With the Chinese exclusion wave in the U.S., the Chinese version of the New York Times has a report on the large number of Tang restaurants whose business has plunged and whose livelihood is extremely miserable, and does not forget to remind Chinese readers that “a spate of hate crimes and violence against Asians, with racists claiming that Asian Americans are responsible for spreading the virus, has in some cases fueled the violence.”
This statement implies that the originator was former President Trump, who bluntly called it the China Virus, which is said to have fueled racial attacks against Chinese Americans in civil society. So the Biden administration stressed that the word China must not be labeled as a virus.
But the Biden administration is also very smart. Unlike Trump, the Democrats are an intellectual elite and are not as open-minded as the Trump administration, and they know more about semantics.
On April 11, Secretary of State Blinken summoned national reporters and said something very important: “China knows that it did not do what it should have done in the early days of the virus, that is, it did not keep international experts informed and was not transparent at all. One of the results of this failure was that the virus got out of control faster.” (China knows that in the early stages of Covid, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to, in real time, give access to One result of that failure is that the coronavirus got out of control. One result of that failure is that the coronavirus got out of hand faster.)
What is semantics? It is the study of how different ways of phrasing words converge in the same meaning. There are two main types of semantics. One is called “Conceptual Semantics” and the other is “Associative Semantics”. Conceptual semantics, such as “Asian”, includes race and color, and has a clear meaning. Associative semantics, such as “an ethnic group that is skilled in kung fu and martial arts and has a taste for wild animals such as bats and civets”, does not say which ethnic group, but everyone understands it.
Instead of directly connecting China and Virus as Trump has done, the key words and elements of China, Covid, Early stages, knows (the verb is still in the present tense), and failure are included in a long sentence. Trump’s China Virus, is a Tarantino standard kill order (Kill Bill) type of fast mirror jump connection, and Blinken’s sentence such as Wang Jiawei style Maggie Cheung in cheongsam slowly walking down the stairs of Long shot, the key is a pair of words: China and Covid.
The black people with lower education listened to the standard killing order style of Trump, and beat the Chinese when they saw him. The elite population of the East Coast of the United States heard the long shot semantics of the Brink’s Wang Jiawei, received the message, but will not hit people, see Chinese restaurants and Chinese employees, only silent and civilized to avoid. The two have their own division of labor, different ways to the same. As an intellectual from a literature department, I hate politics, and I am not too interested in whether Blinken is a more cultivated racist, but I like the art of subtle language.
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