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In his addresses to the Liǎnghuì 兩會 (Two Sessions), annual plenary meetings of the national People's Congress and the national committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference that have just concluded in Beijing (March 4-11), Xi Jinping repeatedly stressed “guó zhī dà zhě 国之大者”.  The grammar is clearly literary, with the first character a monosyllabic version of vernacular "guójiā 国家" ("country"), the second character a classical attributive particle, and the fourth character a classical nominalizing particle. Thus the phrase stands out like a sore thumb midst the matrix of vernacular in which it is mixed.  What's worse, even fluent readers of Mandarin generally misinterpret what it means.  Most educated persons to whom I've shown the phrase think that it means "big / large / powerful / great country", "that which (can be called) a big / large / powerful / great country"), etc., when in fact Xi intends for it to mean "something that is important for the country", "that which is important for the country" "things that are important for the country", etc.

The two meanings of the phrase may be parsed thus:

1. “X zhī dà zhě X之大者” ("a big / great one [in the class of] X; that which is big / great [in the class of] X"]

2. “X zhī dà zhě X之大者” ("that which is big / great / important [pertaining to] X")

There are historical precedents for both of these usages:

Since Xi (and his speechwriters) are not truly learned (see "Selected readings" below), how did he fall into the trap of misusing the “X zhī dà zhě X之大者”?

Jin Yong / Louis Cha Leung-yung (1924-2018), the phenomenally best-selling author of wuxia novels, romances of knight-errantry, was fond of this expression:  "xiá zhī dà zhě 俠之大者" ("the great knight errant").  For instance, he used the expression "Xiá zhī dà zhě wèi guó wèi mín 俠之大者為國為民" ("The great knight errant serves the country and serves the people") in the twentieth chapter of 《Shè diāo yīngxióng zhuàn 射雕英雄传》(The Legend of the Condor Heroes [novel] / The Brave Archer AKA Kungfu Warlord [film]) and elsewhere.  Here the great knight errant is Guo Jing 郭靖, about whom one of my graduate students from the PRC writes:

I still remember that my mentor in college said that their generation all loved Guo Jing among all adorable characters in Jing Yong's novel for his nationalist standpoint. And, in the end of the novel, Guo Jing died with his wife defending the Song dynasty from the invasion of the Mongols. It is quite interesting to see Xi turn "xiá zhī dà zhě 侠之大者" into "guó zhī dà zhě 国之大者."

Xi had been using this expression, "guó zhī dà zhě 國之大者", on various occasions already starting about a year ago when he made a three-day inspection tour to Shaanxi, his father's native province, but the tempo of his usage picked up in December and during the early months of this year.

Xi would have been better off if he had stuck with the vernacular and said "dàguó 大国" ("big country") for sense 1 (but he didn't mean that, though most people think that's what he meant unless they dig deeper into the contexts in which he used it) and "guójiā [de] dàshì 国家[的]大事" ("a matter of great importance for the country") for sense 2.

While "guó zhī dà zhě 國之大者" has a pedantic ring to it, which to some extent has certain traditional cultural connotations and seems to be derived from ancient Chinese classics, it sounds awkward in the context of modern CCP political discourse, especially coming from the mouth of Chairman Xi, who is prone to language gaffes as it is, and has a dubious academic background.  Although a thesis titled Zhōngguó nóngcūn shìchǎnghuà yánjiū 中国农村市场化研究 ("Tentative Study of Agricultural Marketization") is attributed to Xi Jinping, there are many questions surrounding whether he actually wrote it himself (see here, here, here, and here).

A number of websites actually question what Xi meant by "guó zhī dà zhě 國之大者", but I haven't noticed any that call him out for having committed a solecism.

Selected readings

• "Comrades, 'hike up your skirts for a hard shag'" (7/23/17)
• "The linguistics of a political slogan" (8/17/17)
• "'Hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people'" (9/12/11)
• "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar" (9/3/16)
• "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
• "Latin Caesar –> Tibetan Gesar –> Xi Jinpingian Sager" (3/20/18)
• "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
• "Peking University president misreads an unobscure character: monumental implications" (5/5/18)
• "Xi Jinping's reading errors multiply" (12/28/18)
• "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19)
• "More misreadings by Xi Jinping" (5/2/19)
• "The face of censorship" (1/11/19)
• "Latin Caesar –> Tibetan Gesar –> Xi Jinpingian Sager" (3/20/18)
• "The political dangers of mispronunciation" (4/5/17)
• "Peking University president misreads an unobscure character: monumental implications" (5/5/18)

[h.t. Nick Kaldis; thanks to Yijie Zhang, Chenfeng Wang, Lin Zhang, Yixue Yang, and Xiuyuan Mi]

March 13, 2021 @ 7:12 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Grammar, Language and culture, Language and history, Language and literature, Style and register, Usage, Vernacular

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