On the real meaning of zhēteng (折腾)
China VP Xí Jìnpíng (习近平) heated up the stinky tofu a bit the other day with some trash talk about foreigners who criticize China. Danwei has a video clip from Hong Kong, but the Beijing Sounds audio editors have been kind enough to pick out just a few pearls from Xi.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Yǒuxiē zhèige chībǎo le méi shì gàn de wàiguórén ā,
有些这个吃饱了没事干的外国人啊
Some of these foreigners with full stomachs and nothing to doduì wǒmen de shìqing zhǐshǒuhuàjiǎo.
对我们的事情指手画脚
point fingers at our affairs.Zhōngguó — Yī, bù shūchū gémìng, èr, bù shūchū jī’è hé pínkùn
中国，一，不输出革命，二，不输出饥饿和贫困*
China — first does not export revolution; second does not export hunger or poverty;Sān, bù qù zhēteng nǐmen [see Note 1 below]
三，不去折腾你们
third doesn’t go and cause trouble for (bother) you.Ā, háiyǒu shénme hǎo shuō de?
啊还有什么好说的？
Is there anything else they can say?
Now due to the miserable production rate of the unionized Beijing Sounds workers, it’s not often that articles are able to address current events in a timely manner. But in this case, we pulled out all the stops (and a couple extra bottles of 金六福 for the graveyard folks) in order to comment. Because history demands that we defend zhēteng. Specifically, this history which we might as well replay:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
wánr shì shénme?
玩儿是什么?
What is “wánr”?wánr shì zhēteng
玩儿是折腾
“wánr” is playing crazy/running aroundnà wán shì shénme?
那玩是什么?
Then what is “wán”?wán shì zuò nèr wánr xiǎodōngxi
玩是座那儿玩儿小东西
“wán” is sitting there playing with some little thingnǎyīge hǎo?
哪一个好?
Which one is better?wánr hǎo
玩儿好
wánr-play is bettershéi shuō wánr hǎo?
谁说玩儿好?
Who says “wánr” is better?wǒ shuō wánr hǎo
我说玩儿好
I say “wánr” is betternà nǐ lǎolao ne?
那你姥姥呢?
Then what about Grandma?lǎolao shuō wán hǎo
姥姥说玩好
Grandma says “wán” is betternà wèishénme nǐ juéde wánr hǎo?
那为什么你觉得玩儿好?
Then why do you feel that “wánr” is better?yīnwèi wánr hǎo wánr!
因为玩儿好玩儿！
Because wánr-play is more fun!
Emphasis added. You might quarrel with the translation of zhēteng from that post last year — “playing crazy / running around” — but there’s no escaping the connotation that PBS puts on it. Although the Vice President may resent foreigners engaging in it, and Grandma may ask the Granddaughter not to do it (bié zhēteng / 别折腾! is as common a phrase as “calm down!”), still there’s no denying: zhēteng is pretty good fun!
———–
Note 1:
Just one more linguisticky question: What’s up with nǐmen (你们 = you, plural) here?
Sān bù qù zhēteng nǐmen
三不去折腾你们
third doesn’t go and cause trouble for (bother) you.
I suppose if we knew the context, it might turn out that Xi is talking to his audience very directly, “we don’t bother YOU”. But that seems pretty directly rude. Barring that, does it mean he’s using nǐmen in the generic sense to mean “anyone”? Beijing Sounds is guilty of doing this to a fault — in English. And it’s apparently not linguistically uncommon: BJS once referenced this Jabal al-Lughat blog post noting that in Darja (Algerian Arabic) the “impersonal you” is even grammaticalized. But somehow I have no familiarity with this usage in Mandarin, which means nothing except that I need to post this now and hope that others can enlighten.
———–
* Thanks, Sima, for the correction (via email) of 步 where it should have had 不. The funny thing is that I had corrected another instance of this earlier and apparently missed this one. After a while you start to trust your IME to just magically give you the right characters, especially for simple stuff. Yet…
OK, now update 2: I’ve changed the punctuation to try to make it clear that he is enumerating: 一二三
Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle
Comments 11
“speaking to members of Mexico’s Chinese community”.
What’s the problem with 你们？
Posted 23 Feb 2009 at 11:02 am ¶As some of you might already know, 折腾 zhēteng became a popular online catchphrase in early January, following a press conference where Mr. Hu himself used the word. If you missed the whole hype, see the Paper republic link below for a full discussing of the meaning of 折腾 zhēteng (read the comments too):
http://paper-republic.org/ericabrahamsen/fooling-around/
Posted 23 Feb 2009 at 3:28 pm ¶@hsknotes: so 你们 sounds fine to you? It may well be, but it struck me as out of place because it seemed the natural referent would have been finger-pointing foreigners — the people he started out talking about. To say 你们 all of a sudden (where 你们 really does refer to the audience in front of him) sounds to me like he’d be accusing them of these offenses — a little rude and unexpected. Because of all this I was thinking it might be an instance of “impersonal you” that I’m not familiar with — but it’s all guessing at this point.
@André, thanks for the link — good background and some good alternative translations, e.g. “fooling around”. I notice either the article has the pinyin wrong (”zhéteng” should be “zhēteng”) or there is, yet again, an alternative tone pronunciation I’m not familiar with.
Posted 23 Feb 2009 at 7:28 pm ¶To me, it sounds like he is addressing the finger-pointing foreigners when he says 你们.
Posted 23 Feb 2009 at 8:28 pm ¶If the 你们 implies ‘chinese nationals’ living in china or living in mexico, both seem ok. If it is referring to ‘chinese ancestry people’ living in mexico, 你们 or 我们 both seem ok.
If it refers to the ‘dirty foreigners’ who he is referencing, but not talking directly to, 你们 also seems ok． I guess I would have to care more about this to really get into it, but it hardly seems controversial in any of those readings.
Posted 24 Feb 2009 at 1:35 am ¶你们 sounds good here to me, addressing the foreigners.
Posted 26 Feb 2009 at 11:46 pm ¶I guess what we are looking for here is linguistic proove…. A “It sounds good to me” is not good enough. It doesn’t mean your not right, but we need hard grammatical evidence here!
I looked through my “Chinese: A comprehensive grammer” (Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington) but couldn’t really find anything of value to our particle case here. Any hints for further grammar reading?
Posted 27 Feb 2009 at 1:18 am ¶The linguistic question seems to be: who is 你们 referring to? The two native speakers I queried seemed to be utterly clear that 你们 refers to the well-fed foreigners mentioned at the beginning of the spiel (as @Mikael said). It would NOT, they say, refer to the people he was talking to. But neither would it refer to just anybody, as I was thinking when I mentioned “impersonal you.”
I’ll be curious if others agree.
If that holds true, then doesn’t it become a rhetorical question rather than a grammar question — why did he say it that way?
So I asked the same two folks what the difference would be if he said “them” 他们 instead of 你们. They felt that it was, to quote one of them, “more pointed, carrying more weight or expressing more emotions.” And now that I’ve said all this, I have to admit that this seems pretty exactly parallel to English. That is, the rhetorical effect of saying “China doesn’t bother you” is to make it more direct or confrontational than if he had said “China doesn’t bother them.” The same meaning, but with a chip on the shoulder.
Posted 27 Feb 2009 at 2:37 am ¶the commenter syz has it exactly correct. it’s almost exactly parallel to english.
Posted 08 Mar 2009 at 10:52 am ¶okay, bu4 zhe1 teng is a really political buzz word this year. Here are 2 recommend translations for that.
no backtracking or no messing up
If you can read chinese, check out this post
Posted 23 Mar 2009 at 8:52 pm ¶http://www.bilinguist.com/data/hy04/messages/136830.html#136830
‘no backtracking’ and ‘no messing up’, horrible and worse.
http://hsknotes.blogspot.com/2009/02/and-sometimes-even-though-i-dont-want.html
Posted 24 Mar 2009 at 9:15 am ¶