Depressing and uninspiring.

At first I thought it was about translating "dissident" posts on Chinese social media, like what Taiwanese and Hong Kong media have been doing since around the early 2000s.

You will find plenty of people complaining about the local authorities or government policies on sites like Weibo and Zhihu. But instead of using this as proof that China has freedom of speech, they use this to further the narrative of "Chinese people hate their government".

Classical propaganda technique left over from the Cold War. Draw conclusions first, then interpret the facts accordingly. If the Soviet people don’t go to church, it is due to lack of religious freedom; if they do go to church, it is an act of protest against the lack of religious freedom.

Distasteful? Yes, but nothing we haven’t seen before.

However, that’s not what the Great Translation Movement is.

The movement is about seeking out the most controversial, trollish and deranged posts on Chinese social media, translating them into other languages (usually English), and saying that’s what Chinese people basically are.

Imagine if people like me were to take screenshots of 4chan, or some of the white supremacist spaces here on Quora, translate them to Chinese, and present Americans as aspiring school shooters, kebab removers, and segregation enthusiasts.

That’s the Great Translation movement in a nutshell. It’s the kind of thing mainstream media used to be criticised for in their depiction of Muslims. They only show the crazies, so that people come to associate Islam with fanaticism by default.

You see, while western understanding of China has pretty much been the same for centuries, the narrative on China does actually evolve. The narrative used to be that the CCP is oppressive and unpopular, and all it takes to spark a regime change is to appeal to the good senses of the Chinese public, by showing them "truths" that they "haven’t seen before".

In other words, "hate the Chinese government, but love the Chinese people".

However, some time during the late 2010s, people began to realise that regime change was never going to happen, at least not under the current circumstances. Folks in China do have complaints, but they are overwhelmingly supportive of the government.

And so they’ve pretty much given up on trying to sway the Chinese public to the “Light Side of the Force”, and have chosen instead to poison the well - by depicting the Chinese people as wholly alien, fanatical, weird, irredeemable, and inhuman.

In other words, "hate the Chinese government, and the Chinese people too".

So what do I make of the Great Translation Movement?

I’ve been arguing for the longest time that there is little to no practical difference between hating the Chinese government and hating the Chinese people. These “translators" and their supporters are basically proving my point.

Moral of the story is, if you look hard enough for shit in a shithole, you’re going to find it. But what a miserable existence that would be, to be immersed in shit all day, to stoop to such pettiness, to limit one’s vision and understanding of the world as nothing more than…this.