China's committee work-around
December 22nd 2010 02:05
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Vyoos news
'I have a question: what are we talking about?'
Chinese authorities have announced a ban on the use of foreign words in the media and state press. The ban, they say, addresses a need to end an erosion of the purity of Chinese language.
The ban, I say, proves that Chinese committees produce the same brain-dead nonsense as their counterparts in the rest of the world.
In practice, the Chinese decision will work. Neither privatised nor state-owned media will have any concerns about following the edict, because they won't have to change anything to comply. English words do not make it into written Chinese, in the way they make it into written Italian or Norwegian, for example, because Chinese publishing systems are not set up to handle alphabet-based characters. Further, although many mainland Chinese these days might understand some English words popularised through the internet (mainstream English words such as thanx, LOL and porn), few would recognise their written form.
The Chinese decision works in principle, as well, in the same way that xenophobic, politically self-serving propaganda works. The authorities pronounce it; the workers ignore it.
For this reason we can see that, while committee meetings in China are just as full of hot air and devoid of common sense as committee meetings anywhere else, the trappings of totalitarianism remain sufficiently evident that foolish edicts can be treated as such. This makes Chinese committee decisions much less dangerous than elsewhere, a fact which has enormous benefits for the economy, for due process and for individual freedom.
This capacity to take the decisions of committees out of real-time processes lifts the efficiency rating across all Chinese sectors well above anything seen in more backward and underprivileged countries, such as the United States, where people still live in hope of committees producing something useful.
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