OPINION - Politics
Hong Kong, Newspeak & Psychological Subversion 2015. A relatively uneventful year for Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the resignation of Ronny Tong (湯 家驊) from the Civic Party (公 民黨) managed to arouse much attention. “Tearful Ronny Tong quits as legislator,” reported the SCMP ( 南華早報) on 22 June 2015. The lawmaker, when founding the Civic Party, had hoped “to inspire the party… to win over moderate Hongkongers too in order to strengthen the democratic movement”. Following this break from his former party, Tong founded the Path of Democracy (民主思路) in pursuit of his political principles.
納更多政治傾向較為中立的港 人，以壯大民主運動。 The word ‘中立’ was translated to English as ‘moderate’. This translation is bad to say the least, since it leads to misunderstanding. For the original Chinese word ‘ 中立’ has two different meanings – one is to imply ‘moderation’ or ‘the middle way’, the other is ‘neutrality’. Or perhaps the translation was correct. In that case Tong was responsible for causing this misunderstanding. It is unnecessary to use the word ‘中 立’ to convey the first meaning. For instance, Tong could say ‘中間
路線’ instead, which has a literal meaning of ‘in the middle way’. He certainly has the ability to do so, himself being a renowned lawyer – a profession notorious for their selection of words. Instead, Tong used the word ‘中立’ in multiple instances in his resignation letter to convey the meaning of the ‘middle way’. So what made a great literacy like Ronny Tong blunder in perhaps his most important letter of his life? But let us first consider the nature of the misuse of wordings. In essence, this is a form of Newspeak, as a reference to Orwell’s 1984. Being the official language of a fictional dystopian nation named Oceania, Newspeak was specifically engineered to remove the possibility of rebellious thoughts among its people. One of its techniques is ‘doublethink’, which makes a person simultaneously accept contradictory concepts. For example, the word ‘free’ in Newspeak does not imply ‘free will’. Instead it would mean ‘the absence and lack of something’, which is contradictory to its original meaning. Back to Tong’s case, his blurring of two distinct and opposing concepts of the word ‘中立’ has far-reaching consequences. For one would now
The SCMP quote above was a translation of Tong’s ‘致各公 民黨兄弟姊妹書’, which was essentially his resignation letter. The original passage in Chinese is as follows: 自零九年底，我開始察覺公民 黨所走的路線，與當日創黨的 理念日漸偏離。我一直期待透 過我的不斷努力，可以啟發黨 的視野，由單是面向民主派最 堅實的支持者，轉而致力於吸 23
