Youthology on Language Polarization

Youthology, “When Polarizing Language is Everywhere, It is all the More Important to Speak Nicely”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated here is fairly self-explanatory.  It discusses language polarization and hate speech on the Chinese Internet, focusing particularly on extreme nationalism and gender issues, apparently the hottest of hot-button issues in today’s China.  The text illustrates—sadly—that much of China has gone down the same sad rabbit hole that many of the rest of us have, and for much the same set of reasons:  the joys of tribalism and online, anonymous aggression. 
 
These tensions were particularly high during the recent Olympic Games in Tokyo, especially in events involving China and Japan.  I don’t know if most Chinese viewers watched the Olympics on television or online, but many seem to have watched while commenting on WeChat and Instagram, which added a layer of excitement and invective to the experience. 
 
Freya Ge notes that:
 
“Polarizing rhetoric was particularly on display in a sport that Chinese people pay close attention to: table tennis. After China's mixed doubles team lost in the final, many netizens took aim at the Japanese, accusing the Japanese organizers of cheating and attacking the player’s facial expressions during the match as contemptuous and disrespectful. In fact, the evidence of cheating was vague, and most viewers don’t know the rules of sports competitions, but ultra-nationalistic remarks were just a way to express people's anger and dissatisfaction with the results of the competition. Actually, in the beginning, I was drawn into this myself, and the discomfort of seeing China lose transformed the sport into a contest between Chinese and Japanese values.”
 
Strangely enough, Youthology, the organization that penned the text, appears to be a marketing firm whose business is helping brands market their products to young people!  Clearly, the rancor and polarization they denounce in the piece do not help them sell products!  One wonders if their Mr. Rodgers-like appeal to “speak nicely” will resonate with China’s tribal Internet culture. 
 
Translation
 
Not long ago, Dr. Zhang Wenhong 张文宏 [“China’s Dr. Fauci”] was attacked for saying that we may have to "live with the virus." Detractors thought this kind of statement was tantamount to giving in to the virus and was irresponsible. They attacked him as a "spokesman for Western interests", and quickly accused him of plagiarism, asking "Who is this person? Who is he to speak out like this?"
 
One careless word can stir up a great storm and spread throughout the entire country. We see such disputes everywhere on the web, whether it is over the stand-up comedian Yang Li endorsing Intel, a subway security guard in Xi'an dragging a female passenger off of a train, or the attacks on the Japanese actor Yuki Furukawa and the Japanese table tennis player Mimi Ito during the Olympic Games.  Everywhere, we find that in issues touching on gender, nationality, class status, and more, the public arena more and more frequently divides itself automatically into two camps.  The cognitive framework of friend vs. foe has never been more popular, and the polarizing rhetoric has found its way into everyday language.
 
"Speech polarization" refers to the tendency of people's opinions to become binary and polarized. The phenomenon of group polarization has long been studied extensively in the fields of psychology and communication. Due to factors such as group psychology, selective information access, and group irrationality, group members wind up taking more extreme positions after discussion and negotiation than before. What are the steps by which discourse has become polarized with the onset of the Internet era?  Social media has facilitated this process to a large extent, making it not only easier to form groups, but also easier for each group to ostracize and exclude others. We receive more and more homogenized information in our "bubbles” [lit., “stratospheres” 同温层], and with the stimulation of "likes", "retweets" and "I’m watching," your side gets ever more endorsements, and dissenting voices become harder to accept. Coming to terms with the forms and problems of polarized speech on the Internet is very important for reshaping our public speech arena. In response to the growing fragmentation of the online world, this article will talk about "speaking well."  How do people use polarized speech? What impact or damage will the increasing polarization of speech bring to public discussion? And when we lose faith in public discourse, is there a remedy?
 
When "value speech" and "hate speech" are integrated into daily life
 
Polarizing rhetoric takes many different forms on today's Internet. People connect everyday facts with distant values such as nationalism and left-wing discourse, raising the tone of what would otherwise be commonplace discussions.
 
In the early days of the epidemic, Dr. Zhang Wenhong called on people to eat more meat, eggs, and milk with high nutrition and protein, and to eat less rice porridge. His goal was increased immunity among the population, but many people saw these recommendations as "worshipping foreign things."
 
Internet users are increasingly enthusiastic about attaching huge labels to mundane factual details. Eating meat, eggs, and milk, being bilingual in Chinese and English, and buying foreign brands are considered the same as "worshipping foreign things," and things like unsimplified Chinese characters,[2] LGBTQ, and feminism are all seen as potential "outside forces." Whether it's Olympic champion Yang Qian 杨倩 (sport shooting) being called a “toady 跪族” and told to “get the hell out of China 滚出中国” for being photographed wearing Air Jordans, or Tsinghua University, called out for being "biased屁股歪 [lit., “slanted butt,” sitting on one side and not the other, taking sides]" for handing out copies of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to entering freshmen, anything associated with the world outside can stir up a lot of hate and outrage.
 
These hatreds, based on nationalist sentiments, often degenerate into collective, carnivalistic crusades. A "one-star campaign" against Japanese movies was launched on Douban.  After the floods in Henan in July, netizens cheered on Erke, a lackluster domestic sportswear brand, for donations to disaster relief, and angrily criticized other brands for not doing the same.  During the 2020 Olympic Games, Chinese netizens attacked Japanese athletes on Instagram.  This phenomenon occurs more and more frequently, as long as it is a question of something that is "not like us 非我族类," which, “though distant, must be punished 虽远必诛.” In addition to the spread of nationalism, the discourse of "class struggle," which disappeared for many years, has been revived. In videos related to social issues on Bilibili, the screen is filled with the words like "down with capitalists!" and "workers of the world, unite!"  We seem far from the era of "class struggle," but words like "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" have become familiar yet again.

The intensity of the rhetoric reflects the symptoms of the era. As the Hong Kong writer Leung Man-tao 梁文道 said in his “Eight Points 八分” podcast, "We are now in an era of emotional turmoil, either full of love or hate. Only when I am addicted to this kind of excitement can I feel that my life has weight, direction, and meaning.” The rise of extreme nationalism stems from the ebb and flow of struggle and stalemate in great power competition. The root cause of the return of the discourse of "class struggle" is the anxiety caused by the hardening of class lines and the misuse of "instrumental rationality" by large companies.
 
In uncertain times, some people are always eager to take the helm, and the (mis)appropriation of language speaks to a thirst for meaning and value. Those suffering the pains of an “empty heart” and an existential sense of nihilism, and who feel that life lacks meaning and interest, are desperate to find a purpose or belief that can lend them satisfaction and glory outside of their value as an individual, and by grasping after grand narratives, they fill their souls and seek warmth in the safety of the collective. Hatred of opponents and love of allies are at opposite poles of the Internet's emotional field of honor. But the charged language that surrounds the field, which seems to be rooted in the motherland and to be so insightful, is in fact mostly unproven conspiracy theories, which are nonetheless powerful enough to silence most people for fear of being defined and judged.

In addition, the polarization of speech in cyberspace is also accompanied by the incitement and exaggeration of "hate speech." Hate speech is typically about people rather than things:  race, nationality, gender, religion or sexual orientation can all become the “original sin.” Insulting and discriminatory comments directed at Black people and sexual minorities on the Internet in China are typical examples, and our social media platforms tend to be very tolerant of this. In discussions of gender issues, however, things quickly dissolve into mutual name-calling:  feminazi 女拳 [lit. “female boxer”], male chauvinist pig 蝈蝻 [a play on words: 国男 might be read as “Chinese male,” and adding the insect radical 虫 is insulting], prick [xdz].  As each side hurls increasingly ugly labels at the other, the issue itself becomes vague and almost irrelevant. Language has become a virtual fist, smashing the target with great force, but across the distance of the screen.  Those who are in the sites of the attackers are merely virtual avatars, far, far away, so people who engage in hate speech tend to think that the virtual world of hatred and anger is "no big deal."

Most of the time, " value speech" and "hate speech" do not appear alone, but are often mixed together with Internet slang, and a blend of the three has become the typical language used to express public opinion on the Internet. Phrases such as "hashtag 带节奏 [lit., “drive the rhythm," i.e., lead the crowd in a certain direction, "slanted butt" and "trolling 夹带私货[lit., “smuggling"—generally used as an accusation of others’ lack of sincerity] have become ubiquitous in Internet discussions. Deliberately stirring up emotions and creating gender antagonisms is often blamed on “driving the rhythm.” Not long ago, a painter added words like "free" to his paintings in accordance with customers' requirements and was immediately criticized by a KOL [key opinion leader], who opined that: "There is a lot of bias in the art world." What he actually meant was: "let the bullets fly a bit longer" and "wait for the backlash."

These words can be applied to almost every social event. As if anticipating a backlash, the speaker seemed to called attention to the truth. In fact, the "wait for the backlash" mentality is not concerned with the facts themselves, but with whether the present facts accord with what the speaker wants. These phrases are quick, short and effective, and they strip us of our ability to think carefully and independently. They are like a standard set of answers that will not let you down once you've mastered the formula.
 
FlipRadio host Li Houchen 李厚辰 has noted that a completely new ability the Internet has given us is that of making people passionate about an online "rush to judgement." We feel that we have the power to judge others, that we are doing justice. We actually care less and less about facts and logic, and more and more about values, theories and ideologies, in a fantasy of individual empowerment. The result of "judgment" is to use these partisan attacks to "cancel" a person, an organization, an idea, and make them disappear forever.
 
Once they have taken form, buzzword-filled value judgments become habitual, ready-to-use reflexes. As such, the act of judging becomes subconscious, and the perception of the "concrete person" on the receiving end is hazy, so people hardly recognize it when they engage in extreme speech acts.
 
What problems will result if we fail to recognize speech polarization?
 
In the case of Dr. Zhang Wenhong, polarization of speech led to polarization of behavior. When people refused to accept his idea that "we may need to coexist with the virus for a long time," not only was he branded a “talking head公知”[3] and someone who “worships foreigners,” but also immediately accused of plagiarism. As things continued to simmer on the Internet, the controversy gradually turned into a battle, with supporters and opponents quickly taking sides.
 
Ill-intentioned denunciations, black-listing, deleting, and piling on are common forms of behavior, and have even become the habitual practices of ordinary netizens, from which not even experts are safe. The combination of nationalism and moral condemnation is not rare and is the principle force behind today's surly online environment. However, this culture of denunciation and its use of public power are purely political. People are only too good at summoning extraterrestrial spacecraft to wipe out alien races, which has a taint of structural oppression, and even touches on the issue of the impact of public power on individual lives.
 
This is actually a manifestation of the increasing prevalence of anti-intellectualism in speech, but anti-intellectualism is nothing new. In the 1960s, the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) argued in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that people are not as accepting of "intellect" as we might imagine. "Intellect" is different from "intelligence." Intelligence refers to things like people’s abilities to express themselves, their ability to react, their speaking ability, all of which signal that the person is "smart," something that people welcome.  By contrast "intellect" emphasizes criticism, creativity and imagination, and is often regarded as pedantic and useless. In addition, there is a gap between the intellectual elite and the masses, which creates contradictions that can easily become antagonistic. Hofstadter described people's distrust and hatred of "intellect" as "anti-intellectualism.”
 
In today’s context, the manifestations of "anti-intellectualism" are complex and cannot be simply defined. In some situations, intellectuals are not excluded, and can actually help people understand the problems of the era and find a knowledge discourse that meets their expectations, so they are sought after. But it is nonetheless clear that people remain suspicious of experts and their arguments. On the surface, social media is a media that returns information, knowledge, and discursive power to the people, and it is difficult for "experts" and "intellectuals" to monopolize discursive power as they once did.
 
According to the historian Xu Jilin 许纪霖 (b. 1957), the information age is more like a new hotbed of anti-intellectualism. When intellectuals present an argument, they have to prove it, and not merely express opinions.  They have to mobilize any number of facts and examples, so that people can review and reflect on the process by which they arrived at their conclusions. But on social media, the currency is not "knowledge," but rather "information," which is expressed in tweets of 140 characters without argument or logic.
 
Individual rationality is limited, and partial or biased understandings of truth are inevitable. These biases should be constantly corrected in public discussions with others, without the expectation of arrive at a unified public opinion. This should be the way we finally look for truth, but instead what we see is both sides bickering and talking past one another.
 
At present, people solely pay attention to stirring up emotions and pinning labels on people.  They are quick to express opinions and to pass polarizing moral judgments on others. They ignore the ambiguity of the issues, and instead rush to judgement, using absolutist, violent, and simplistic language, and the public square becomes a place to vent their anger, or even deepen their prejudices against one other. In the Xi'an subway incident, the ferment of online public opinion conformed to this feature. "Anger" can be forwarded and liked, which in turn encourages people to express their moral indignation all the more.
 
It cannot be denied that the polarization of speech is fundamentally caused by deep social contradictions, and "class" and "gender" contradictions are structural. However, the sensitivities, attacks, and obstructions we see in discussions on class and gender not only have failed to bring empathy and understanding to both sides, but also have the potential to intensify contradictions and even create a vicious circle of polarization. For example, when people speak up for women on gender issues, they are "feminist bitches 女权婊 [lit., women’s power whore]" who create gender antagonisms. When someone speaks up for men, he is displaying "toxic masculinity 男权癌 [lit., men’s power disease]." These antagonisms stifle dissenting voices, who will be denounced, cancelled, or kicked out of the group chat, so neutral possibilities disappear.
 
The proliferation of judgmental language, ideas, and habits makes it difficult to sustain public discussion based on facts, logic, and reason, which means that the only way to have a dialogue is to attack the other side based on positions, attitudes and identities. The normal practice of analyzing facts, presenting and defending opinions, and seeking wider approval as a basic part of public discussion has now been eclipsed by the language of Internet polarization.
 
The spread of "trolling" and hate speech will make most people feel lost. Some people will lose interest in participating, while those who participate will become more and more homogeneous. The bubbles will automatically filter heterogeneous information, closing off and purifying itself.
 
The media scholar Fang Kecheng 方可成 has noted that online discussions have not resulted in a situation in which “far away people have become neighbors,” but rather one in which “neighbors seem to be far away.”  Far from becoming a village, the earth’s walls are multiplying, and the separation between people is getting worse and worse.
 
At the same time, people's allegiance to ideas in a world of speech polarization will also lead to indifference to facts. The concept of "post-truth" discussed in Hector Macdonald’s Truth：How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality [translated into Chinese as The Post-Truth Era 后真相时代] describes a situation in which people’s attitude towards the truth is more important than the truth itself, and speech is defined by attitude.
 
We see many people who read an article, get a rush of adrenaline after reading only a few lines, and immediately rush to comment online. This points to the dilemma of popular ideas, which are shaped not by facts but by emotions. If one side can cater to the attitude of those who support a certain thing and form a community on this basis, this group is also likely to manipulate the facts surrounding the cause to strengthen their monopoly on group values.   
 
Is it still possible to speak nicely?
 
As the water temperature slowing increases [and the frog slowly dies], the cyberworld of intense love and intense hate embraces ideas and emotions in all their constantly changing forms, but has no room for any "middle." What are we to do when we have no more innocent expectations of the “online public sphere?"
 
It's easy to slide into abandonment and nothingness when people lose faith, and to embrace extremes and hypocrisy when "reasoning" is no longer useful. This attitude is like saying that if you can't communicate, then you either keep silent or stop talking nicely and give as good as you get in online exchanges.
 
In an article published on our site entitled "As an ordinary person who wants to lie flat, I reflect on my own ‘privilege’", we came to the conclusion that if "silence" can indeed avoid speech conflicts, it does not promote communication or solve problems. In some cases, "zipping your lips" can be a kind of laziness, and is likely to let the minority opinion fall into a "silence spiral," in which the minority is unwilling to share its point of view, while the media and the public are focused on the views of the majority, so the voice of the minority becomes ever smaller, the voice of the majority ever bigger, spiraling upward. Positive expressions and voices are important, because "we can't hand over the world to people who don't think like we do."
 
"Giving as good as you get" is also clearly not a good way to communicate. It only makes polarization more difficult to deal with and people on both sides of the battle line less likely to come together. Polarized speech spreads because we want it to, not because we are incapable of public reasoning; language has become a tool of attack, and "reasoning" has been pushed aside. "Speaking nicely" may be the first thing we need to wake up. 
 
Fang Kecheng once mentioned in a lecture that he hopes that we can be people who will make unremitting efforts to realize the values and goals with which we identify, regardless of whether there is hope or not, regardless of whether "that day" is coming. We also believe that we can still have the courage to make a difference.
 
Remaining sufficiently open to facts and different points of view is one way to do it.  When we express ourselves we should rely on facts, but it is equally important to be open to new facts. When something riles us up, we should also ask ourselves if there is more than one way to look at the issue. Or we can invite others into the conversation so that more information will inform our judgements and discussions.
 
Kindness in the face of hostility is becoming scarce these days, but we still see a lot of people making the effort. Whenever Leung Man-tao responds to listeners' comments on his "Eight Points" podcast, no matter whether the listener approves of him or not, he still explains things systematically, freely admitting his own mistakes, and humbly acknowledging that learns a lot from his listeners. In between the battles of the Internet war, there are still people who patiently respond to others' questions or doubts with clear logic and reason. Seeing that such exchanges still exist gives us the confidence to cling to moderation and rationality.
 
"The intolerance we see on social media is due to the fact that many people’s toolboxes have only a hammer, or they are only willing to pick up the hammer nearest to them." According to the News Lab's newsletter, harsh labels like "crooked butt" and "wrong-headed 三观不正" are such "hammers." If you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all we ever have are hammers and nothing else, there will always be thorns and cracks in a world full of nails.
 
In our polarized lives, we would like to throw away our hammers and let reading and expression become tools yet again. Constantly reading positive words and speaking properly opens up some possibilities. Before using a label, ask yourself: What would I say if I didn't use the label? How might I return to a more humane and moderate expression? The premise of communication and dialogue is to "treat people as human beings." However huge they appear to be, countries, systems, nationalities, and genders are made up of living, breathing people.
 
In a binary cognitive framework, East and West, male and female, us and them become antagonistic.  But we need to avoid falling into this binary trap, because our goal is not to get rid of the "mob", but to break down the divide between you and me. Only when we can see genuine people and feel more empathy for one other will our “camps” disappear and the boundaries between us diminish.
 
Notes

[1]“当极化言论弥散四周，我们更需要好好说话” published online by Youthology on September 16, 2021.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  As part of an effort to promote mass literary, the Chinese Communists imposed the use of “simplified characters,” which reduced the number of strokes needed to write certain ideographs (for example, the People’s Republic of China in simplified characters is 中华人民共和国; in traditional characters, it is 中華人民共和國).  Traditional characters continue to be used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and certain parts of the Chinese diaspora.

[3]Translator’s note:  Gongzhi is an abbreviation for gonggong zhishifenzhi 公共知识分子, and both mean “public intellectual.”  At the same time, gongzhi has become a derogatory way of referring to “public intellecuals” whom one does not respect or with whom one disagrees, and thus has the populist connotation of “talking head” or “egghead.”  For more on public intellectuals, see the conversation between Liu Yu and Murong Xuecun here.