Language Police Put Out the Word That West Isn’t Best

From the paramilitary riot squads to the street-side grannies of the neighborhood watch committees, Chinese citizens have plenty of reminders to toe the line.

And now, with the language police out in force, they had better watch their etymologies too.

In recent months, most major cities have launched campaigns or legislation to stamp out commercial names deemed politically “unhealthy” or harmful to “socialist ethics.” In Beijing alone, officials have inspected 20,000 companies, 2,000 of which have been fined and ordered to change their names.

According to State Administration for Industry and Commerce statistics, about 36% of existing Chinese trademarks bear foreign-sounding names, which are especially fashionable among merchants aiming at upscale clients in major cities.

The current campaign to cleanse China’s language and signboards of Western borrowings is the latest government countermeasure against the tide of foreign influence.

With Communist ideology largely discredited, Beijing’s regime is attempting to assert its authority by “manipulating the language as a public symbol of a moral state,” according to professor Thomas C. Bartlett, a Chinese-language specialist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Communist Party officials are concerned that many Chinese equate modernity and quality with the West and its merchandise. Such attitudes, says Bartlett, are part of “a deep ambiguity about China’s relationship to the rest of the world, deriving from traditional views about China’s cultural superiority.”

On the streets in China, the signs of the times are changing. Gilded wooden placards with elegant calligraphy hanging in front of old stores such as the Hall of Shared Benevolence (an herbal apothecary), the Forest of Skill and Virtue (a vegetarian restaurant) or the Abode of the Six Musts (a pickle shop) look like dinosaurs among the gaudy neon marquees.

Transliterations of Holiday’s, Richmond and Las Vegas pack signboards on Beijing’s main commercial avenues. Even more common are companies and brand names such as Yingkelai and Mengnisha--transliterations of foreign words that do not exist but sound impressively foreign to Chinese ears.

Some merchants try to make a yuan off China’s past, with such names as the Imperial Entertainment Palace, the Royal Beauty Salon or Gentry brand shirts.

Officials were particularly outraged by businesses called Formosa--the name Portuguese colonialists gave the island of Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province. On state-run television, commercial authorities in coastal Jiangsu province berated the owner of a restaurant named Napoleon.

Ironically, Napoleon brand is one of many imported cognacs selling briskly in China. McDonald’s and Benetton are not likely to be forced to change their names. In official eyes, even worse than foreigners are the Chinese who imitate them.

Party officials also criticize the infiltration of slang from Hong Kong and Taiwan into the mainland lexicon. The spread of Sinicized versions of such words as “taxi,” “cell phone,” “office” and “cool” are seen not as linguistic contributions from the vanguard of the Chinese cultural sphere, but as “colonization” of the language by foreign or rebel-held territories.

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In March, five delegates petitioned China’s congress to draft a law to maintain the country’s linguistic purity. One of the delegates, Beijing University language professor Jin Kaicheng, argued that “confusion and pollution in the language is harmful to national dignity,” while keeping Chinese free of Westernisms and vulgar slang “is an important reflection of patriotism.”

Chinese trademark authorities also have joined in the crackdown, refusing more than 50 domestic and foreign trademark applications between May 1995 and April 1996 because of alleged violations of Chinese trademark law, according to the official New China News Agency.

A commerce official said the trademarks contained “words or pictures that promote or degrade professional killers, American Indians, bodhisattva, the queen and the Mafia.” The official did not specify which could legally be promoted or degraded.

Kuhn, a scholar of Chinese language, culture and martial arts, is a researcher with The Times’ Beijing Bureau.