In Beijing, Orwell Goes to the Olympics

Following are highlights of Op-Ed Contributor Ross Terrill
*** as published in The New York Times on August 22, 2007

Please follow the link at the bottom to read the entire Editorial

IN China, language has long been a test of political orthodoxy. In Mao Zedong's era, to confuse evil "bourgeois" with virtuous "proletarian" was to face a prison cell. Write the Chinese character for a leader's name at a wrong angle and you were a class enemy. Now, as Beijing begins the final year of its preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games, a mistake with an English word is taboo.

Some lapses are harmless. "Don't Bother" as a privacy request on a hotel door, for example, or "Chop the Strange Fish" on a restaurant menu. Others could lead to minor trouble. "Please take advantage of the chambermaids," says a resort brochure.

The penalty for "Chinglish" is usually humiliation, not incarceration. Still, citizens are asked to snitch, Mao-era style, on people who shame China with their shaky English. An outfit called the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program issues prefabricated foreign phrases to workers who cannot converse in any foreign tongue. The Olympics have become one more tool in the authoritarian state's box of tricks.
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Yet behind the attack on Chinglish lies an Orwellian impulse to remake the truth. Banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other "troublemakers" who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.
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Likewise, in 2001, arguing before the world to get the Olympic Games, the vice president of Beijing's bid committee said, "By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights." Yet the opposite danger looms: Games preparation has spurred repression.
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Alas, few Americans visiting Beijing next August will realize that the drinking water from the faucets of their five-star hotels is unavailable to 99 percent of the city's residents. In fact, this city's water is not safe to drink; the water for the athletes and tourists will be piped in from neighboring Hebei Province.
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For years, the party hopes, it will be able to flaunt photographs of Tibetan farmers cheering at a Chinese gold medal in table tennis, videos of Muslims in Xinjiang Province fainting with joy as the women's high jump goes to China by half an inch over Japan, and documentaries in which Beijing taxi drivers speak in perfect English to tourists from New York.

***Ross Terrill, an associate in research at Harvard's Fairbank Center, is the author of "The New Chinese Empire: And What it Means for the United States."

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