What's the point if you learn Chinese but will never be given the opportunity to use it, as all major Western schools, media, publishers, and universities practice Orwellian Rules of Writings in order to keep their China reports "Chinese-free" - pure, clean, and unpolluted?
The New York Times, a US corporation dressed as global public service, is perhaps the most notorious offender to the world's languages, cultures, and foreign people. All its writers and editors, letting alone outside contributors, are forced to "avoid foreign words" whenever they can in order to keep the sovereignty over the definition of thought. It's like saying to Russian, Iranian, German, Indian writers and thinkers: you may express your ideas but it must be in OUR VOCABULARIES, thereby effectively committing cultural intellectual property theft. It's the old imperial codex of "It's knowledge only if we know it" -meaning in practice that unless a Westerner said it and named it, as far as our media and the academia are concerned, foreigners have no ideas, concepts, and categories. Certainly no ideas, concepts, and categories that are worth reporting by their correct names.
Here's another gem of violent 'language imperialism' by a 'China professor', Daniel A. Bell, who in order to get published in The New York Times prostrates himself not only to Western values but also to the NY Times racial language policy to omitting the correct Chinese terms and names, thus keeping his China report purposely "Chinese-free".
If I was a student of Dr Bell at Tsinghua University, I would ask myself "what's the point of studying Chinese when the heights in my future career as a China Expert will be directly proportioned to me not having to write Chinese words at all. As a commentator on Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich once observed: People, if it looks like propaganda, that's because it is propaganda. It's one thing to forbid yellow people riding a public bus, and a similar thing to forbid them their words, names, and brands.
I am all for inclusion of foreign cultures -their originality, ideas, and inventions- into World History.
The New York Times, which conspired in most US wars during its long history, and which promotes US Empire and Americanization throughout the world (of which brutal Anglophone language policies are an essential part) thinks that white Western men and their white vocabulary policies and Orwellian rules of writing should dictate what US citizens read and hear about foreign lands.
Daniel A. Bell had a golden opportunity, I claim, to break through the walls of media racism and ignorance and inform the US public and those Anglophone wankers in Asia who refuse to learn the local languages because their media implies them not to, about certain Chinese key terminologies that are essential to understand China and to honor and respect its ideas, its culture, and its thought. But no, Dr Bell bowed down to Empire. Think about this for a moment: A China Expert on China writes a China piece without using a single Chinese term!
I felt like watching tortured Peeta Mellark in the Hunger Games confessing on the nation's First propaganda channel that all resistance to Empire was futile and that the revolution must stop. No Chinese words when you explain Chinese ideas to us! We are the masters. It is the Chinese who have to learn English. Hundreds of his students must feel betrayed and let down by this Dr Bell: "Fuck you China. Fuck you Tsinghua University. In the end, the West will rule here anyway, so you better forget your culture and language and do it like I professor do: write Chinese-free China op-eds for the NY Times!"
No wonder that American students don't want to study foreign languages any more. They won't be allowed to use foreign words anyway later in their professional careers in the media and writing business. America may say all it wants about how it battled slavery and racism - violent culturism is still in full swing.
During the last 350 years of Western China Studies, most 'China Experts' agreed that China has no originality, no intellect, and no reason. That is because they never allowed or permitted Chinese ideas, brands, and thought to exists in Western media, papers, and textbooks. There was always some lazy and convenient Western translation. Incorrect? Sure. Misleading? Always. But it helped the West to expand its control over Eastern thought, with the result that even today Asians will have to study their own Asian cultures in Western universities. The other side of the coin is that white Western masters in Asia can live as gods -as long as they play their part and assimilate and adjust as little as possible to China and the Chinese language. They day Westerners use Chinese terminologies in their China reports, is the day Westerners will have to come to China, the original place and the owner of the intellectual property so to speak. And that day all those Western 'China Experts' will lose prestige and status.
We can know what they think by applying our own Western categories and concepts to it. It's the same easy-peasy formula that helped the Western powers dominate Asia during the ages of colonialism. In fact, the NY Times has not evolved a bit since then in its treatment of foreign words: out and away with foreign pollution.
A China without Chinese. That's what Washington wants to hear. That's what Western corporations and think tanks what to hear. That's what Western universities want to hear. China is supposed to completely 'Westernize'. The less we have to deal with Chinese elements in our lives the better. Certainly, if we can censor all Chinese words in US publications, that will help a great deal in keeping those non-Western people and their ideas out of our heads.
Is the omission of Chinese words and concepts "correct scholarship"? No. Is it the "correct names"? No. What is it? It is bullshit. It is patronizing educated US readers who, I claim, wouldn't mind to look up a foreign term they didn't know, or even to study a foreign concept just a little more. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the problem is with the self-absorbed, political motivated, and agenda-driving NY Times journalists, editors, and owners who feel shamed and intimidated by people telling them about foreign cultures, things that they had no way of knowing about before. This would greatly offend their egos, and rob them of all their pretensions as intellectual giants (the arrogance and self-importance of NY Times people is legendary). They must write their reports on foreign lands from a position of the highest authority, like galactic overseers and masters of the universe. Chinese (or any other foreign terms) would make them look tiny and little and non-experts on things that are clearly not their territory. Therefore, writing from that position of the highest authority would make them look what? Stupid and preposterous. They just can't have that. They must never give away their privileges of censoring and omitting inconvenient foreign words. A cheap English translation will do the trick all the time.
I know for sure that one day, after this current Cult of China Experts is long gone, and a new generation of tolerant, broad-minded, and honest scholars and journalists is emerging that will be able to put an end to the constant NY Times's misreporting on Chinese policies. This new generation of scholars and journalists will fight and hopeful limit or destroy the unfair use of bogus English translations just to get published. The will fight the inequality of words and vocabularies like we fought the inequalities of the races and genders. But, most importantly, the new generation of China scholars and journalists will enlightening the world community about the US media's unfair treatment of China (and most non-Western nations really) that poisoned the wells and crept the rats out of pan-America.
Down with English translations of Chinese key terminologies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffT_eaVhqUA
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