Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao's China (review)

This book is a study of the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to transform people's beliefs and modes of thought through a centrally directed and strictly implemented process of "linguistic engineering." While the book addresses the entire Maoist period from 1949 to 1976, the focus is on the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the propagation and enforcement of revolutionary discourse reached its zenith. Author Fengyuan Ji argues that linguistic engineering constituted Mao's "most precise instrument of ideological transformation" (p. 283 ), surpassing in both scope and intensity even the Soviet model upon which it was in part based.

Ji sees three reasons for the greater intensity of linguistic engineering in China: the Confucian tradition of inculcating moral truths by rote learning; the personality cult surrounding Mao, which surpassed that of Stalin; and the extreme extent of mass mobilization in China, which required ordinary Chinese " to incorporate displays of political consciousness into their daily lives" (p. 284). Linguistic engineering is defined as having two core components. The first entailed reform of the lexicon and semantics. This included "logocide"—blotting out words and expressions that were associated with "incorrect" thought; "semanticide"—abolishing the old meanings of terms and replacing them with new official meanings; "linguistic resurrection"—reviving traditional terms while investing them with revolutionary meanings; and inculcating a set of neologisms for the "correct" expression of official thought. The second component entailed encouraging and enforcing the habitual use of fixed expressions and "standardized scripts" that embodied "correct" attitudes and thinking. Failing to use the official language or using it inappropriately or out of context was taken as a sign of ideological deviance or confusion. In short, linguistic engineering represented "an attempt to remake people's minds by compelling them to participate in a totalizing discourse . . . that touched all aspects of reality and expressed a single worldview to the exclusion of all others" (p. 4 ).

The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the author, who is a linguist, sets out the relevant theoretical issues as seen from the vantage point of linguistics and psychology. This is followed by a lengthy chapter that traces the development of linguistic engineering in China from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 to the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Chapters 3 through 8 constitute the heart of the book and are concerned with a detailed examination of linguistic engineering during the Cultural Revolution. Chapter 3 describes how Mao broke ranks with the Party establishment in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution in order to impose his own revolutionary discourse, control over which gave Mao the means not only to mobilize ignorant youth but also to frame and topple his enemies within the Party. This chapter also shows how, in the chaos that ensued in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao effectively lost control over the interpretation of his words, the plasticity of which meant that Mao Zedong Thought could be invoked in support of practically any self-proclaimed revolutionary truth.

Chapter 4 examines the impact of the central text of the Cultural Revolution, the Little Red Book or Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, which one contemporary outside observer described as fomenting a society-wide "verbomania or graphomania" (p. 150). For Ji, the most significant impact of the Little Red Book was not simply that people learned to deploy a new political vocabulary (a process that had been established as far back as the early 1950s) but that "people began to write and act in Mao's actual words on a grand scale," the result of which was a "profound, if temporary, impoverishment of the Chinese language, which became repetitive, narrow, political, and cliché-ridden" (p. 155). Indeed, the mind-numbing and thought-terminating effects of this discourse will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to conduct research on the Cultural Revolution using its written texts. In this chapter Ji also shows how criticism and...