Harmony as language policy in China: an Internet perspective

Abstract

This paper provides an ethnographic understanding of harmony as language policy in China, grounded in a historical analysis of 'harmony' (和 he) as a distinct traditional Chinese (Confucian) ideal that gradually finds its new expressions through the policy of Harmonious Society (和谐社会hexie shehui) in contemporary China. The paper focuses on language practices surrounding 'harmony' emerging from the Internet, a discursive space and site that is both highly diverse and heavily contested with respect to policing processes, and notably so in the context of the PRC for its stringent measurement of censorship and sensitization of language use. It is shown that although the state is arguably the strongest stakeholder in implementing the policy of harmony, the actual processes of harmonization online develop in detailed, multidirectional and unpredictable rather than abstract, linear or monofocal ways. The paper offers a descriptive analysis of the field of Internet memes that critique and subvert the policies of harmonization. This includes new meanings for words (e.g. 'harmony' as euphemism for censorship) and puns around the acoustic image of hexie and other censorable words, resulting in the circulation and bricolage of myths and songs revolving around 'river crab' (hexie) and 'grass mud horse' (caonima) as placeholders of dissent, which feed back into offline popular (and critical) culture. The paper concludes with a discussion of the politics of harmony, pointing at the increasingly polycentric realities clashing with the modernist monocentric ideal of the state project of harmony, and with arguments for an ethnographically based understanding and inspection of language policy as an instrument for shaping sociolinguistic life.

Diaosias infrapolitics: scatological tropes, identity-making and cultural intimacy on China’s Internet

“…(p. 1390) Not dissimilar to what Tang and Yang (2011) have argued regarding another linguistic event that swept through China's cyberspace several years before -the Grass Mud Horse (or caonima, which is homophonic to 'fuck your mother' in Chinese) phenomenondiaosi affords people the cathartic pleasure of swearing every time it is pronounced and reproduced textually. It has been previously noted (Meng, 2011;Tang and Yang 2011;Wang et al, 2012) that Grass Mud Horse could be primarily interpreted as netizens' clever and covert subversion against the Chinese state's authoritarian language policies and draconian control over online speech, but what this analysis leaves unexamined is the more general but surely more widely shared appetites for verbal obscenities among the Chinese netizens, which we believe partially underpins the popularity of diaosi. The notion of hypernormalization is helpful here.…”

Castilian Takes Backstage in the Balearic Islands: The Activation of Catalan Standardization Recursions in Facebook

“…However, participation is also constrained by various forms of policing (Blommaert et al. ), which may be external (see Wang, Juffermans, and Du ) or internal (see de Bres and Belling ). In the latter case, members may negotiate through interaction the most valued linguistic capital within their communities, which thus operate as symbolic free markets (Bourdieu , 99).…”

“…In particular, online social networks, which largely escape editorial or institutional control, are sites where language variation, innovation, and change develop, where written language norms may be pluralized and localized, and standards challenged (Androutsopoulos 2009(Androutsopoulos , 2011b(Androutsopoulos , 2013Coulmas 2013). However, participation is also constrained by various forms of policing (Blommaert et al 2009), which may be external (see Wang, Juffermans, and Du 2016) or internal (see de Bres and Belling 2015). In the latter case, members may negotiate through interaction the most valued linguistic capital within their communities, which thus operate as symbolic free markets (Bourdieu 1991, 99).…”

Writing as a sociolinguistic object

“…Thus, deliberate normviolations, deviations and subcultural expressions are themselves normgoverned (e.g. Varis and Wang 2011;Wang, Juffermans and Du 2012;also Blommaert and Varis 2012).…”