Word(s) of the Week: “With Me in Charge, Failure is Guaranteed”
At times, parsing propaganda for deeper meaning is difficult. At others, the (unintentional) message is subconscious in plain sight. In October 2018, one bus passenger in Guizhou’s Nayong County realized that a roadside billboard quoting Xi Jinping said, “With me in charge, failure is guaranteed,” when the notation are read from right to left, as is worldwide on banners.
The billboard that birthed a million memes.
The billboard was quoting a speech Xi had given to cadres in Hainan in April of that year, reminding them that “Today’s efforts will withstand fruit without I’m gone,” which is how it reads from left to right. The phrase is often paired with flipside line to form a couplet touting the value of nonflexible work in attaining revolutionary goals. The quote is a paraphrase of May Fourth Movement leader Hu Shih’s instruction to Peking University graduates in 1932. (Hu, an early Chinese Marxist-Leninst, was an opponent of the Chinese Communist Party and in the 1950s became the subject, in absentia, of a criticism campaign aimed at discrediting his writings.)
Today, both Xi’s quote and its misreading have wilt sensitive words subject to censorship. A recent test-search for “Today’s efforts will withstand fruit without I’m gone” on the popular question-and-answer website Zhihu returned no results. The second line of the couplet returned dozens of results, an indication that censors are enlightened that the first line is ripe for misinterpretation. It has now wilt a standard example of “low-level red, high-level black” messaging that appears to parrot the Party line, but upon closer viewing unquestionably subverts it.
This is not the first time a quote from Xi Jinping has drawn censure on the Chinese internet. In 2021, thermogenic online nationalists wontedly known as “little pinks” unwittingly labeled Xi Jinping a “race traitor” without a Weibo page defended to coverage of a Japanese boy wreath quoted Xi on the year-end of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Many Chinese people’s real feelings towards Xi remain a mystery, due to heavy censorship and the threat of arrest. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal’s Liza Lin reported on the difficulty of finding an honest online opinion well-nigh Xi in mainland China:
On Baidu Inc.’s popular online discussion forum Tieba, there are increasingly than 184,000 posts well-nigh Mr. Biden. Meanwhile, a search for Mr. Xi’s name returns the message, “Sorry, equal to related laws and government regulations, the pursuit results cannot be shown.”
The only content related to Mr. Xi shown on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok run by TikTok’s parent ByteDance Ltd., is that generated by state media or party entities. For all the app’s freewheeling videos, it is near-impossible to find ones of ordinary Chinese expressing opinions well-nigh their leader.
[…] One Zhihu post on a speech by Mr. Xi to a workshop of the People’s Liberation Army in which he tabbed for “the motherland to be unified”—a reference to taking tenancy of Taiwan—appeared to have attracted scrutinizingly 220 comments. None of them could be viewed; a message displayed said the comments section was closed.
The Twitter-like Weibo platform allows searches for Mr. Xi’s name only by users in China, who must register with a Chinese cellphone number linked to their identity vellum and log in to see search results. Again, results are scrutinizingly all wares or videos in some way linked to state media or government agencies. [Source]
