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Many Language Log readers are probably aware of the food scandal at OSI in Shanghai, the implications of which have spread throughout much of East Asia, to parts of Southeast Asia, and even beyond, wherever shipments of Chinese meat products have reached.

In reporting this, CNBC made the following point:

"The rules are dead, and people are alive, that's simple," a worker said in the report. "Dead rules and alive people" is commonly used in China to indicate corners have been cut. OSI did not immediately respond to the news report.

The "dead" and the "alive" are obviously translations of sǐ 死 and huó 活, but in the context of the article (people being given bad meat to eat) the meaning didn't exactly leap off the page. A more idiomatic translation would be "rigid" and "flexible", although that still only captures only part of the meaning. In order to understand the worker's mysterious utterance, we must travel deep into the heart of Chinese metaphorical language. We begin our journey by reconstructing in Chinese what the worker said. It was undoubtedly something like this:

Guījǔ shì sǐ de, rén shì huó de, zhè hěn jiǎndān.

规矩是死的, 人是活的, 这很简单

"Rules are dead, people are living; this is very simple."

[N.B.: guīdìng 規定 ("provisions; stipulations") or zhìdù 制度 ("systems; institutions" might be substituted for guījǔ 规矩 ("rules; regulations"), but usually the latter term is used.]

I suppose that all Chinese who heard the worker say this would immediately apprehend what he was implying, but I suspect that few Westerners would comprehend what it has to do with unsafe meat. How come the people are "living"? Shouldn't they be "dead" because of the rotten meat?

To unpack the worker's opaque (as rendered in English) statement, we need to delve further into the mechanics of Chinese figurative speech and the subtleties of attitudes toward the law in the People's Republic of China.

First, let's take a look at a Chinese report of the incident.

In this report, we find the following revealing statement:

“Wǒ zǎo jiù hé nǐ shuō SOP méiyǒu yòng, dōu ànzhào SOP bùyào gàn huóle”, gōngrén zhèyàng gàosù jìzhě

“我早就和你说SOP没有用，都按照SOP不要干活了”，工人这样告诉记者。

"I already told you that the SOP [Standard Operating Procedures] are useless. If we did everything according to the SOP, we might as well not work," the worker told the reporters.

As one of my Chinese graduate students put it:

规矩是死的，人是活的。。。What a typical Chinese attitude!

Rules are set in stone, but people deal with situations "flexibly"…

A British friend guessed that the meaning should be "the spirit of the law is not the letter of the law." I said, "No, what the Chinese expression conveys is much more negative…"

A colleague from the PRC explained it this way:

This is an old and common expression. It's been in use for as long as I can remember. It conveys a fairly typical Chinese attitude towards any rules/laws/regulations: they are made to break, bend and be compromised. View it positively, this indicates a way of problem solving. There is another expression "大活人还能让尿憋死," which is less known, more crude and more regional, but expresses a similar meaning.

It requires a bit of effort to figure out the cruder, more visceral variant, but here goes:

(Dà) huórén hái néng ràng niào biēsǐ.

(大)活人还能让尿憋死

A (fully) living person could never have to pee so bad that he / she would burst to death.

[Grammar note: the ràng 让 / trad. 讓 ("let; allow") here is functioning like a passive signifier (viz., "by" the urine).]

[Lexical note: biē 憋 has a wide variety of mostly negative connotations: "hold one's breath; suffocate; choke; hold back / in; restrain; stifle; suppress; force; feel oppressed; be destroyed; contemplate; ponder;

[Literal translations by a graduate student from the PRC:

1. How could a living person possibly die of holding back urine?

2. How could a living person possibly be exploded by urine?

It means people should deal with things with flexibility.]

[Exegesis by a Chinese colleague: Literally, it means a live person will find a way to relieve himself regardless what the situation is. In a general reference, niào 尿 ("urine") is the problem (whatever that might be) one is having, and a live person will find a way to solve it. The implication is that do whatever you can to take care of the problem and not let it get you.]

The dà 大 ("big") at the beginning is optional and serves to emphasize that the person is really and truly alive. Dà 大 refers to a condition that is at its peak. A dà huórén 大活人 is a person full of life. Other similar expressions are:

dà rètiān 大热天 ("really hot day")

dà lěngtiān 大冷天 ("really cold day")

dà zhōngwǔ 大中午 ("high noon")

dà qíngtiān 大晴天 ("really bright day")

dà qīngzǎo 大清早 ("very early in the morning")

To further appreciate the nuances of "living" and "dead" in Chinese figurative speech, we may consider this saying:

shù nuó sǐ, rén nuó huó

树挪死, 人挪活

"If you move a tree it will die; when a person moves, they'll live".

[rigidity vs. flexibility]

Here are a few more common expressions, focusing only on the "dead" aspect of things:

shūběn shàng de sǐ zhīshì

书本上的死知识

"dead book learning" (in contrast to practical, "living" knowledge)

sǐjì yìngbèi

死记硬背

"dead remembering and hard / forced reciting" (i.e., rote memorization)

zhǐ huì sǐ dúshū

只会死读书

"only knows how to read books in a dead manner" (i.e., doesn't know how to apply knowledge)

As one Chinese friend summed up the dilemma, it all boils down to the division between fǎzhì 法治 ("the rule of law") and rénzhì 人治 ("the rule of man"). In China, the latter generally takes precedence over the former, hence the flagrant disregard for rules and regulations, of which the worker's statement concerning the SOP regarding bad meat with which we began this post is a typical instance.

[Thanks to Greg Pringle, Maiheng Dietrich, Liwei Jiao, Jiajia Wang, Rebecca Fu, Fangyi Cheng, Wicky Tse, Wei Shao, and Ziwei He]

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