Revolutionary language is ubiquitous among normal Chinese people. We commonly refer to economic sectors like industry and agriculture as “battle fronts.” (Most workplaces, in fact, are called “fronts.”) Continuing to work while sick is likened to “the wounded not leaving the front line.” Many big enterprises talk about their marketing teams as “armies” or “troops,” and their sales territories as “battle zones.”

The literary scholar Perry Link and others have called this “Mao language.” In a 2012 essay on ChinaFile, the Asia Society’s website, Mr. Link wrote that such talk is “much more freighted with military metaphors and political biases than most.” In that same article, he gave some pointed examples of how Mao language has seeped into everyday usage: “At the ends of banquets, even today, mainland Chinese sometimes urge their friends to xiaomie [annihilate] the leftovers; a mother on a bus, the last time I was in Beijing, answered her little boy, who said, “Ma, I really need to pee!” by saying, “Jianchi! [Be resolute!] Uncle bus driver can’t stop here.”

The roots of this New Chinese Language naturally go back to Mao. In his 1942 Yan’an speech exhorting authors and artists to “serve the people,” Mao called for writers to use language people can understand. Even in essays he wrote before the Communist Party took power, Mao rebuked the use of “shady” words that “the masses” wouldn’t understand. In direct response to Mao’s dictates, the party apparatus promoted “the people’s language” — a plain and easy to understand style.

The Communist Party’s dumbing down of our language was a deliberate effort to debase public discourse. The Cultural Revolution took this to an extreme: Intellectual discussion, along with reason, were thrown out the window. In this atmosphere, words lose real meaning. The party can then use words to obfuscate and lie.

For example, high party officials talk about building a socialist state under the “rule of law,” but when they use the phrase, they mean that the party uses the law to rule the people.

This deliberate use of language to obscure and confuse serves a clear objective: to conceal the reality of China’s lack of democracy and indeed to pretend that democracy exists.

I can’t claim to have the answer for how to resist the party’s use of language. Nor do I know how to stop it from seeping into our vernacular. Even someone like me, a writer who is acutely aware of how the party tries to manipulate us, can’t avoid humming party songs from time to time.

My big fear is best summed up by George Orwell, who wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”