Proper Chinese Movement

There needs to be a #SpeakProperChinese movement. Not just an invoke, but a real movement.

Chinese language has been enormously impact by official propaganda and lingo, or as it is commonly being referred as “CCP Chinese”, with strong words and paralelism as its feature. The official way of wording resonates its root since the Yan’an era.

For common people, in order to avoid censorship (dated back to 2008), the online Chinese has developed to another way, with homophonic, metaphor, ancient reference, dismember characters, mixing with other language, rhetoric, innuendo, meme, internet lingo, etc., the current Chinese has come to an embarrased situation where almost all the online content is hard to read, not necessarily uncomprehensible, but with a discounted experience, especially when talking about politics, the tones in the language seems twisted and by no means sounds serious. It is almost impossible to sound serious, if not sounds CCP-ish “official”.

Chines social networks are full of such content after about 10 years of “cultivation”, and the influence is inevitable and long term. It even injects its influence to real life. It takes a long time for me personally to “detoxicate” myself from using such language. It is a slow process but not impossible. I am in no intention to “purify” Chinese or any language, but just consider that it is time for everyone to use proper written Chinese, which means,

use any words you want to use rather than thinking about a metaphor, construct your sentences like you mean it rather than playing a riddle game, stop using popular meme text/word as they will be outdated soon thus hard for people to understand in the future, treat the internet as an archive that everything will be documented permenently rather than treating your text as “temporary and could be removed soon”, find a synonym of a certain word when you realise the text sounds “CCP-ish”, read more content published by Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore or any other Mandarin regions to refresh your reading experience, read more translated text which naturally filtered the language, …

The New Culture Movement had been past about 100 years, and we have seen its influence on modern Chinese in a very positive way.