Online Chains of Contempt

[Randy W]

in the Sixth Tone

 

How Online Chains of Contempt Show China’s Obsession With Money

Popular jokes on social media reflect society’s preoccupation with materialism.

 

 

In modern China, for example, so-called professional chains of contempt work like this: Venture capitalists look down their noses at finance workers, who, in turn, think little of real estate developers. If you work in information technology, you probably think you’re better than people who work in new media. If IT workers’ scorn arouses the ire of, say, Sixth Tone journalists, they can always console themselves with the knowledge that at least they’re better than traditional media outlets.

In the past, however, this chain looked very different. Government workers sat at the top in their ivory towers, peering down at the mass ranks of lowly public institution workers, state-owned enterprise staff, and private companies, in that order. Chains of contempt apply to cities, too: Denizens of Beijing consider themselves superior to the supposedly snooty Shanghainese, who in turn shun those from Shenzhen, who then hate on the Hangzhounese, who then gripe about Guangzhou, and so on ad infinitum.

Chains of contempt are meant to be fun, satirical ways of framing the existing hierarchies in Chinese society. Every time someone wryly exposes a new chain on social media, it invariably goes viral. But why, exactly, do people have such a tireless preoccupation with chains of contempt?

 

 

 

 

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

 

 

WeChat Apologizes for Translating ‘Black Foreigner’ as N-Word

 

 

 

 

[Greg.D.]

Says it uses "neural machine translation", which is cool, but when I ask for translation here in the U.S. It says ..... whoa, I was gonna say "translated by Bing", but it no longer says that. It only says "Translated".

 

It's been sometime since I even relied on translation in WeChat as the translations were confusing but, based on this story, I think I should do some testing with my wife re the quality of translations.

[Randy W]

The best check is to translate the translation back to the original language - or to split it up into smaller parts until the translation makes sense. YOU do the translating into your own language.

[Allon]

The translation company usually has a proviso that says the translation uses "gisting." I guess when you see the translation itself, if you want to avoid some effort, is to gist it yourself.

 

Sometimes the results are absolutely hilarious. Korean is especially funny since the language uses pronouns (we, you, they, he, I) interchangeably depending on context. "I love you" becomes "You love me." Not quite what was meant.