Last week, China’s State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (?????????? / ??????????) announced a policy that bans the use of wordplay in media and ads ostensibly to “popularize and standardize the use of the national common language, a heritage of Chinese traditional culture”. Whilst this would not affect some marketing industries in use, such as those that make use of the best seo company in usa, or indeed firms more local to home, but many other firms who specialize in social media advertisement and other forms online may have issues with this. Since Chinese languages, like Mandarin, have a rich linguistic tradition of wordplay based on homophonic puns that, unlike puns in English, are much more ubiquitous and always seem clever and never groan or eye-roll inducing, the edict at first glance seems to be more ridiculous than SAPPRFT’s ban on time travel in TV shows and movies. It might not be entirely ill-conceived.
The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time explains one example specifically cited by the Chinese version of the FCC as an “indiscriminate use” of language:
“[T]he phrase “????” was used in ads promoting tourism to Shanxi province, widely seen as the cradle of Chinese culture. The slogan – translated as “Shanxi, a land of splendors”– was a pun on the Chinese saying, “????,” which means perfection. The ads swapped out the character “?” for a homonym, “?,” a character often used to represent Shanxi.”
Shanxi Promotional Video:
The slogan was selected in December 2012 by the Shanxi Tourism Bureau after four months of competition and was heavily promoted on CCTV and other media outlets. In July 2013, it was reported a fourth grade student mistook the tourism slogan for the idiom meaning “perfection”. The clever phrase was deemed to “rape” the idiom and sullied Chinese culture. This pun control can be seen as part of the Central Government’s efforts to promote standard Mandarin.
Many are sympathetic to the government’s concern about the irregular and inaccurate use of characters, especially among children, but find it at odds with linguistic appreciation and development. Yi Ming (?? / ??), a contributor to China Art Newspaper (????? / ?????), praises the slogan as a clever use of traditional culture for a commercial purpose and highlights the charm of Chinese characters. Li Zhiqi (???) chairman of marketing group CBCT, linguistic innovation should be encouraged and new idioms created. An editorial in Xinhua does not believe in a “one size fits all” prohibition. The author calls for the SAPPRFT to “seriously listen to the reasonable opinions of language scholars and the public” and believes that people need to keep an open mind about language so that it can develop.
The rule naturally echoes efforts by the government to censor online taboo topics, names, and words which Chinese netizens often circumvent by slyly hiding behind puns. For example, when the government censored the word “harmonious” (?? / ??, pronounced héxié) online because netizens began using it as a euphemism for censorship (which the government justifies in order to promote a “Socialist Harmonious Society“), “river crab” (?? / ??, pronounced héxiè) was used as a substitute. Dissident artist Ai Weiwei later visualized the phrase in an installation and invited supporters to feast on river crabs to protest the government’s demolition of his Shanghai studio.
David Moser, academic director for CET Chinese studies at Beijing Capital Normal University, tells The Guardian, “It could just be a small group of people, or even one person, who are conservative, humourless, priggish and arbitrarily purist, so that everyone has to fall in line…But I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies. It sounds too convenient.”