Linguistic ENGINEERING Linguistic ENGINEERING Language and Politics in Mao’s China JI FENGYUAN UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS HONOLULU © 2004 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 05 04 654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ji, Fengyuan. Linguistic engineering : language and politics in Mao’s China / Ji Fengyuan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2536-5 (alk. paper) 1. Language and languages—Political aspects. 2. Linguistic and communism. 3. China—Politics and government—1949–1976. I. Title: Language and politics in Mao’s China. II. Title. P119.32.C6 J5 2003 306.44'951—dc21 2003009984 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Josie Herr Printed by IBT Global Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 I Prelude 1 ◆ Linguistic Engineering: Theoretical Considerations 11 2 ◆ Linguistic Engineering before the Cultural Revolution 42 II Mass Mobilization, Language, and Interpretation, 1966–1968 3 ◆ Mao’s Revolutionary Strategy, 1966–1968: Contexts, Interpretive Principles, and Capitalist Roaders 109 4 ◆ Revolutionary Conformity, Public Criticism, and Formulae 150 5 ◆ Dichotomies, Demons, and Violence 188 III Institutionalizing the Cultural Revolution, 1968–1976 6 ◆ Creating Referents and Controlling the Word 221 7 ◆ Controlling Culture: Literature and Dramatic Art 247 8 ◆ Educating Revolutionaries: The Case of English Language Teaching 265 IV Assessment 9 ◆ China’s Great Experiment: Intensity, Success, and Failure 283 Notes 319 Bibliography 323 Index 343 Acknowledgments In writing this book, I have been blessed with help and support from many sources. I owe particular thanks to Kon Kuiper, who supervised the thesis out of which it has grown. He gave me encouragement and important practical assistance, he inspired my interest in oral formulae, he introduced me to Relevance Theory, and he suggested that the term “linguistic engineering” was an apt description of what I was studying. Other members of the Linguistics Department have played their part. Elizabeth Gordon supervised my early work on English language textbooks in China, and some of that research has proved useful in the different context of this book. Lyle Campbell and Kate Kearns both read parts of my work and gave valuable advice while Kon was overseas. I have been greatly assisted by friends in China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. Sun Xiourong, Liu Minghua, and Li Xing- zhong collected old English language textbooks for me; my well- thumbed copy of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance was a gift from David Weston; Professor Huang Yu gave me a copy of Gao Hua’s fine book on the Rectification movement in Yan’an; Professor Yang Jingnian lent me a very useful Cultural Revolution dictio- nary; You Ji supplied books and articles on the Cultural Revolu- tion and clarified points about Chinese politics; and Susan Bou- terey was an unfailing source of support when I needed it most. Authors often say that their greatest debt is to their families. In my case, this is no conventional piety. I would never have completed the book without their help. My father, Ji Mingshan, and my brother, Ji Cheng, sent me information when I asked for it. My father was also able to clarify points for me in discus- sion, while in his own scholarly life he has been both an inspi- ◆ vii ◆ viii ◆ Acknowledgments ◆ ration and an example. The two people most deeply involved in helping me, however, are my sister, Ji Yiyuan, and my hus- band, Chris Connolly. Yiyuan gave me six months of her life, helping me to look after little Daniel, cooking, cleaning, and doing everything possible to make sure that I had time to write. She was also an invaluable source of advice, and our discussions helped to clarify many issues. Not for the first time, she has been more than a sister to me. Chris shared with Yiyuan the burden of freeing me to write, and after she returned to China he took it all on himself. He has also encouraged the development of my ideas. Whenever I had a new inspiration, he was my initial sounding board; he per- suaded me to read a lot more psychology than I had intended; and when it became clear that an assessment of linguistic engi- neering required historical skills, he was a professionally qual- ified adviser. And, of course, he has polished my English. His love and support have made the book possible. The book has benefited immensely from the assistance of staff associated with University of Hawai‘i Press. Patricia Crosby, executive editor, was a model of courtesy and efficiency as she extracted from me a shorter, less technical, and more stream- lined manuscript. Cheri Dunn, as managing editor, super- intended the publication process expertly. Joanne Sandstrom’s meticulous copyediting produced a cleaner and more stylish text, and Nancy Knight proofread the page proof. Finally, I owe a debt to the librarians at the University of Canterbury, the National Library of Australia, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Their helpfulness greatly speeded my research. Introduction In the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell imagined a future society in which everyone accepted the official ideology and in which punishment and terror were unnecessary. Instead, people were kept under control because they spoke, heard, read, and wrote only a single, specially contrived language—the lan- guage of Newspeak: Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Social- ism. It was expected that Newspeak would finally have superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devo- tees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be liter- ally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by elim- inating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still ◆ 1 ◆ 2 ◆ Introduction ◆ existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellec- tually free”, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity name- less. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary mean- ing of ‘politically equal’, or that free had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. (Orwell 1976 [1949]; 917–918, 924) This passage is not without theoretical problems and equivoca- tions, but it raises important questions about the relationship of language to thought. It also captures the spirit, if not the details, of the type of linguistic engineering that is the subject of this book: a centrally coordinated attempt to remake people’s minds by forcing them to speak and write, as far as possible, in set formulae—carefully crafted words, phrases, slogans, and scripts expressing politically correct thought. Orwell’s principal models were Nazi Germany and, more especially, the Soviet Union. The Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty- Four was his imaginative extension of the officially approved language of those societies (see Steinhoff 1976). But in the very year in which the novel was published, there came into exis- tence a society in which the control of language was even more comprehensive—the People’s Republic of China. There, more- determined attempts were made to extend the use of politicized language into people’s private lives and to turn the whole pop- ulation into “thought police” who monitored words to detect “incorrect” thought.1 These attempts reached their peak in the last ten years of Mao Zedong’s rule, during the Great Proletar- ian Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. China was the laboratory in which Mao conducted easily the biggest experiment in lin- guistic engineering in world history, and one of the most rigor- ◆ Introduction ◆ 3 ously controlled.2 It is an ideal case study for scholars who are interested in the practice of linguistic engineering and who wish to examine its effects on people’s beliefs and ways of thinking. In a loose sense, the term “linguistic engineering” can be applied to any attempt to change language in order to affect attitudes and beliefs. In this sense, linguistic engineering prob- ably exists in all societies. Its current manifestations in the English-speaking world include new coinages and new applica- tions of old words, as well as attempts to eradicate usage that is believed to underpin “offensive” attitudes.