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A commenter on this post, "'All Japanese must be killed'", stated that he thought that the sentiments expressed were "a little extreme".

How seriously should we take what appear to be calls for genocide against the Japanese people?



From a Language Log reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

Thanks for your recent post about the anti-Japanese poem. Speaking as someone that lives in Japan, what I wonder about this sort of rhetoric is how "normal" it is. For example, are hyperbolic calls for genocide fairly common around Chinese political disputes? (Or around disputes with Japan, etc. — I know that the context of "China vs Japan" is quite different to that of "China vs the Philippines".) Or does this represent a new level of extremism that should be viewed with alarm? I mean, I don't think that all those people at the Audi dealership *literally* want to murder all of my friends and family. But they obviously mean *something* unfriendly by it. I wonder if the history of Chinese rhetoric can provide any pointers towards a sensible interpretation here.

I asked some China specialists how they would respond to these issues.

From Perry Link:

Since Mao, words like xiāomiiè 消灭 ("eliminate; extirpate") have crept further into daily-life Chinese than they had ever been before, and in that sense they are not literal. But the very "normalization" of bloodthirsty language probably makes violence more possible, too. Sapir-Whorf had a point, I think.

From Rudolf Wagner:

I believe indeed that this is a rhetorical pattern going back deep in time. Take official XX in Qing China. He is up there, and the language used to refer to him is humble and painfully flattering. He is under criticism and demoted, and suddenly the language package opened for people of that type is of the most vulgar slander. This practice was continued in the PRC (take Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, Jiang Qing as examples) with the same sudden switch. Chinese foreign self-presentation has time and again suffered from the same pattern. In the midst of xixi haha long-time friends comes an incident or statement the government considers damaging to its core interests, and the same spokesman uses a language that is so hilariously out of tune with diplomatic habits that years of confidence building measures go down the drain in a minute. Hyperbolic language (in both directions) is a standard feature of Chinese rhetoric and the difference between long live and kill all is only in the color shown by the time and occasion frame with its simplistic black and white alternatives. I always wanted to get a student write a PhD about this rhetoric, but no success as yet.

From a professional China-watcher who wishes to remain anonymous:

Well, PRC-era rhetoric has a well-established reputation for dehumanization and licensing all manner of mass savagery. So I think the sensible interpretation would be to take this seriously (even though, I wholeheartedly agree, it is probably being whipped up to conceal intra-Party struggle). That said, this anti-Japanese "genocide" rhetoric seems new, with no real historical analogue, and it strikes me as more or less the way Chinese "nationalism" expresses its desire to avenge what Imperial Japan once did to China.

Sadly, and this is a point that has been made to me with great distress by sensible Chinese friends, the extreme rhetoric of the government sanctioned anti-Japanese slogans bears unmistakable resemblance to those of the Boxers toward the end of the Qing Dynasty in the late 19th century, e.g., fú Qīng miè yáng 扶清灭洋 ("Support the Qing, destroy / annihilate the foreigners")



Lexical notes:

Xīyángrén 西洋人 ("Westerners; Occidentals"; lit., "people from the western ocean")

Yángguǐzi 洋鬼子 ("Foreign Devils", i.e., "ocean devils / demons"; includes both Westerners and Japanese)

Rìběn guǐzi 日本鬼子 ("Japanese devils")

Dōngyáng rén 东洋人 ("Japanese"; lit., "people from the eastern ocean")



jiǎ yángguǐzi 假洋鬼子 ("fake Foreign Devils", i.e., Chinese people who ape Western ways)

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