Within the realm of the Middle Kingdom there are countless codes of culture; immovable objects if one will, that the unstoppable forces of progress glance off at best. Many, to the outsider resident in China for a short period, will be well known; lunch at 11.30, going home for Spring Festival or the financial requirements for men seeking brides. Others are more obscure, buried in a mindset of cultural expectations; that English abbreviations be one example comes as a surprise in the least.
As this issue of The Nanjinger elsewhere goes into further detail as to the importance of face in China, so too is “getting some face” a worthy pursuit. What easier way than to drop into conversation a smattering of English abbreviations, by way of demonstration that one is familiar with the nuances of foreign languages, carrying with them airs of intelligence and sophistication?
The concept is nothing new; borne out of the KTV era and imported from Japan and Korea. But it was to hit a new crest in recent years, driven in 2007 at the dawn of the SUV; but it was the abbreviation SCEO from car maker Shijiazhuang Shuanghuan Automobile, based in Hebei province, that was to have local car buyers snapping the four wheel up, and dreaming of taking their rightful place in the boardroom.
Fast forward to this day and age, and among those very same Executive Officers, the “mot du jour” is EMBA, yet it was in the world of music, entertainment and media where the shortened form of English was to really take hold. Think MTV which was in Chinese to be demoted from its status as a proper noun; it now simply being a term to describe a music video.
Elsewhere, the DVD-VCD war was at an end and MP3 was the only survivor. Many people may have a 4G LG CDMA mobile phone but how many could remember where they bought their first BP (pager)?
Then there came good examples from healthcare; SARS was first back in 2002, followed very recently by the H7N9 scare. Both abbreviations dominated newspaper headlines and article texts.
The situation was to come to a head in 2010 when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) banned the use of English abbreviations in Chinese media. Media outlets were directed to stop using foreign letters and acronyms in news announcements, news reports and subtitles after several national legislators and political advisors called for the preservation of the Chinese language’s purity. There was also a fear that, left unchecked, the proliferation of English abbreviations may make programmes unintelligible to some people. Opposers to the ban claimed, that the abbreviations were employed merely for brevity; F1 being quite a bit faster to say than 级方程式赛车锦标赛” (Formula One Championship).
It may be one thing to tell announcers to stop using the foreign acronyms; it is another altogether to have a good proportion of the country’s TV stations remake their entire Visual Identities. Even the great bastion of broadcasting China, CCTV, has a logo in which the Chinese is almost illegible under its overbearing English abbreviation. Most of the country’s largest television networks are in much the same situation, as a glance at STV, BTV and our own JSBC (one of whose two buildings off Gulou does not even use the Chinese at all) will prove.
While, in the eyes of the authorities, SARFT was unstoppable, so the cultural expectation to be “cool” was immovable. Pass me the remote; there’s a good movie starting on CCTV6.
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, November 2015 Issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link.