The Atlantic has an interesting feature about the ‘Nine Nations of China.’ These sorts of cultural delineations are problematic; “the people on the other side of this here imaginary line eat baozi for breakfast, we prefer rice-porridge” type distinctions are difficult to come by. The regions chosen aren’t actually very different from Sinitic language maps; though obviously there’s going to be a lot of overlap within culture and language. Language as a measure of certain kinds of diversity seems more defensible since there is some distinction about what people are speaking at point A v. point B. This is even more significant given the complete lack of homogeneity within the Chinese language family: they call Cantonese, Hakka, Wu… dialects, but they are about as close to Mandarin as English is to Swedish, French, and Esperanto. As such, language seems to be a fairly important facet of regional identity among mainlanders.

It’s useful to think conceptually of the wealthier Chinese provinces as a coastal archipelago, given extensive economic inequality in China today; those provinces with GDP per capita greater than Rmb30,000 (~USD4,200) are shown above (note: Inner Mongolia fits the criteria, but has a very small total population, and is resource rich, pushing up the average per-capita measure). This entire area has a total population of approximately 500 million, and also happens to be the region with the most linguistic (and therefore cultural-regional?) diversity. The bias becomes more significant the higher the threshold; the image below depicts provinces with average GDP > Rmb35,000 GDP / capita:

The pseudo-Mandarin speaking, Han dominated heartland is still relatively poor (income at approximately Rmb2,500 per capita annually). The rural-urban, north-south wealth divide is also strongly correlated with linguistic differences, at least broadly speaking (there’s considerable geographic overlap in both measures). This phenomena could to some extent explain the vigor behind the ‘one nation 5000 years!’ narrative. The areas that are most capable of conducting their own affairs might have the most reason/motivation to (“what do those socialist bumpkins up north know anyway?”) Indeed, the wealthiest and one of the most diverse areas (Ta|wan) is already a separate country中国组成的一个部分. Repeating that last line (“Taiwan is a part of China Taiwan is a part of China”) is important: history furnishes plenty of examples of national division over less significant fault lines as language or regional identity, in places with wealth gaps much less extensive than those that exist today in the PRC.

Cultural identity is necessarily subjective, and these maps (via Shanghaiist) are probably at least as revealing than my econo-linguistic examination up there. They also happen to be hilarious.

The forums of KDS (宽带山, “Broadband Mountain”) are home to an age old cat-and-mouse game between internet users and censors. Within China, Shanghai natives are notorious for being prejudiced against people from pretty much anywhere else in China. For example, Wuhan people will often say “Shanghai natives are unfriendly and refuse to speak in Mandarin with me, only using the dialect” (the dialect is about as similar to Mandarin as English is to German – there’s a big gap). As a result, on these forums you can find a lot of flaming among Shanghainese about “outsiders.” They spit, refuse to line up properly, and take jobs, I guess.

In order to promote harmonious interaction in cyberspace, censors have flagged the use of 外.地.人* (“outsider”) and 本.地.人 (“local”), sometimes deleting posts that contain these phrases. Presumably these terms were important to users – alternate terms have gradually developed, and were censored once they attained common use. The evolution of both iterations is as follows (meaning in “”, Pinyin pronunciation in italic):

1. 外.地.人 – “outsider,” waidiren. After this was blocked, people simply adopted:
2. W.D.人 or W.D.R – quickly blocked, netizens got more clever, and implemented:
3. Western Digital 人 – must have seemed like a good idea, since it would be impractical to block a company’s name – but when they did, netizens responded with:
4. 硬.盘.人 – “hard drive person, yingpanren” since Western Digital makes hard drives and the word “hard drive” is very commonly used, blocking it would be even more impractical than blocking a company’s registered name… But they did that also, so netizens moved on to using:
5. 石更人 – shigengren, doesn’t really have a coherent meaning, and is only the two composite character radicals of 硬, the first word of the previous iteration. As it stands, 石更人 seems to be the most commonly used when people wish to speak of outsiders in a written format.

And for ‘locals’

1. 本.地.人 – “local,” bendiren. After being blocked, people used:
2. B.D.人 or B.D.R – simple enough, later blocked. Replaced with the current:
3. 蓝光 – “Blue Ray Disc,” languangren. Apparently Blue-ray is common enough that censoring it would disrupt all sorts of other conversations. Apparently it is not heavily flagged yet.

* Periods are used here to dodge automated cens0r searches.

Martin asks in the comment thread:

i’ve been curious–how do you get around cens0rsh1p while writing in chinese? aren’t the individual characters fully-formed words? are all these comments in english?

Providing a wonderful opportunity to rant about language. Well, there are several ways to [sort of] dodge censorship in Chinese. Each character is a fully formed syllable with a basic meaning. Most words are two or three characters. Each particular syllable usually corresponds to a number of characters, for example, ji (with different tones) can be written as: 几、及、急、既、机、鸡、积… And so on. Some of those make no sense written alone. Regardless, it’s possible to replace words based upon pronunciation alone – 鸡肉 (ji1rou4 - chicken meat) could be written as 及揉 – the tones are wrong, and it would like like a bad typo. More common is to simply write JR. Chinasmack has a good list of commonly used terms. My knowledge doesn’t go much beyond that.

There’s also a very curious version (consider it a Chinese leetspeak, used by ‘post-90s kids’) that they call Martian. It’s a more complicated version of finding characters with homogenous pronunciation (including tones) and radicals (component characters) with similar meanings. It’s been popularized as a way to dodge censors, and demonstrate one’s grasp of obscure characters not commonly found in normal speech. For example, the phrase 达到美帝 (‘overthrow the American Empire’ – might catch the eyes of evil imperialist net nannies) could be written in Martian as 墶椡鎂締. Pronunciation is almost identical, and the characters read similarly – rather, they look similar, since all of the characters have an additional radical, which would allow the phrase to dodge automatic text searches.

‘[Spoken] foreign language capacity comes in waves.’ This mantra, repeated daily, is one of the keys to living and studying abroad. There are times when one feels fluent in Mandarin; and carries on discussions about politics, religion, and reasonably complex economics.

Then there are days where one barely finds oneself able to communicate, and is met with slow, “DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND-WHAT-I’M-SAYING?” as you blurt out, what must sound like (approximate with a thick Russian accent):

“To having the time; help me a little! Horse your rice. Indeed, I am to search for to projected electrics!” when the goal was to simply inquire, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be a bother – do you know where the movie theater is?”

Perhaps it’s not quite that bad. Still, those of us who would laugh at Ching/Engrish should be aware of how very amusing we probably sound.

Toward Better Tones in Natural Speech - Dr. Liao (of the Defense Language Institute) suggests re-conceptualizing tones in Mandarin to take into account natural speech patterns and tone changes within sentences:

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If current trends continue, the CCP and its subsidiaries will soon own most of the U.S. – ironic that. There is only one logical choice: capitulation and appeasement. As such I’ve expedited my Chinese resume project – though the glamour photo will probably be replaced by something more stern and serious, indicating efficiency and productivity. 

And you can have one too, with my user friendly template (turn comments on for translations) and a little copy-pasting from an online dictionary like www.nciku.com. Chinese resumes are pretty formulaic – it’s like filling out a character sheet or application, so directly translating things isn’t all that difficult. It’s also not unusual just to list “Date – Employer – Title” without lengthy explanations of duties. You could even use English for the aforementioned. 

You will of course notice a few linguo-cultural format differences:

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English is one of the eleven official languages in South Africa. English was introduced by the British at the end of the 18^th century. Most white settlers at the time were either of Dutch descent and spoke Afrikaans, or of British descent. Over time, words from Afrikaans and other indigenous languages (Zulu, Xhosa) were incorporated into a form of the English that is distinctly South African. Here are some South African words and expressions.

Bakkie = pick up truck

Braai = cook out

Is it? = really?

Plaster = band aid

Robot = traffic light

“Just now,” “now” and “now now” = expressions to describe Africa time