Today’s Chinese use vocabulary that are void of the language’s ancestral and intrinsic abstraction. The netizens talk like they have just graduated from a government-sponsored adult literacy night school. The phrases in high volume of circulation are deliberately unrefined. It follows the formula of saying as little as possible and understating it as much as possible but meaning as much as the listeners can conjure.

I live in dread that the Chinese government will find out our true identities. Even my parents do not know what I am doing. For the past few years, I have worked by day in the California criminal justice system and by night editing Free More News, a news blog that defies Chinese censors. Since we are based in the United States, we have the freedom to publish as we please. Chinese journalists do not.