In my Chinese politics class we are reading and discussing the new book by Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China. It is a thorough and valuable analysis which I will review in greater detail in another post or two. Today I simply want to focus on a key point he makes about what he calls "online contention." In chapter 4 he describes the "new spirit" of online discourse in China:
It is a spirit of irreverence, not authoritarianism. Digital contention of all stripes holds power and authority in scorn. Nothing is sacred in cyberspace, where profanation prevails. And a spirit of profanation may be a necessary cultural condition for a more profound transformation of citizen-state relations. (101-102)
To illustrate this point, I showed my students some postings from Chinasmack. And it became immediately clear that profanation does indeed prevail. For example when we went from the translation of a post about electricity price increases to the original Chinese BBS source, I found various profanities. In comment number 81 the phrase - 我日 - was repeated several hundred times. At first I was puzzled because I thought this phrase would translate into something like "my date" or "my day." But then I looked in the handy glossary of online terms that Chinasmack keeps and I found that 日 can be rendered as "fuck." That changes the meaning a bit doesn't it....
And this got me to thinking about "grass mud horse," which comes rather close to being a homophone of the curse cao ni ma (I'll let you link through to the Chinasmack glossary for the meaning). The curse word is banned by Chinese authorities but netizens coined "grass mud horse" as an act of resistance:
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”
“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”
So, I asked my students: can profanity be good, insofar as it works to undermine authoritarian power? An utterance of the curse, "cao ni ma," could express and encourage a more general skepticism toward authority, and that might be, as Yang suggests, a precursor to a transformation of citizen-state relations.
But I was in new territory here - I have not thought much about the political potential of profanity - so I looked around the net and found an article in the Journal of Politics entitled, "Four Letter Threats to Authority," by David L. Paletz and William F. Harris. (Here is a link to the JSTOR text for those who have access). It is a bit dated, 1975,and they are analyzing US college student newspapers, but the offer an analytic schematic that has some applicability to the contemporary Chinese internet:
Political and Social Authority (is based on)
Public Rationality and Morality which embodies the processual flow of command (and is based on)
The System of Language which incorporates the values and conventions of a social and political system, and provides a model or a logic of action.
And this leads them to this conclusion:
It is the central contention of this paper that the public expression of obscenity may provide us with the closest thing we have to a paradigm of defiance against authority's command to obey, when otherwise we may not know how to say we don't want to. Indeed, obscenity may seem to be an inarticulate, primitive chant precisely because of the primordial need for the alternative of defiance or disobedience which it serves and which has been socialized out of us in the name of social cohesiveness.
Profanity, in certain contexts, can thus be politically productive. If one is working to weaken the authority and power of the PRC state, an occasional "cao ni ma" might be a good thing. And the broader public circulation of profanity on the Chinese internet could be contributing to "the alternative of defiance or disobedience."
And, yes, there is an ancient Chinese philosophy angle here. Zhuangzi could get profane at times. Here's passage six from chapter 22 of the book that bears his name (Watson's translation) (orignal Chinese here):
- Master Tung-kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “This thing called the Way – where does it exist?”
- Chuang Tzu said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”
- "Come,” said Master Tung-kuo, “you must be more specific!”
- “It is in the ant.”
- “As low a thing as that?”
- “It is in the panic grass.”
- “But that’s lower still!”
- “It is in the tiles and shards.”
- “How can it be so low?”
"It is in the piss and shit.
We can find Way in the most profane of things...
Even Confucius could get a bit salty at times. In Analects 13.3, the famous passage on the rectification of names, he excoriates one of his buddies. Hinton's translation has the Sage saying: "You're such an uncivil slob;" while Ames/Rosement renders it: "How can you be so dense!" Perhaps mild terms in our times, but they stand out as sharp, even profane, rejoinders in the context of Confucius and his times.
Profanity: if it is good enough for Zhuangzi and (very occasionally) Confucius, then it can't be all bad....
great!“道在屎尿”
Posted by: nickwong | December 02, 2009 at 02:58 AM
i take a certain pleasure in seeing these great thinkers were just "regular folks"
Posted by: Paul Goring | December 02, 2009 at 09:26 AM
just wondering what would be the responses from Zhuangzi and ( very occasionally ) Confucious to the following speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZLVqhsLgIw
I am speechless ...
Posted by: isha | December 02, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Swearing is a kind of lower-order brain function. When people awake from some kind of anaesthetic, (?) or something that disables their speech, the first thing to come back is often the ability to swear. So it probably serves some function, but not as much as higher-level speech.
Posted by: david | December 31, 2009 at 10:03 PM