Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies

by Schoenhals

(From Perry Link's review of Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics) These five pioneering essays show how control of public language supports state power in the PRC. Schoenhals explains how state rulers prescribe tifa ("formulations") that are circulated to Party propaganda offices and are aimed at dominating public understanding of issues. Tifa include such things as who is a "spy," who a "traitor" and who an "arch-unrepentant capitalist-roader," as well as who is to be named by name and who by label variously at central, provincial and local levels. In 1983 a big debate in Beijing produced authoritative nation-wide instructions that the slogan "achieve wealth through labour" really must be "achieve wealth through diligence." Schoenhals shows how control of connotation could itself become a political prize: in 1967, Lin Biao attempted a power grab through a presentation of false modesty, only to have Zhou Enlai undermine him with a counter-manipulation of language; in 1980, master word-man Hu Qiaomu declared that one of the earlier tifa of his arch-rival Kang Sheng had been, simply in its formulation, "a crime." Schoenhals further shows how correctness of tifa replaces truth as the standard for whether something should be said. A Deng-era document explains that it is correct to put contemporary phrases anachronistically into the mouths of Mao-era characters and to eradicate all signs that one has done so because this "raises the accuracy of the texts with respect to their meaning."

Genres: China

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 1992

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book. Schoenhals writes very well. His essays are fascinating, well-researched, creative, and thought-provoking. Case studies inside cover the 1950s-'80s.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally one of the best, most fascinating books I've ever read in my life. I have no idea how this has less than 300 citations (google scholar, 2023), and I'm so mad that I didn't learn about it until *after* finishing my dissertation on the rhetoric of communists and communist parties 🤦🤦🤦

[Naked Fish · Rating 3 out of 5]

开创性工作所以不能要求太多。第一章很好地定下了以政治语言为中心approach的framework，剩下的就都是具体的案例研究。简单地说，宣传工作的重心就在对政治用语的塑造和manipulate上，而这种塑造是一种少数人享有的power。政治语言定调后的跟进解释和控制依然需要更多的empirical studies