A mere five months into 2016, Tuesday saw China’s Ministry of Education release a report collating the most popular expressions and internet slang for the year 2015.

The report, titled “2016 Report on the Situation of Language Life in China,” has been slated by internet users as having already slipped behind the times, but the Ministry of Education has maintained that the content of the report provides “a window through which we can know, perceive, and understand society.”

“No one can live without language,” Yang Erhong told Sixth Tone in a telephone interview. Yang is the director of China's National Language Resources Monitoring Research Center (CNLR), a research institute based at Beijing Language and Culture University and one of the study's participating bodies. “This report seeks to draw people’s attention to language, something we use so frequently yet so rarely focus on.”

After detailing the government’s plans for strengthening the teaching of Mandarin — China’s official language — and the “scientific protection” of the country’s ethnic minority languages, the report goes on to list last year’s top 10 newly-created words, popular expressions, and internet slang.

Among the top 10 words invented in 2015 is wangyue che — “internet-booked cars.” Tensions among the major players of China’s ride-hailing industry have grown steadily in recent months. Chinese taxi service Shenzhou came under fire in June last year for running a smear campaign against American rival Uber, while a spate of sexual and violent assaults by drivers has led many to call for greater regulation of China’s ride-hailing services. Monday saw large-scale protests by taxi drivers against ride-hailing services like Uber and China’s Didi in Xian, capital of China’s northwest Shaanxi province.

Tao Huan, a professor of linguistics at Shanghai’s Fudan University, told Sixth Tone that he believed the “valuable” report demonstrated an irreversible trend of increasingly creative uses of the Chinese language. “In the age of information, we communicate with others in a higher frequency than before, and the language we use changes accordingly,” he said.

“New words and phrases are generally not a bad thing,” Tao said, responding to the opinions of some linguists who believe that the creation of new Chinese words is a form of linguistic bastardization.

Alongside the bulk of entries that pertain to uniquely Chinese phenomena, words that relate to international events also appear in the report, with the inclusion of “refugees” — referring to Europe’s refugee crisis — and “Paris terror attacks” in the list of trending expressions.

A news event closer to home that was reflected in the list of 2015’s lexical inventions was yuebing lan, literally “soldier inspection blue,” referring to efforts made leading up to last year’s Victory Day parade of Sept. 3 to clear the smog from Beijing’s skies. It’s a term that is generally used tongue-in-cheek to suggest that efforts to clean up air pollution are only ever sincere when there is a public event of notable gravitas.

Growing concern about China’s pollution is also reflected in one of the most popular internet slang expressions listed in the report: “It’s all about charisma.” The phrase existed originally as something of a motivational saying, but it gained new momentum toward the end of 2015 during a particularly bad spell of smog in parts of China, when netizens discovered a literal reading of its Chinese characters resulted in the phrase: “God wants to check the air quality.”

Many were left perplexed by the inclusion of a four-character expression that roughly translates to “hold on to your stocks for the country.” July last year saw a ban on state-owned companies and other large shareholders from selling stocks in an attempt to right plummeting share prices. Some social media users questioned whether the term deserved a place on the list of most popular internet slang, with many claiming they’d never heard of it as an expression. One user suspected that the term’s inclusion on the list was down to “someone pulling strings.”

According to Yang of CNLR, the report was the result of systematic analysis of data collected from online platforms and messaging apps. However, citing the exclusion of some of 2015’s cruder — yet vastly popular — pieces of internet slang, many social media users seemed skeptical of the report’s scientific methodology.

“Any ranking that has been interfered with by people has no credibility,” wrote one user. “Dare you include ‘Why the fuck are you asleep — get up and have fun’ in the list?” That expression was one of 2015’s most popular pieces of internet slang, and it inspired a slew of memes and stickers on messaging apps like WeChat.

Another user, referring to a viral expression similar to English’s “WTF,” complained: “There’s no ‘fuck the dog.’ Not good, not good.”

Additional reporting by Feng Jiayun.

(Header image: ‘It’s all about charisma,’ read the Chinese characters of a sculpture in front of the Qihoo 360 office building in Beijing, Jan. 6, 2016. The expression was one of the most popular examples of internet slang in 2015. VCG)