“Keyword Fever Syndrome”

The other day I mentioned that there is a kind of epidemic in Chinese society today, which I have temporarily called “keyword fever syndrome.” In fact, it seems that scholars have already proposed something like this long ago, but I can’t quite recall it at the moment, so let me first talk about my own view!

What is meant by “keyword fever syndrome” is this sort of mentality: people do not care about the preface and aftermath of a sentence, about signification and reference, about connotation and denotation, and so on. As long as they see some “keywords,” they immediately become mentally aroused.

For example, the case mentioned in a previous article—when it comes to the thought of the ancients, people are often too impatient to settle down and read a few original texts. As soon as a few keywords appear, they can launch into a righteous and passionate denunciation! See “the mind is nothing outside of things,” and fine, that means denying the objective world; see “preserve heavenly principle, destroy human desire,” and fine, that means denying human nature… These people do not care what those ancients actually said in the surrounding context. “One can smell their decadence with one’s nose”—this is an attitude of excessive self-righteousness.

There are many other examples of keywords. Take the word “science,” for instance; it has also become one of the most popular keywords. People often no longer understand what the true meaning of science is, but anyway science is a good thing: whatever I say is “scientific” is equivalent to saying that it is good and progressive. If we randomly open a newspaper and replace every occurrence of the word “science” with “good,” the meaning of the article often would not change very much at all…

Correspondingly, words like “idealism” and “metaphysics” have also become keywords. In an ordinary newspaper, if you see these words, you can replace them all with “bad,” and it will hardly affect the original meaning.

Or take “the Three Represents” and “maintaining advanced nature”; these expressions are also becoming “keywords.” Suppose we go out into the street and ask people, “Have you heard of the Three Represents?” I believe nine times out of ten the answer will be yes; but if we continue to ask, “What are the three represents?” then, again nine times out of ten, the same people will be completely unable to explain! In fact, if you replace “the Three Represents” with “good,” the meaning is more or less the same…

Take “important,” for example. This too has become a fashionable word: important documents, important speeches, even writing a book has to be called an important work… When everything becomes “important,” that means everything has become unimportant. Zhou Enlai once inspected a newspaper office and personally deleted the word “important” from the headline reporting his speech—commendable indeed!

And then there is “reform.” This keyword has a somewhat different meaning, in that it can push people to find ways to get something done. For example, “when a new official takes office, he makes three fires”; it seems that if you have done some work, you must always come up with some “reform” before it counts as having achievements or results. So now reform is all the rage: the college entrance examination system is changed almost every year, educational policy has to be changed without cease—from the central government to the school to the class, it is all like this; everyone also needs to keep rectifying and innovating, and the Party Constitution also has to keep being revised. Yet in fact, many things are not necessarily improved the more they are changed. If you earnestly implement and carry forward what was handed down by your predecessors, isn’t that also highly valuable? No, that won’t do—there must be “reform” before it has enough of a point. So in many cases we are not reforming for anything else at all, but simply “reforming for reform’s sake”—reforming for this keyword…

There are many, many more symptoms, and I will not list them one by one. Everyone can pay attention to them in daily life and experience them. In fact, once this problem has been pointed out, when looking again at much of the impatience in society, one often cannot help feeling that it is rather amusing.

December 29, 2005

Latest comments

Shangling 2009-12-21 13:21:31 [reply]

Four years have passed, and there has not been much change.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.