The title isn’t trying to be profound so much as demonstrate how absurdly flexible Chinese can be: put the same words in different situations, and they produce completely different effects. If that kind of linguistic mischief feels offensive, the problem may be less with the words than with the reader.
This sits beside an earlier line of thought about punctuation losing value and becoming inflated through overuse. Both come out of the same frustration with the current malformed boom of Simplified Chinese media and self-media. I say that without pretending innocence. I used to be one of the people who needed clickbait headlines and explosive topics to pull in readers. I also believed that self-media more or less had to sell itself by manufacturing panic, raising problems while carefully avoiding solutions, and dressing all of that up as urgency. I’ve been part of the filth, so I’m qualified to talk about how it works.
Before getting into it, here’s a multiple-choice question: what is the hardest substance in the world?
- A. Diamond
- B. A horny high school boy fantasizing about his female teacher
- C. Li Yifeng’s mouth when he was flatly denying solicitation
- D. Pro-Russian Simplified Chinese media reporting on Russia’s retreat on the front line of the Russia-Ukraine war
The answer was already hidden in the title. Even now, if you search Simplified Chinese online media using that phrase, you can still find headlines built around it. At a certain point it becomes impossible to tell whether they are engaging in sophisticated mockery or clumsy praise.
To me, the pleasures of Chinese being “broad and profound” can be split into three states: static, dynamic, and mutated.
Static pleasure: a word that means too many things
The static version is when a word or phrase can carry several meanings, sometimes even opposing ones. I’ve mentioned before that the shift to Simplified Chinese flattened some of the older ambiguities and textures that existed in Traditional Chinese, while accidentally creating new comic possibilities of its own. Add strict online censorship to that, and a word can become unusable not because all its meanings are sensitive, but because one of them is. Once that happens, the non-sensitive meanings often disappear with it, and people are forced to invent substitutes.
That is “static” in the sense of inward tightening: language gets squeezed. But the same kind of static play can also expand outward. A good example was when Baidu Tieba had to urgently regulate the “proper usage” of an insult because more and more people had started replacing the original word with another innocuous-sounding one. That spread wasn’t random. It was semantic contamination caused by censorship itself. Once one word is blocked, nearby words begin absorbing its function.
Dynamic pleasure: redefining words in motion
The dynamic version is different. It’s not just that a word has many meanings; it’s that events and social pressure force those meanings to change.
Some words originally carried no humiliating or loaded meaning at all. But once people start over-reading them, taking them apart, attaching insinuations to them, they acquire layers they never had before. In an environment where Simplified Chinese media can trip moderation systems at any moment, self-media learns to survive by self-castration.
Self-censorship inevitably shrinks the vocabulary available for normal use. People become afraid to try any new wording, because no one knows what might suddenly trigger invisible controls. So everyone retreats into “publicly certified” words—the ones that can already circulate in large numbers on social media without getting flagged. If a term appears everywhere, over and over, that itself becomes proof that it has passed desensitization tests.
After all, nobody would have predicted that phrases like “poor at studying” or “elementary-school graduate” could themselves become sensitive.
But “dynamic” isn’t only about decay. It also has a second kind of pleasure: creation.
Chinese works like water. You cannot permanently dam up every sensitive expression. Even if one word is wiped out, people will still preserve the impulse behind it, the imagination that immediately wants to fill the hole. The advantage, if you’re the side with the power to define terms, is that language can also be redirected.
That is why those who control the final interpretation love making new words. Layoffs become “graduation.” Lockdowns become “static management.” If the wording sounds elegant enough, people are expected to stop noticing how ugly the reality underneath still is.
Mutated pleasure: when context flips a word’s nature
The “mutated” part does not mean perversion in the personality-trait sense—though that confusion is exactly the point. The moment you see a word like “mutate,” your brain may already assign it a moral tone, even though in a middle-school biology textbook it simply refers to a tadpole becoming a frog. That gap is what makes Chinese entertaining.
Here, mutation means this: the same expression, placed in a different context, can turn into something else entirely. A word’s negative sense can overwhelm its neutral or even positive one. People who care obsessively about right and wrong often become especially bad at dealing with neutral terms objectively. And once phrases are recombined with other phrases, the emotional charge and implied intention can change completely.
That is how you get pairings like the ones in the title: “frantic pursuit” and “calm retreat.” The combinations feel wrong immediately. Something in them catches in the throat. But for pro-Russian Simplified Chinese media, this seems to be the final line they refuse to cross.
Russia may indeed have suffered setbacks on the battlefield and had to pull back, but in terms of rhetorical momentum and textual logic, it cannot be allowed to lose completely. “Frantic” plainly belongs with failure and retreat. But then a major bug appears: the side retreating is Russia. So the language engine instantly patches itself. I can acknowledge the fact, but I cannot lose on posture.
To anyone not invested in the fantasy, these forcibly swapped collocations are laughable. But for people who cannot accept reality, a single word choice can become anesthesia.
Take another example: in disaster reporting, “missing” can feel harsher than “out of contact,” as if using the stronger term is somehow cursing the victims, as if it seals their fate. But if the news says “out of contact” instead, does that bring back those who drowned in a flooded subway station during urban waterlogging? Of course not. The word softens the emotional surface, not the event.
The logic of the written self-criticism
I used to write a lot of self-criticisms in school, and because of that I ended up holding myself to standards that were, in a strange way, higher than other students’. If every self-criticism is just endless repetitions of “I have deeply recognized my mistake” and “I will actively correct it in the future,” then even the person writing it gets bored to death. At that point you cannot honestly claim the exercise has any educational charm left.
Seen statically, repeating the exact same mistake is not only irritating to a teacher; it also leaves the student feeling sheepish. So if the same error keeps happening, the trick is to redefine it using different words. Carelessness and sloppiness may refer to the same thing, but once one is framed as “failing to read the question carefully” and another as “falling behind schedule and becoming mentally unstable,” the cause of the mistake suddenly appears completely different.
Seen dynamically, the real issue is that the promised “correction” never actually happened. So how do you persuade the teacher—more importantly, how do you persuade yourself—one more time that this time it will be different?
You learn to make old words sound new.
If last time the promise was “I will keep myself under control,” then next time it becomes “I will resist temptation.” On the surface there is little difference; both point to restraint. But the flavor changes if you pay attention. “Keep myself under control” implies the problem came from my own lack of discipline. “Resist temptation,” on the other hand, implies the loss of control was triggered by external causes—say, classmates luring me into talking during class.
Those two framings produce completely different styles of self-criticism. One is humble, lowering itself before authority. The other is morally upright while quietly protecting itself.
The mutated function of vocabulary: losing while calling it victory
So when do you need the mutated function of words most badly?
In short: when you are losing, but need to trick yourself into feeling that you have won massively.
The kind of self-criticism I hated most was the one demanded after my monthly exam ranking dropped by seven or eight places, especially after I had barely squeezed into the top ten the previous time. Teachers loved asking for a “deep” reflection then, as if writing one would automatically make me discover my problem. I used to half-believe that myself: maybe if I wrote a serious enough self-criticism, I would somehow become a genuinely good student.
Getting an ordinary mid-tier class ranking is obviously nothing to be proud of. So the self-criticism had to become strategic. If the situation was a loss, then the writing had to turn it into a kind of win.
I had ranked seventh before. Therefore, the problem was not my ability; it was my attitude.
Once you keep hammering on “I have succeeded before,” you can deceive yourself into believing that getting back to seventh place is only a matter of time. Of course, you also have to anticipate another possibility: what if the teacher or parents think this is not self-criticism at all, but self-anesthesia?
Then the wording changes again.
You call it confidence.
Yes, I lost, but I did not lose my dignity. Because if even that is gone, then the defeat becomes real.
A calm retreat can also be called a success—especially when the side attacking is described as making a frantic pursuit.
At a certain point, even writing this out starts to numb the brain.