Apparatchik Babble

We’re talking here of our “blindly loyal bureaucrats”

Somewhere earlier on this blog I noted that our local bureaucrats are increasingly using communist-speak, “apparatchik babble”. I’m very sensitive to it because, from the 1970s in Beijing, I was studying it and having to parrot it. It’s really depressing to hear it said out loud. Especially today, nearly half a century later, and by those in charge of our city’s future. 

Example: one of the PSAs on local radio tells us how the National Security Law is a wonderful and necessary thing to stop an “extremely small minority” of people (极少人数  Jí shǎo rénshù) who were trying to cause problems. Thus did they (mis)label 2 million-plus of our fellow citizens; like me. That “extremely small minority” is the same wording used by Mao and his Gang to smear their enemies in the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. 

Peter Kammerer notes this new “mainland-style terminology” too, in today’s South China Morning Post:

A patriot I am apparently not. When Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and others in her administration speak of national security and related issues, their language is unfamiliar to me.

Their speeches are peppered with phrases and ideas that I don’t hear other Hongkongers utter. Expressions like “foreign interference”, “external forces” and “black hands”; this is mainland-style terminology that is alien to a city that has been used to bland bureaucrat-babble.

In the past few months, the United States has been the target of foreign ministry and Hong Kong government vitriol, the language in press releases and statements being virtually identical. [Read more…]