Four years ago, the old State Administration of Radio, Film and Television banned the use of English acronyms such as WTO, NBA and GDP in television and radio reports, interviews and film subtitles. The media watchdog said audiences would better understand programs without them, even though much of the public had become familiar with these terms and even though their absence would create wordier, more confusing translations.

Chinese viewers were suddenly forced to listen to awkward Chinese translations of terms such as "American professional basketball," even as CCTV – the acronym for China Central Television – remains on TV screens. The move was, and is, comical. And now, an article in the government's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, seems to be reinforcing this state of affairs.

The newspaper recently criticized the use of English acronyms such as Wi-Fi, CEO, MBA, VIP and PM2.5, which are commonly used in global broadcasting and in the country's academic periodicals. Critics say the abbreviations are an abuse of the Chinese language, fragmenting context and undermining the purity of Chinese.

In response, the Chinese blogosphere immediately and jokingly made up sentences avoiding the use of loanwords such as Wi-Fi and iPhone. Alas, the examples demonstrated the absurdity of trying to translate these loanwords into Chinese. It makes for much longer strings of ideograms, and these terms are not any more comprehensible just because they are translated into Chinese.

That there is a war of words, so to speak, between Chinese and foreign languages is not new. The struggle involves politics and culture, and has been intense over the past 200 years. Though we cannot determine who will be the eventual victor, what can be asserted is that the ultimate winner will be the language associated with political and cultural openness.

Judging a language by its purity is overbearing. Purity is not the first and foremost essence of a language. A closed language surely would be more pure, but it is only by being tolerant and inclusive that a language can have vitality. This is precisely the specialty of Chinese.

Chinese terms such as "hutong," meaning alley, came from Mongolian. "Cha na," meaning a moment, came from Sanskrit. The landscape of the Chinese language is enriched, not corrupted, by these loanwords.

From the purity perspective, the Chinese language has long been a hybrid. An estimated one-fourth of the Chinese we use today is made up of loanwords. It is advisable to take the long view. Zhang Zhidong, a famous late Qing Dynasty mandarin, once furiously denounced his staff for using a new term of the time, jiankang, meaning health, because the term came from Japan and sounded like "the subjugation of China." Zhang would be chagrined to learn the term is very common today.

If there is a real enemy of the Chinese language, perhaps it is People's Daily. The discourse that this newspaper relies on and develops is a yoke on the Chinese language, quashing the freedom of the Chinese people. Its habitual criticisms and tone corrupt the language far more than the people it criticizes.

Yu Ge is a newspaper columnist