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Understanding Climate Change
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Humanitarianism or
Imperialism
An examination of the U.S.'s so-called humanitarian interventions over the last half century.
The world’s most renowned public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, has consistently made the argument that,
“Almost every aggressive act by a Great Power is justified on humanitarian grounds.” If you live in the U.S. you should be especially familiar with the idea of humanitarian intervention. The official U.S. position when taking our military into a foreign conflict is almost always the same. So and so, from such and such country, is a brutal dictator who is killing his own people, and we have no choice but to send our military to stop him.
These arguments are especially effective when used on democratic societies due to the fact that many people in these societies tend to think of themselves as defenders of freedom and justice. The truth is that these “humanitarian” interventions almost never alleviate the suffering of those on the ground, and the only reason we engage in them is to protect our global hegemony.
The U.S. had a long and bloody history of humanitarian escapades in Central and South America during the Cold War. Under the guise of humanitarianism, the U.S. has issued economic sanctions, deployed its military and backed literal death squads to overthrow democratically elected governments throughout Latin America. The civilian populations of Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia bore the brunt of our “humanitarian” missions in the region.
In Guatemala during the 1970’s and 80’s the U.S. provided training, weapons and intelligence to forces that waged a brutal war on the country’s poor and indigenous populations. Amnesty International, along with many other international human rights organizations, have deemed this humanitarian effort, that killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced a million more, a genocide.
In the 1980’s, the U.S. militarily propped-up the right-wing government in El Salvador during the country’s bloody civil war. El Salvador’s U.S. trained and funded security forces committed countless atrocities during the war that killed an estimated 75,000 civilians.
After the war, a United Nations Truth Commission found that U.S. backed forces in El Salvador were responsible for 85% of those killed, kidnapped, or tortured during the conflict. Among those killed by U.S. backed death squads was Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had long advocated for the rights of poor El Salvadorians. Despite the realities on the ground, then President Ronald Regan said in 1981:
Although the Cold War ended in 1991 our “humanitarian” interventions continued throughout the world. The U.S./N.A.T.O. “humanitarian” intervention in Kosovo in 1999 is, to this day, staunchly defended by many. It has been deemed “necessary” to stop the slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Serbia.
Solobodan Milosevic was committing atrocious war crimes against Kosovar Albanians, but N.A.T.O.’s bombing campaign only escalated the horrors being perpetrated on the ground. U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark warned, before the bombing of Serbia, that a U.S./N.A.T.O. attack would escalate violence against ethnic Kosovar Albanians, not alleviate it. Mueller stood before Congress and repeated the WMD lie.
Common Dreams and Salon have estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion in 2003. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found and the destabilization of the region gave rise to countless jihadi terrorist groups including ISIS.
Again in 2011, a U.S. led N.A.T.O. bombing campaign was waged in order to “promote democracy” and free the people of Libya from a vicious dictator. U.S. led N.A.T.O. bombings killed around 10,000 people and toppled the government of Muammar al-Gaddafi. Libya went from the richest nation in Africa to a failed state with open air slave markets and a haven for terrorist groups including ISIS.
He was right, Serbian forces ramped up their attacks on ethnic Albanians in response to N.A.T.O.’s bombing. In addition, N.A.T.O.’s bombing of power plants and civilian infrastructure cut off power and water to hundreds of thousands, killed countless civilians, and destroyed the country’s economy.
In 2003, the U.S. began one of its most tragic “humanitarian” blunders. The mission was dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The mission sought to save the world from a brutal dictator and his “weapons of mass destruction.” Every U.S. official from then Secretary of State Collin Powell to then F.B.I. Director Robert In 2012, the C.I.A. launched a mission code named “Operation Tinder Sycamore”. The program trained and armed what it called “moderate rebels” to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and free the Syrian people. In reality many of the “moderate rebels” the U.S. was funding during the operation turned out to be linked to Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, and other jihadi terrorist groups.
Operation Tinder Sycamore was one of the main contributing factors behind the Syrian Civil War. The U.K. based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has estimated around half of a million people have been killed in the conflict with 6.6 million displaced internally and another 5.6 million displaced around the world.
The U.S. “humanitarian” mission to free Venezuela from their democratically elected leader is still ongoing. In this case the U.S is using economic sanctions to “free” the people of Venezuela. U.N. rapporteur to Venezuela, Alfred de Zayas, was sent to investigate the facts on the ground. In Zayas’ report he said U.S. sanctions are killing many of Venezuela’s most vulnerable people and may amount to “crimes against humanity.”
According to Zayas, the sanctions are compatible with a “medieval siege” and are “illegal under the U.N. Charter.” Many news outlets have reported that U.S. sanctions have killed 40,000 Venezuelans. These sanctions have seized billions of dollars-worth of Venezuelan state assets and have blocked the delivery of tens of millions of dollars-worth of food and medical supplies.
The truth is that these interventions are imperialism not humanitarianism. The examples I’ve given here are but a small fraction of the missions that have been carried out by the U.S. in the name of humanitarianism. Each “humanitarian” action was perpetrated, not to relive suffering, not to spread freedom and democracy, but to secure U.S. economic and military dominance.
U.S. foreign policy, more times than not, thwarts democracy, it dosen’t promote it. Multiple news outlets, including TruthOut. org, Mint Press News and Fair.org, have reported that the U.S. militarily supports 73% of the world’s dictatorships, based on data compiled by Freedom House, and their rating system of political rights around the world.
We have killed far more in these “humanitarian” conflicts than we have saved. A new era foreign policy based on peaceful diplomacy must begin if we are ever to save the soul of our country.
Understanding Climate Change
Written by: Jazmine Martinez @jazminemyleigh_ Layout Design by: Katie Priest
What is truly going on?
There is an entire ecosystem that is taken into account when understanding climate change. Why is the Earth so hot?
Why are Amazon fires dramatically spread all over the internet? Why is seventeen-year-old Greta Thunberg stressing the issue of the climate crisis? The son of Will Smith and founder of water brand “Just Water” Jaden Smith posted a clip on Instagram, creating an “Eco-Resolution” featuring many icons in the entertainment industry. Why does any of it matter?
On the opposing end, there is a rising skepticism on the whole idea of the climate crisis from President Donald Trump. He states in one tweet, “In the 1920’s people were worried about global cooling--it never happened. Now it’s global warming. Give me a break!”
Global warming is a difficult topic to debate after gathering factual situations happening world-wide. After hard research, hundreds of thousands of scientists hint at one idea - the world is warming up faster than ever before. The facts are there, however, now more than ever the public needs to understand the complexity of the issue in a simple and understandable way in order to lessen the controversy.
The Earth’s Temperature is Rising
According to NASA, “Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come, largely due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.”
Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass by the atmosphere; however, they also stop it from leaving. As people breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, there is a large amount of carbon dioxide that fails to leave the atmosphere. Along with other greenhouse gases, this becomes trapped in our atmosphere, heating up the environment. Now, scientists have growing concerns over the rapid increase of temperature.
Creating Warmer Oceans
New York Times Journalist Kendra Pierre Louis states, “the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago”.
The article also warns that one in every five coral reefs have died in the last three years.
Coral reefs hold more marine life per square inch than any other marine environment. Since the oceans are warming up, there are species of fish and coral that have troubles adapting to the temperature.
According to NOAA National Ocean Service Education, “Many drugs are now being developed from coral reef animals and
plants as possible cures for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, viruses, and other diseases.”
Without these reefs, there will be less of a possibility to discover these types of cures for drugs. Also, with less fish, it also means less food to eat within a growing population.
Water Scarcity
Every living organism needs fresh, clean drinking water. The planet holds a vast amount of water; however, only one percent of it is drinkable. All drinkable water comes from groundwater, rivers, and streams. But since temperatures are rising, evaporation plays its part. This creates droughts, which causes other countries to struggle for water.
As water is sucked out of the land and into the clouds, this creates devastating hurricanes, having too much water. Poor countries around the world, that don’t have the access to water as America has, suffer the most. Countries are resulting to take water from aquifers, which is water that has been saved up for around ten thousand years. This is a very expensive alternative that will raise the price of goods heavily. Hedge funds are also created for water due to the scarcity of it.
Less Farming, Less Crops
Since communities are draining groundwater more than ever due to the loss of rivers and streams, farmers suffer from the loss of water in their crops. With less crops becomes less food to eat in this growing population.
The Colorado river has enough water to provide for cities as far as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, as well as six million acres of farmland. It has also gone as far as Mexico; however, recently when it reaches Mexicali, there is none left to provide for farmers or any others nearby. This is what many have relied on in terms of supporting their incomes and their overall well-being. Many have to go to their governments, who determines the winners and losers in the community.
Fires
It is hard to pass by the idea that summers have been getting hotter as one year passes the next. Due to the lack of water, forests and greenery become more dry. A numerous amount of countries are experiencing forest fires, and not the healthy ones. In 2019, Brazil and other portions of South America have seen brutal fires within their precious amazon forests. These types of tropical forests are responsible for 36% of photosynthesis on land. these major issues, and it is easy for one to affect the other. Earth revolves around an entire ecosystem that needs one source for the next. As one factor is altered, another one is somewhere as well. This is why it is a largely spoken subject, shown with urgency from activists to entertainment influencers.
Australia experienced brutal fires that lasted longer, causing a lot more damage. It stood to be 46% greater than the amazon fires in South America, burning 25.5 million acres, mass murdering more than one billion animals, and approximately 2,000 households destroyed. According to Insider, “The total damage and economic losses will exceed $100 billion, according to Accuweather.”
Meat Industry
Something as simple as the digestion system of cattle has such a large impact on the planet. With meat being such a booming business, there is a great amount of buffalo, cows, pigs, and chicken eating, pooping, and burping. There is a gas within their droppings and burps called methane. This is another greenhouse gas that heats up the Earth’s atmosphere, along with carbon dioxide. Although carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere ten times longer than methane, it remains to have a higher radiation level than carbon dioxide.
According to InsideClimate News, “Emissions from livestock account for about 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, globally, and roughly two thirds of those emissions come from cattle.” There are subcategories that aline with
The Invisible Poverty Written by: Alaast Kamalabadi @AlaastChen Design by: Katie Priest I t’s the end of the suburbs as we know it. Numbered are the days of mega-malls, McMansions, and manicured lawns. Beneath this facade of prosperity, something darker is afoot. The suburbs are now home to something antithetical to its conception, something almost unthinkable, especially given the suburbs’ association with postwar prosperity and white affluence: poverty. Poverty, broadly speaking, has been on a slow and steady increase since the turn of the millennium. 11.5 million more people live in poverty in 2015 than in 2000, according to the Brookings Institution. Of that figure, around 48%, or 5.7 million of the growth in poverty, happened in the suburbs — roughly three times the amount of poverty growth in cities, according to the Institute for Research on Poverty. Elizabeth Kneebone, senior fellow at the Brooking Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, notes 2015 as a pivotal moment in American sociological history, where, for the first time, poverty in the suburbs outstripped poverty in the cities, with three million more living below the poverty line in the former than the latter. What is “suburban poverty”? First we have to define “poverty.” How is such a concept measured? The U.S. Census Bureau defines poverty by “money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition.” Complicating this measurement is the Bureau’s division of poverty statistics measures into two branches, according to the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis: official and supplemental poverty measures. The former excludes the role of social safety net programs such as SNAP and welfare in raising a household’s income. Generally, research on suburban poverty is conducted with regards to the former set of data. Secondly, what constitutes a“suburb”? The Census Bureau defines a suburb as “a municipality of more than 2,500 people located within a metropolitan area,” excluding its central city. Finally, what defines suburban poverty, and what are the characteristics that distinguish it from urban poverty? A common myth about suburban poverty is that it is a product of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Kneebone and peer Alan Berube argue in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America that the roots of suburban poverty are deeper and more systemic, emerging from “economic changes, population and immigration settlement patterns, and housing policies dating back to the 1980s.” The Great Recession merely exacerbated existing patterns of inequality. The housing market crash led to millions of foreclosures, and housing and stock values plummeted nationwide by trillions, only to crawl to a slow recovery by 2012. The suburbs, as the locus for real estate investment, was hit especially hard. Career investors were not the only ones to suffer. Andi Durand, retired pharmacist, grandmother of five and occasional real estate dabbler, recounts her brush with poverty a decade ago: “[The mansion] was an investment. I was going to use it as pension and schooling funds for my grandchildren. Then 2008 came crashing hard … I was living out of a 2-acre mansion, without the money to even pay for heating.” She is also an illustration of another quirk of the suburban poor: according to the Institute for Research on Poverty, they are more likely than their urban counterparts to be homeowners. Lastly, they are more likely to be white.
As Kneebone testified in “the Changing Geography of US Poverty,” housing affordability and regional market trends are the reason more low-income families are moving to the suburbs. This influx, however, does not account for the rapidity of poverty concentration in the suburbs and changing urban-suburban income make-up.
An exclusive focus on lowest-income families ignores a significant contributor to the ranks of the suburban poor — moderate-income families, numbering millions, whose “critical housing needs are sending their households into the ranks of the poor,” and who “increasingly [rely] on strained social safety net programs” to survive, according to an Op-Ed titled “Trouble in the Suburbs” by Alexandra Cawthorne Gaines for the Center for American Progress.
Perhaps the most common thread of suburban poverty is downward mobility. As more white, middle-class households encounter crises — caught in the crosshairs of rising house prices, education costs, and costs of commute — they find themselves sinking into financial quandaries.
The suburbs are a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. — only taking off in the ‘50s, when the American economy was bolstered post-World
War II and predominantly middle-class, white, well-to-do families took flight away from what they saw as the cacophony and chaos of the city and to the sanctuary of the ’burbs, enabled by America’s post-industrial refinement of commute.
Poverty in the suburbs therefore poses unique challenges. Take, for example, the geography of sprawl. Cars are a necessity in the suburbs. Public transportation services are limited, and their regional connectivity weaker, according to Kneebone.
Furthermore, the figure of available jobs within reasonable commute distances, set by Kneebone at a liberal figure of 15 miles, decreased by 17 percent from 2000 to 2010, enforcing a reliance on cars, which, if not expensive to purchase, are costly to maintain. The suburban poor are therefore deprived of more opportunities of employment and mobility, more so than their urban counterparts.
Finding a well-paying job within a reasonable distance isn’t the only obstacle encountered by the suburban poor. The discourse around poverty is clouded by the “perception gap” — a term I have adopted from social policy scholar Scott W. Allard as he used it in an interview with Tanvi Misra in “The Biggest Myths of Suburban Poverty,” published on Citylab. com — of poverty as a uniquely urban phenomenon. Most suburban poverty falls under a “blind spot.”
Action to alleviate poverty often concentrates on inner cities, which have historically been coded as black, impoverished neighborhoods following the War on Poverty. According to Mother Jones senior editor Aaron Weiner, nonprofit organizations and governmental programs on poverty are “still targeting low-income clusters in urban centers today rather than the diffusion of people who can no longer afford to live near their work.”
Human service organizations spend around eight times less per each poor resident in suburban areas than they do in urban areas, according to the Institute of Research for Poverty. Although the landscape of poverty has been changing in the past few decades, the alleviation efforts have yet to catch up.
Existing efforts to combat inequality in the suburbs are inadequate, in part due to the perception that the suburbs are untouchable by poverty. Worse, Weiner contends, people living in poverty in the suburbs are “isolated from the government offices, social services, and networks of friends and relatives on which they once relied.”
Furthermore, according to Allard, they are also regularly isolated from opportunity, marginalized from politics, and experience the same racial segregation as their urban counterparts.
Not all research into suburban poverty has been unanimous in their alarm at data pointing to its growth. In no small part due to the staggering diversity of suburban classification — the “suburb” as a geographical and demographical construct is itself frustratingly eclectic, encompassing a variety of areas of varying population densities, racial makeup, and zoning practices — the issue of pinpointing suburban poverty, especially relative suburban poverty, is a complex one, one that yields at times contradictory data and conclusions.
Janice Fanning Madden’s study “Has the concentration of income and poverty among suburbs of large U.S. metropolitan areas changed over time?” finds that contrary to the assertions of contemporary policy analysts such as Allard who claim that poverty across suburban regions of all U.S. metropolitan areas is pervasive, especially in suburban communities built after the 1970s, poverty and income concentrations have not, in fact, increased in the suburbs over the past two decades, generally speaking.
If there are truly any cases of increasing concentrations of suburban poverty, Madden states, they are limited to “suburban municipalities of older metropolitan areas in the northeast and midwest.”
Another study, “Re-evaluating differences in poverty among central city, suburban, and nonmetropolitan areas of the US,” uses Foster et. al’s “distribution-sensitive poverty measure.” By accounting for data on poverty severity, not just prevalence, their study suggests that urban poverty yet remains more severe.
How do we move forward? How do we address suburban poverty? Even if the consensus on whether or not poverty is experiencing growth in all suburban areas is still murky, poverty is a reality of all suburbs. We must educate the American public on the demographics of poverty, to combat the unrealistic, damaging view of the suburbs as a place untouched by poverty.
Furthermore, I believe that suburban poverty should not be viewed as an issue isolated from urban poverty — the twin phenomena are linked, so alleviation measures should be global and wholistic, targeting both.
I propose that we maintain federal funding of safety net programs, such as food stamps, introduce more price fixes to suburban housing areas, increase public funding of human service programs to galvanize the unemployed and low-income workers seeking to advance in the labor market, and divert more resources towards suburban poverty, instead of maintaining a myopic focus on urban poverty.
Diverting resources should not, however, funnel away much-needed funds for inner-city poverty. Over-reliance on existing resources and organizations will only tax all existing frameworks for aid thin and exacerbate poverty across all areas. Instead, we should establish more new nonprofit organizations capable of tackling suburban poverty.
Bernie sanders is my choice
Written by: Giselle Martinez @GISELLEM8899 Layout Design by: Katie Priest
After surviving the last four years under Donald Trump’s presidential rulings, I believe that he should not be allowed to run again and definitely should not enter into his second term. If we leave our country in the hands of Trump, I fear that he will destroy us all. I believe the man that will help restore what Trump, and many other presidents before, have destroyed is Bernie Sanders. I believe in all of his platforms and that there is a big possibility he can change things.
As a college student, my first thought on who should be president was Sanders. As a person who has to pay for some of the college courses, because financial aid does not cover it all, College for All makes me consider him more for presidency than Trump.
College for All, one of his platforms, has me captivated and makes me want to vote for him. Sanders promises to cancel all student loan debt for the 45 million Americans who owe around $1.6 trillion and place a cap on student loan interest rates going forward at 1.88%.
He promises to pass the College for All Act to provide at least $48 billion per year to eliminate tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities, tribal colleges, community colleges, trade schools, and apprenticeship programs. I have family members who have lots of debt or will not be able to go to college because it is too expensive, and I believe they would benefit from this as much as I will. I know there are millions, of people in the United States who will benefit from this proposition besides my family members and I. If you need more information on how many people are in debt go to Marketplace.
Sanders believes that everyone deserves the right to obtain a higher education if they choose to pursue it, no matter their income. Border and instead rely on cost-effective and innovative methods to counter the real threats of drug importation and human trafficking, not manufactured ones targeting the defenseless. The money and effort that is being used to build the wall should be put into stopping the real problem, drug importation and human trafficking. The wall Trump is building will not stop any of those things from happening.
Sanders is also promising to drive Congress to enact a swift, fair pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living, working and contributing in America today. This would have helped my uncle from being deported a year ago. Speaking from experience, I know Sanders will be helping people lose stress over having to be deported and leave behind family members. If Sanders had been elected before, maybe my uncle would not have been deported.
Housing For All is another platform Sanders has that makes me give thought to voting for him. Sanders promises to make rent affordable by making Section 8 vouchers available to all eligible families without a waitlist and strengthening the Fair Housing Act and to end homelessness and ensure fair housing for all. According to National Health Care for the Homeless Council, 700 homeless people are killed annually by hypothermia because 40% of this nation’s homeless are unsheltered.
There are more reasons as to why he should be elected but these three reasons are the most important ones to me on why I would choose Bernie Sanders for 2020 president. I believe that, given the chance, Bernie Sanders can make a difference, even if some of his issues seem impossible to accomplish. Bernie Sanders thinks about the defenseless’ interest first and is willing to do something to help all of us in a way Donald Trump has not.
“We need leadership in this country, which will improve the lives of working families, the children, the elderly, the sick and the poor. We need leadership which brings our people together and makes us stronger.” -Bernie Sanders
Sanders has promised to stop all construction of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico
“Fuck Your
Mother” A Chinese-American Dive Into Vernacular Rebellion Written by: Alaast Kamalabadi Design by: Katie Priest @AlaastChen
Slang is, by definition, on the edge. Slang is construed as “a class of deviant registers of language,” says anthropologist Asif Agha. In an essay titled “Tropes of Slang,” he explains how slang operates antithetically to formalized, standardized language. According to Agha, slang instills among its users a sense of divisional, oppositional belonging to a social group, caste, or demographic. The more fringe the jargon, the more exclusionary it becomes. Fewer people can comprehend and use it proficiently, signaling their belonging in the in-group as they navigate what Agha terms as “microspaces of interaction linked to specific social practices and groups.”
Code-switching, too, can be an exclusionary or inclusionary practice and an act of rebellion. As an American of dual Chinese and Iranian heritage raised in a multilingual environment, I am a veteran of code-switching. In stressful social situations, code-switching from English to Chinese allows me to carve a private space amidst the public, “subtly, reflexively chang[ing] ... between different cultural and linguistic spaces and ... identities,” in the words of NPR’s lead Code Switch blogger Gene Demby. Only those with whom I share the same linguistic background are privy to my venting. This is exclusion at work.
I also code-switch from English to Chinese in the presence of a Chinese-speaking demographic. Code-switching signals my inclusion in their spaces. My attempts to codeswitch are not always successful. Despite my fluency and textbook accent, my lack of distinctive Chinese physical 40 March 11, 2020 features supersedes any impressions that may be formed on the basis of speech and codes me as un-Chinese. I often wind up othered as a curiosity. I persist doggedly despite this form of exclusion because China is my cultural heritage and I feel entitled to the affiliation. Furthermore, I take pride in embodying subversion.
I used to think exclusively in Chinese. I had tutors in Farsi. Nonetheless, at some point, English supplanted their seats and sprawled itself across the porous, vulnerable spaces in my head. I preferred English. Chinese was difficult — so many strokes, and so much meaning and history concealed in every logograph, each so hard to unpack. English, conversely, felt egalitarian and straightforward. Every syllable cut straight to the point. Eventually, I began to formulate thoughts in English rather than in Chinese. This transformation, however, did not occur out of mere personal preference.
Globalization and U.S. imperialism both had lasting effects on China, especially Shanghai, the burgeoning metropolis where I lived from birth until the age of 15. English was rapidly becoming a boon, even a necessity, in business and foreign affairs. Public schools mandated English-language lessons in its curriculum. Most private schools upheld English as the primary language of instruction. My identity as an expatriate and a third-culture kid of mixed race became intrinsically tied to my command of English.
Now, I continually find myself returning to Chinese, fascinated by the way it has evolved since the age of the Internet, and by its inventive rebellion. Chinese slang follows conventions entirely foreign to an English-centric viewpoint. Chinese is logographic, comprising of strokes that each denote meaning or sound. It is not a sequence of alphabets strung together. Chinese characters often embody abstract notions or semantics by themselves, which can be further modified by compounding characters. As it is a highly tonal language, many different characters often assemble under one selfsame sound.
Chinese slang generally operates under the ambiguity afforded by this quirk — characters with different semantics but the same sound can act as a proxy for the original character. One such slang term, “cao ni ma” — which literally translates to “grass mud horse”, a hoax creature said to resemble an alpaca — is a good example of this. It is a wordplay on the slur “fuck your mother,” whose phonemes are almost identical.
Despite the relentless censorship of speech in Mainland China, Chinese bloggers and activists invent slang and code at an alarming speed to circumvent censors. It’s a supercharged push-pull dynamic, in which the government requires a period of time to familiarize itself with this code and glean what it means by looking at its context, then bans certain strings of characters, at which point the process of invention begins anew. You only need to go looking for a list of terms censored by the Chinese government to get a sense of the legal and humanitarian battles fought on the web, and of which political and social issues consistently invoke polemics and ire from the Mainland Chinese establishment. Slang exposes the government’s
deepest-seated fears.
“Cao ni ma” is extensively censored in Chinese news media and on social media sites. What appears to be mere vulgarity at first glance belies a deeper protest; “fuck your mother” teems with anti-communist and anti-establishment sentiment because it pokes fun at China’s censorship practices and because of its association with Chinese activist-artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei posted a nude photo of himself crudely censored with a stuffed “cao ni ma” toy over his genitals with anti-establishment caption “ ”, romanized as “cao ni ma dang zhong yang”, meaning, literally, “grass mud horse covers the center” — another wordplay that hinges on the Chinese quirk of characters sharing phonemes.
While the caption may seem benign, it may also be read as “fuck your mother, Party Central Committee.” The characters “ ”, culled from the full name of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, shares phonemes with the last three characters of Ai Weiwei’s captions, “ ”. Furthermore, “Ma”, or “Mother”, is an epithet for the Communist party and “motherland”, dating back to the conception of the People’s Republic of China. Folklore Institute of East China Normal University Professor Li Mingjie confirms its political undertones, saying,
“[Ma] is a canny form of linguistic subversion that seeks to wrest back an element of power from the social and political elite.”
Ai Weiwei’s post plays on reasonable doubt — after all, under such stringent censorship, double entendres are the only resort for rebellion. The layer of ambiguity obscuring his post certainly did not fool Chinese censors, however, which swiftly expurgated all instances of the post in circulation. Senior party officials allegedly received it as “a direct and obscene insult”, and it may even have played a role in his 2011 arrest, according to a Washington Post article analyzing Ai Weiwei’s appropriation of the “cao ni ma” meme in his art and activism.
There is another unique breed of Chinese slang that has been rising in prominence within the Chinese and American slango-sphere: Chinese-English hybrid slang. Colloquially known as “Chinglish,” this pidgin, linguistically subversive vernacular is especially popular among the millennial demographic on the Chinese Interweb.
Professor Henning Klöter of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures at the Humboldt University of Berlin confirms the significance of English as a well-tapped source for Chinese slang and is particularly fixated on slang developed through instances of Chinese-English code-switching inserted directly into vernacular speech.
The most fitting illustration of this phenomenon would be the internet idiom “no zuo no die,” which Urban Dictionary defines as karmic intervention — “if you don’t do stupid things, they won’t come back and bite you in the ass.” With almost 8000 upvotes, this term has enjoyed surprising penetration into both Chinese and international popular culture. Interestingly enough, the word “zuo,” pronounced in the first tone in pinyin, has its origin in subregional Chinese dialects, in particular Shanghainese. Urban Dictionary defines “zuo” as “act[ing] silly or daring (for attention).” alongside an illustration of an anthropomorphic panda bearing the likeness of famous basketballer Yao Ming, the proliferation of “no zuo no die” and similar memes can be explained through Dawkin’s neo-Darwinian hypothesis of internet memes as units of cultural conduction and transmission, according to sociologist Gabriele de Seta. “Shortness” and “memorisability” [sic] reinforce its effectiveness as web-cultural artifacts. One’s savvy of slang becomes “a social regularity of positive evaluation,” in the words Agha.
I have witnessed first-hand how memetic slang disseminates and sometimes even intermingles with political slang on Chinese social media sites, such as weibo. com, to form hyper-effective, rebellious, integrative, multicultural and hyper-penetrative slang. In the age of the Internet, where the dissemination of ideas grows faster and more localized than ever, slang and other deviant language practices often shed insight into the modern-day dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, subversion, and rebellion — and this is illustrated, paradoxically, most vividly in a space as restrictive and hostile to rebellion as the Chinese interweb.
English-Chinese hybrid slang also owes its conception and prevalence to the pervasiveness of certain English slang terms — e.g. “cool” — in casual Chinese vernacular. Such terms have been absorbed and assimilated completely into common parlance. They are common figures of speech, internationally mediatized through the process of globalization.
Not only does “no zuo no die” illustrate a global, integrative approach to slang, it also reflects the effects of the internet on the production of vernacular rebellion. As a robust internet meme that often spawns
