how language
is a canary, slowly sliding off its perch as we walk step by step deeper into the coal mine. "One
cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and
useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs."

B. Using the capitalized word people to refer to the Chinese justifies censorship,
reinforcing political domination and silences dissent
SCHOENHALS 94 (Michael, Stockholm University, "'Non-People' in the People's Republic of China,"
http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/publications/doc/working_papers/Issue%204%201994%20July%20IUEAWPS%20Schoenhals,
%20Stranahan.pdf )

The People of China (as distinct from "the Chinese") are incapable of self-emancipation. On this
point the CCP Central Propaganda Department is explicit in its instructions to Party censors
noting that the People "easily become ideologically confused" by alternative and heretic
accounts of the truth. "The true history" of post-49 events may only be discussed when the CCP Center judges the timing and setting to
be right. This applies even to works of fiction. In 1983, a censor with a Shanxi publishing firm informed a writer who had submitted a novel set in the
China of the 1950s and 60s that: "The People must be told the true history of the anti-rightism of 1957 and the three bad years, but even so it is (at

The People (not

China's population) are openly masochistic. They will put up with any amount of abuse as long
as their tormentor is a real Communist. In the words of a former President of the CCP Central Party School, describing the
situation in the Henan countryside on the eve of the worst famine in modern Chinese history : Some cadres are hounding the
common people to death. They exploit them, and deprive them of every single possession they
have. They treat them the way Tibetan slave owners treat their slaves, only they don't actually
flay them. When they don't beat the masses, they curse them. They're even worse than the Japanese. . . . And still [the common people] don't
rebel.
No wonder the Party loves the People! Here is a semantic entity that by definition is
incapable of rebelling against the CCP. In the same way that a member of a silent majority
changes her status the instant she opens her mouth to protest an injustice, a member of the
People joins the ranks of the non-People if she rebels against a Party cadre who treats her
least for the moment) inadvisable to take the wraps off everything just like that and to write it up in the form of an expos." (37)

(38)

CRITICISM OF PRC

DDI SS MMVII
KATZ

"worse than the Japanese."

1960: I Think Correct Thoughts, Therefore I Am"Humanity" (renlei) constitutes a subject matter on which leading CCP figures discourse only on the rarest of occasions. The
official Party newspaper has also used the word sparingly, and mostly in quite narrow contexts. In the 1950s, "humanity" figured in the Chinese media mainly in the contexts of
the international peace movement ("The Common Hope of Humanity" was the title of one People's Daily editorial devoted to the movement in 1957) and Soviet proposals to stop
the testing of nuclear bombs ("The Intuitive Knowledge of Humanity Must Emerge Victorious" and "The Gospel of Humanity" are the titles of two People's Daily editorials on
this topic from 1957 and 1958, respectively). In the following rare digression on what it means to be "human," the speaker is Mao Zedong's close comrade-in-arms Marshal Lin
Biao. Lin was by his own admission not a talented speaker, and it is unlikely that he wrote the notes for this speech from 1960 himself. But a transcript of it was subsequently
published in his name and circulated inside and outside the PLA for "study and emulation." As might have been expected from someone who is on record as having called a
"revolution in one's thinking" the "most basic of that which is the most basic, the very core of that which is at the very core, and the very soul of that which is the very soul," the
idea of thinking or thought (sixiang) is of central importance to Lin: Thought, one could say, is the distinguishing feature of humanity. Only humans think. Thinking is

what distinguishes humans from animals. Human, of course, does here not refer to individuals in isolation. Humans are social beings, they make tools, and they
think. Humans have a pair of hands, but in the absence of a brain, in the absence of thought, those hands are unable to create. Hands without a brain

In the absence of correct thought, it is impossible to organize

a [political] party bringing together all the heroes and braves [yingxiong haohan]. There will be
no party, and no correct [political] movement . This will all become impossible.(39) The simple distinction
are unable to do anything, and will produce nothing.

between thinking humans and non-thinking animals is blurred just slightly when Lin goes on from here to speak of lowering and raising the
requirements for being human. In the following passage, a distinction between "vulgar" and "lofty" humans is introduced, again linked solely to their

thought: Having thought is one of the main requirements [tiaojian] for being human. The more we lower this requirement, the more we
become vulgar [diji] humans; the more we raise this requirement, the more we become lofty [gaoji] humans. We Chinese, if we want to stand at the
forefront of the world, and not resign ourselves to a backward position, then we must raise the level of our thought. Raising the level of our thought is
the most important thing we can to in order to raise the position of our nation. (40) If "thought" at this point were to be equated with "education" or
"high moral standards," then Lin's argument might still be regarded as conventional, allowing for some friendly interpretation of ambiguous passages.
But Lin's "thought" is something out of the ordinary: But the thought we have in mind is not ordinary thought the thought of the natural sciences but

Political thought and apolitical thought are two different things, and we are not
referring to that apolitical thought, but to political thought. . . . In its entirety, we call this kind
of political thought of ours class thought or the thought of class struggle.(41)
political thought.