Kira Simon-Kennedy wrote to me from Beijing that she is chaperoning 30 French high school students on their first trip to China to learn Mandarin.
Yesterday afternoon, the French students were trying to decipher the following banner at a bus stop: "没有共产党, 没有新中国." Most of the students have already taken a couple years of lessons, so they could be classed as having reached intermediate level. They got as far in their interpretation of the sign on the banner as "There is no collective __, there is no new China." Not bad for intermediate level learners, but the banner remained a mystery to them, if only at the lexical level because they didn't know what 共产党 meant. However, when Kira told the students that 共产党 meant Communist Party, they were all the more puzzled. "Are they allowed to say that ('there is no Communist Party')?" one student asked. "Isn't that really dangerous to deny the existence of the Party in public?"
The students thought that someone had the nerve to buy a public ad to tell the world: "There is no Communist Party, there is no New China" — superficially that's what the sign on the banner seemed to be saying. The close grammatical parallelism of the two clauses only made such an interpretation seem all the more certain.
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