Thanks for the comments guys! I never thought that people would visit this site outside family and friends. I really appreciate outside interest as well. BSKYO is a personal blog with wide-ranging subject matter, so you’ll probably need to get your China fix elsewhere; it’s just that Tibet and the Olympics have just been on my mind lately.
Asia’s a big part of this blog, and I’ll definitely be posting more of my Asianica-related thoughts in the future. Just with my job, I can’t be too regular about posting…and most of the time my “scholarship” is not as rigorous as I would like. The blog exists to help define my perspectives more, and I have no problem with other people observing my intellectual wrestlings no matter if seem to be winning or losing.
Anyway, really glad you found this blog. Here’s one more post on an instance of weird English/Chinese semantics.
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The Chinese government is using a weird term to describe protest participants in Tibet and Xinjiang. The term is “splittism.” I’ve never heard it before. The line so far is that “splittists” conspire to create a “Tibet People’s Uprising Movement” (don’t know the original Chinese, but man that sounds CCPish). “Splittists” plan to form suicide squads. What I’m wondering is that we already have a word for what’s happening in Tibet now: separatism. Why not use that?
What connotative meaning was so absent in “separatist” that use of a neologism is required? The CCP has a habit of creating new terms (especially terms for undesirables), in fact, my understanding is that it’s more of a Chinese language thing than a Chinese communist proganda thing. But this word appears in press releases for international consumption. It must be that “splittist” conveys a more appropriate meaning, right? But what? “Splittist” could mean “someone who supports a sharp split or division from a larger oppressive group, ” or “someone who desires immediate political autonomy.” In this violent climate, other connotations could be conceived like “someone advocating expulsion of outsiders from their group or area by any means necessary.” Is any of that different from separatism?
The definition of “separatist” encompasses violence as well. Basque separatism. Northern Irish separatism. Texan separatism (tee hee). But wait, it certainly doesn’t have to be violent. Quebec separatism isn’t violent, for example. In fact there’s all kinds of separatisms, like religious separatism, ethnic separatism, even apparently lesbian separatism, and all of those can be both violent and nonviolent. There’s a lot of room to move, so why “splittist?”
I think…it could be a trick, or at least an attempt at one. When you split something, you take something that was once one thing and forcibly divide it into two. There’s an actor. There’s something disrupting the unified harmony of a complete, integrated whole. Things that are separate, meanwhile, may have no relation to each other. It may be perfectly reasonable for them to be disconnected and apart.
Separations can be good, can be reasonable, can be normal. Separations exist in the spaces between two unrelated wholes. But someone splits something apart and it isn’t the same. The end result is less than the previous whole.
“Splitting” Tibet from China, then, diminishes the Chinese whole. It changes the great Chinese family from harmonious into dysfunctional. And of course, if you are convinced by the conclusion of this fallacious deductive argument, you’ve implicitly asserted that TIBET IS A PART OF CHINA.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking the whole thing 
