Subversive Writing: Li Xiaoguai’s Newly Coined Chinese Characters and His Comic Blogging

1. Subversive Writing: Li Xiaoguai’s Newly Coined Chinese Characters and His Comic Blogging Jin Liu School of Modern Languages Georgia Tech

2. Neologism and Internet censorship • Visually, three innocuous Chinese characters 草泥马 Grass Mud Horse (cǎonímǎ ) • aurally, càonǐmā “fuck your mother,” which would normally be written ideographically as 肏你妈, including one with an erotic connotation • In March 2009, created by Isaac Mao Xianghui, a trained engineer and Internet activist

3. Comic blogging artist Li Xiaoguai李小乖 (1974-) “guai” (“well-behaved, obedient”) “Guaiguaide” (1997)by the Ziyue band: “The piece of candy you give me IS NOT SWEET AT ALL.” “perverse, deviating from the norm, contrary to reason” in 乖戾

4. In 2009, together with sixteen other famous bloggers such as Han Han and Ai Weiwei, Li was included in a book entitled China’s Powerful Blogs, edited by Zhai Minglei, himself a pioneering blogger.

5. A proposal of “revising 44 Chinese characters” by the Ministry of Education in 2009 • For example, the ending horizontal stroke 一 of 王 in the left upper corner of the character 琴 (qin “zenith”) would become a rising line ㇀. The vertical stroke with a hook 亅in the bottom part of the character 茶 (cha “tea”) would be modified to a simple vertical line丨 • Very controversy and more than 80% of online users declared themselves opposed to the proposal

6. diǎng • 党中央 dangzhongyang “the Central Committee of the CCP,” which is the Party’s highest organ of authority • expletive diǎo (屌 penis)

7. diǎo • 代表 daibiao “to represent; the people’s representatives” • “三个 diao 的伟大思想” • “diang 永远 diao 最广大人民的根本利益”

8. wáo • 五毛 wumao“Fifty Cent Party” or “fifty-centers”, a word invented to satirize Internet commentators hired by the authorities to steer online discussion in favor of state policies (The going rate when the term was coined was fifty cents per post.)

9. nǎn • 脑残 naocan, literally means “brain-damaged” or “mental disability,” and often refers to those who have been brainwashed by Party ideology

10. 拆那 chai na, “demolish that,” a transliteration of the English word “China” and therefore a new mocking nickname of China, where forced demolition is ubiquitous and has led to many disputes over land and much violence • the pronunciation of the character 叉chā (“X-sign” or “to cross off”) Gu Wenda’s “Modern meaning of totem and taboo” (1986)

11. 屁民 pimin“Fart people,” a substitute of “people” 人民 renmin, who used to enjoy an elevated status in socialist China, have been relegated to the margin in the post-socialist period. An notorious incident of a Shenzhen official in 2008: “Nimen suan ge P” (“You’re just a P”); new chinglish word “shitizen” 贵国 （”your honorable country,” another sarcastic reference to China. The netizens ironically distance themselves from “your state.”

12. 一小撮 “a small bunch.” In the party discourse, the term has negative connotations and usually modifies politically incorrect or morally bad groups, no matter how large a yixiaocuo group may be 不明真相 “be unaware of the truth, be ignorant of the facts.” In the party language, it is always an adjective to describe the masses, who are instigated by a small yixiaocuo group of evil people

13. punning Combining 查 (cha, “investigation”) and 茶 (cha, “tea”) Being invited to tea becomes a euphemism for investigation by the police. The new character creates a variety of links and interrelationships on the phonetic, semantic, and graphic levels, noting the two compounds largely share the 木 The lofty official principle, 原则/則 ze is downgraded to a lower-bodily toilet 厕/厠 ce. Degradation and debasement, the essential principle of Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque realism, is at work.

14. Simultaneous Praise and Curse Here narrowly specifically referring to the grandson of the Chairman Mao, Mao Xinyu. The word sunzi孙子 has a double meaning in Northern Mandarins including Beijing Mandarin, as a curse word or intensifier meaning “shit.” 亚克西 yakexi “good,” Originally it’s the Chinese transliteration of the Uyghur term, but joined the ranks of the “Ten Legendary Beasts of Baidu” in 2010: 亚克蜥 (yakexi, “Yax/Jacques lizard” or “Yakeshit”).

15. excessive praise transformed into excessive invective

16. “又鸟口巴” • 口/嘴巴 (zuiba “mouth”) • 又鸟巴/鸡巴 (jiba “dick”) • The anti-vulgarity campaign

17. a close analysis of these new characters and examine how the aesthetic intertwines with the political to form a powerful online discourse against Internet censorship and ideological control. • how the new characters, as a parodic translation, achieve their Austinian performative force through an iteration of the original official language, which is thus displaced and subverted; • how the puns become double-voiced and double-signified utterances in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor; • how vulgarities are pervasively used as interjections and intensifiers to vent strong emotions in the struggle against the state’s anti-vulgarity campaign.

18. Li’s Comic Blogging As the coining of new characters is an integral part of the artist’s creative work in comics, this article explores how his comic strips dealing with social and political news evoke carnivalesque laughter by satirizing social ills, officialdom, and the increasing gap between the Party and the People, the state and the family, and the privileged and the underprivileged.

19. Li’s Comic Blogging 《毫无疑问中国滴网虫素 “全天下最自由滴”》 “No Doubt, the Chinese Net-worms Enjoy the Most Freedom in the World” (2006) Frame 3: the worm’s costumes allow it to shapeshift under the shell of a snail or turtle, the leather skin of an elephant, or a disgusting turd, each acting as a protective shield. Frame 4: the worm laughs and gives an ambiguous shout of freedom, because he is under the “protection” of the “Golden Shield.”

20. comic column From December 2007 to October 2009, Li published a comic column entitled “Laona, Juzhang, and Xiaoli” on Netease.com 网易, a leading entertainment website in China. Li’s comics visualize three well-known fictional characters that netizens had storified on Netease’s signature “response to news” forum (xinwen gentie).

21. Vulgarities embedded in the Party slogans

22. “Country” (2009) 国(家)guo(jia): country/nation 家 jia: home/family 冢 zhong: tomb/grave

23. 国/家

24. “All you said is Right”你说得都对(2016) • 走就对了 • 赵 • Who is the beholder of the truth at all? The right is embedded within the wrong, and the truth simultaneously negates itself. Officials often utter vulgar language, which may, however, speak the reality. The high is the low, and the vulgar is the sublime. The thesis and antithesis can become one and the same. The non-Zhaos use vulgarities to scathingly expose the falsity of the Zhaos’ “truth.” The vulgarities uttered by both the Zhaos and the non-Zhaos are interacting, interpenetrating, and mutually inflicting, involved together in a nasty language game in the Internet era.

25. Visual Art • As visual art, this trend of creating new characters joins in a bigger Chinese character art movement led by influential contemporary avant-garde artists, including Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, who have produced artwork of coined characters, combined words, pseudo-calligraphy, and fake texts.

26. Book from the Sky (1987) Xu Bing 徐冰

27. The Meaning of Xu’s Characters • The scholars have extensively explored the rich and endless information and aesthetic senses that can be readable from his semantically unreadable book and linguistically nonsense characters: a symbol of the broad liberalization movement in the mid-1980s, an attack on China’s political authority, its literary legacy, and even the broader tradition of Chinese arts and aesthetics, the philosophical sense of the sublime arising from the deliberate effort to reach a meaningless goal,the sense of loss and disappearance of the traditional bookmaking craft, and even the Chan Buddhism’s mistrust of language.

28. 谷文达 • Less famous but earlier than Xu, Gu Wenda experimented with pseudo characters in a series of works including Fake Seal Script (1983), Pseudo-Characters Series: Contemplation of the World (1984) and Modern Meaning of Totem and Taboo (1986). • As Gu himself wrote, “the pseudo-scripts help us reach infinity and eternity by imagining the universe which is out of reach of human knowledge (language). furthermore, faking language is a way to express fear, anxiety, and a distrust of our knowledge, and places human languages in a predicament of absurdity and irony.”

29. 《谷氏简词》

30. 《天堂红灯》比利时 2009

31. 中园China Park 设计图 (in progress)

32. Significance of new characters and neologisms On the Internet, the young Chinese netizens wield the weapon of the grotesque language and launch a discursive battle against the upper body, the official discourse, and ideology censorship.

33. Thank you!