Metaphysics has ruined Chinese
In The Opinion Pages section of today's NYT, Contributing Op-Ed Writer Murong Xuecun has a provocative piece entitled "Corrupting the Chinese Language" (5/26/15).
His basic claim is that "Decades of… party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people’s minds and into the Chinese vernacular." The result is that, because people are conditioned to talk using phrases ready made by the party, they are conditioned to think in ways determined by the highly politicized language in which they have been immersed their entire lives. Even dissidents are reduced to "using the language of our propagandists, and not ironically."
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