My Take | Hong Kong’s protest movement is also a language war

Many protest messages and graffiti may have lots of miswritten Chinese, but their writers only care about their effectiveness as a political weapon. The crisis in Hong Kong has been nothing short of calamitous, but this doesn’t mean it lacks comical moments. An endless source of amusement and the subject of many blog posts has been miswritten Chinese words messaged on Lennon Walls and in political graffiti across the city.

Usually, it’s just a character stroke or two missing. Sometimes, though, the wrong character with the same Cantonese sound was used. One example is “revenge for Yuen Long”, which referenced an incident in which white-clad men with alleged triad connections attacked protesters and bystanders in a mall and then on an MTR platform. In Cantonese, there is word for worry and another for revenge, and they both sound the same, though written in very different ways.

The frequent occurrence of miswritten Chinese has been cited by pro-establishment figures as evidence of the low level of literacy, and by extension, education standards, of the protesters and rioters. That may be true, but I am not so harsh. I am a terrible Chinese writer and a horrible English speller. Without word-processing, I am practically illiterate in two languages. Thankfully, journalism in Hong Kong usually doesn’t require a high level of literary accomplishment.

We need to remember that “the Revolution of Our Times” is being carried out by young people, many of whom were born after the British handover of Hong Kong back to China in 1997. They have been texting all their lives, with apps featuring auto-correct and predictive-wording functions. Unfortunately, spray-painting on walls doesn’t come with writing apps; and you need to spray your graffiti quickly before anti-riot police show up.

Since I became a hack in the early 1990s, Chinese word-processing has developed by leaps and bounds. In the old days, you pretty much had to know your Chinese words to process them on a computer. But even with early programmes such as Sucheng and Cangjie, you only need to input between two and five radicals to come up with the whole word. There is, of course, Pinyin, which enables you to input in English, but the pronunciations are in Mandarin, which presumably is a no-no for our localist/anti-China generation.