The Pen Names of People’s Daily
仲祖文 is a name. A Chinese name.
It is pronounced Zhong Zuwen.
Based on the characters it uses, Zhong Zuwen is a unisex name, semantically leaning male. Zhong (仲) is a mildly uncommon surname; 祖 could mean “ancestry”; 文 could mean “literature”, or “scholarship”, or anything in the classical studies. Taken together, the given name 祖文 could mean “learned ancestors.” Perhaps a constant reminder for whomever bears this name to continue the scholarly traditions of the family line.
人民日报 is a newspaper. Named “The People’s Daily”, it is the dominant government news outlet. It traces its roots to before the founding of the republic; the first iteration of its name was calligraphically written by Mao Zedong, who also suggested the name itself. Its editorials are akin to government statements from the highest level; its opinion pieces aren’t just officially sanctioned, they’re officially written. The authors of these opinion pieces are essentially tasked by the government to announce and clarify the government’s official stance on all issues and ideologies.
Zhong Zuwen is one such author. His opinion pieces regularly appear in the newspaper; they almost exclusively discuss methods to indoctrinate lower-level officials on Communist ideology, reinterpretations of Marxism, correct interpretations on Xi Ideology, and so forth. Boring stuff to me, but fundamental instructions to regional party leaderships.
So, who is Zhong Zuwen? The influential, scholarly (presumably male) ideological gatekeeper of the PRC editorial section?
Zhong Zuwen is not a person.
Zhong Zuwen (仲祖文) is a homophone for 中组文 (also pronounced Zhong Zuwen, cuz that’s what a homophone is).
中组文 (Zhong Zuwen), in turn, is an acronym for Zhongguo gongchandang zhongyang weiyuanhui Zuzhibu Wenzhang — 中国共产党中央委员会组织部文章 — “Essays by the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China”.
The CCP’s HR department, the secretive, highly powerful organ responsible for the appointment and promotion of 90 million party members across all levels of power in government, NGO, and private sectors; compiling detailed personnel reports, finding and recommending promising officials for higher offices, has an anthropomorphic pen name so it can write Op-eds on a newspaper.
In fact, all People’s Daily Op-eds are written by such pen names, representing various organizations.
They’re pseudonyms of “Writing Groups” (写作组), embedded within each important government organs, including the Politburo, which stands above all. Each “Writing Groups” publish under their pseudonyms when necessary, their wording, tone, and ideological core for each essay are scrutinized by numerous layers of bureaucrats before publication. This process of examination is to ensure their essays correctly portray the official sentiment, and cannot be construed as a governmental mistake in any way.
The People’s Daily does not usually indicate to its readers that the author is using a homophone pseudonym, nor that the “author” is in fact a group of writers representing a government agency.
Some other amusing pen names include:
钧正平 -> 军政评 -> 中央军委政治工作部宣传局评价 (Critique by Central Military Commission, pseudonym concurrently used by the Defense Ministry)
卫民康 -> 为民康 (meaning “for the health of the people”, The National Health Commission)
郭同欣 -> 国统新 -> 国家统计局新闻 (National Bureau of Statistics News)
钟纪轩 -> 中纪宣 -> 中国共产党中央纪律检查委员会宣传部 (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, internal control unit; arrests officials)
钟政轩 -> 中政宣 -> 中共中央政法委员会宣传部 (Central Poli-Legal Commission, justice department; arrests normal people)
何振华 -> Literally means “How to revitalize China”. Talks about domestic affairs. Been especially heavily used lately, due to the wave of patriotic propaganda.
皇莆平 -> This one is a triple entendre used during the 1990s Deng Xiaoping years. It uses two puns: 皇莆 (Huang Pu) 评= 黄埔 (River by Shanghai, here meaning Shanghai in general) 评论 (critique). Secondly, the term, when pronounced in the Minnan (southern) dialect, would mean “According to the Will of the People, Assist Deng Xiaoping”. This name was used for when Deng was touring the southern provinces to advocate for economic reforms.
钟声 -> 中声 -> 中国之声 (Super important and active pen name. Meaning the Voice of China, this one is for foreign policy opinions. Especially active lately due to the trade war and pandemic crisis. The tone of its articles have been heavily aggressive toward the US).
Often, these essays are the first official stance announcements to be released, and are especially influential when the topics concern economics or foreign policy (钟声).
Lastly, a fresh new pseudonym popped up in 2010.
郑青原.
This one publishes very rarely, but its authoritative tone, and scope with which it pontificates, has led to the consensus that it’s named after an obscure idiom “正本清源”. The idiom could translate to “clean from the up stream; reform from the root.”
Who could reform from the root? Who could clean the upstream?
To clean the up stream, one must first reach the up stream; one must reach the apex from which the stream originates.
郑青原 essays are uniformly interpreted to be directly penned by the Chinese Politburo.
Context (Boring, can skip)
Unlike the U.S., the Chinese government talks to its people in a different way. There is no Zhongnanhai Press Corps. Xi Jinping does not tweet. I’ve always wondered if the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee have a private WeChat message group; what do they talk about in there? How do they talk in there? Do they use emojis?
But I digress.
The point is, for the Chinese people to find out what’s going on in their government, they’d have to be resourceful. While they most often would need to rely on third-parties to dissect government news, they’d have to weed out the surface-level WeChat blog accounts to get to the ones with real substance.
The Chinese information distribution system is essentially an upside-down pyramid. Those at the top (government power-holders, decision makers) receive vast quantities of information, and that amount trickles down, until a tiny droplet seeps through to the very pointy bottom, to be digested by the public masses.
With the advent of WeChat, hundreds of thousands of “self-media” (自媒体) accounts have sprung up. They are operated by individual content providers, digesting news and writing analysis for their subscribers. However, most of these accounts have the same amount of access to information as the public does. When a content provider’s access to information is as restricted as that of its audience, then the opinion they can offer is limited.
On certain matters, such as “predicting the outcome of the Sino-US trade war,” an uninformed opinion is essentially null. In order to appear believably informed to their readers, commentators would either have to give the impression: “he has an ‘in’ in the government. Someone higher-up is feeding him classified information,” or be able to credibly explain a pattern found in public information.
This latter, pattern-finding part is our topic.
Credible pattern-finding via public information isn’t “psycho-analyzing the body language of world leaders when they meet.” It involves the clichéd “reading between the lines” in official publications. In China, this tried-and-true method is particularly effective. For some reason, the government prefers to not “tell” its citizens of its intent, but rather “hint” at it. This tendency to “hint” extends not only to communications with citizens, but to the press, and to foreign institutions as well. Editorials about foreign policy in the State newspaper “People’s Daily” are as much propaganda for citizens as they are messages to foreign countries.
Take the previous example of trade war. How would an internet commentator credibly analyze the outcome of the war? First, they work on the assumption that the leaders of China and the US, with legions of economic advisors at their beck and call, have a pretty good idea of the tide of war. Both leaders would naturally publicly proclaim impending victory for their respective country, but it is assumed they are privately aware of who is truly winning. It is then assumed that their public, more high-browed statements would betray their true sense of confidence. If China is winning the trade war, its leaders, armed with the secret knowledge of import/export numbers being profitable to China, would be fierce in their sanctioned editorials. If China is losing the war, its leaders would strike a more moderate tone; put a greater emphasis on reconciliation, and urge the U.S. to “return to the negotiation table.”
The single-most reliable source of Chinese government “hint” is the People’s Daily.
The People’s Daily editorials are officially-sanctioned, verbose, boring, and hugely fascinating.