So, the official English name for the governing party in China is the Communist Party of China, or CPC for short. But basically every Western media calls it “CCP”, or “Chinese Communist Party”, which doesn’t exist. Wikipedia’s page about the CPC will auto-redirect from “Communist Party of China” if you enter that in, to “Chinese Communist Party”, its title and URL is “Chinese Communist Party”, and then, in the first sentence, literally says that the official English name is Communist Party of China, and THEN proceeds to use CCP for the rest of the goddamn article anyway.

And yes it matters from a language standpoint. While it isn’t the case here, you sometimes do see “X Party of Y” and “Y X Party” both being separate organizations, and they could have extremely different ideologies despite being similarly named. Also, it’s basic grammer rules you learn in first grade: proper nouns can’t just be rearranged all willy-nilly!

So I have this conspiracy theory: CCP sounds worse subconsciously due to its proximity to “CP”, you know, that really disgusting type of sexual imagery. And of course sinophobes want to portray China in the worst way possible.

The thing the prompted me to think this: I have seen “jokes” on R*ddit comparing the acronyms of “CCP” and “CP”. Which get thousands of upvotes despite using child sexual abuse as a punchline.

Am I saying everyone does this, obviously not. But it could explain why mainstream media keep pushing that wrong acronym.

The effectiveness of this trick isn’t conjecture either. There have been plenty of psychology studies that have shown that if the name of one benign thing has even a tangential resemblance to a word for a unrelated bad thing, it dramatically reduces a person’s opinion of that thing vs. if it had a neutral name. I think the most interesting for this one is the study that showed that people whose initials are things like P.I.G., D.I.E., or A.S.S., have lower self esteem than people whose initials are neutral or look like nice words. Same with if someone’s name has letter combos like “hell” or “ass” inside of the spelling.

I KNOW I sound crazy here. BUT: From the regime that gave us MK Ultra, Project Stargate, and the GAY BOMB, is it REALLY that hard to picture them playing around with associative naming in popular media?

There’s another not conspiracy thing I should mention: If you can’t even get the name of the organization you’re vilifying right, then why should I trust you on the factual accuracy of anything else you say about them? If you don’t even care to look up a simple name, then your “research” deserves to be called into serious question. If I went to the hospital and the cardiologist assigned to me keeps spelling the word heart wrong, I’m probably not going to trust them to correctly insert a wire into that organ without killing me.

Communist Party of China

    • KomradeK
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      192 years ago

      I think racism is definitely a big reason, Chinese Communist Party emphasises Chinese ethnicity more than Communist Party of China, which instead emphasises the country as a whole. Western governments want their people to flinch just from hearing the word “Chinese”.

  • Ball Thrower
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    222 years ago

    I thought they call it CCP bc it’s like CCCP, which was the Soviets

  • @guojing
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    172 years ago

    But CPC also contains CP…

  • @cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    142 years ago

    You’re overthinking it. It’s petty childish nonsense. Because China prefers to translate it one way, they have to say it a different way, assuming that it will “trigger” China. China couldn’t care less.

  • I mean tbh it also depends on the language. In portuguese here we call it Partido Comunista Chinês. Not due to fucking brainwashing, it’s simply easier than Partido Comunista da China.

    We have our own Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) and Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCdoB). Guess what? The more revolutionary one is PCB, and no one considers them more insidious or eeevil than PCdoB.

    This is specific to english, if even.

    • @pinkeston@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      I think the difference here is that in official English documents by the CPC, it’s always translated as CPC, not CCP

      Not sure if China has any documents written in Portuguese haha

        • @pinkeston@lemmygrad.ml
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          2 years ago

          Do you know if any of those CPC documents are available online? I’m curious to see how it gets translated in Portugese

          I tried doing a search but couldn’t find anything

  • @BlackLotus
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    92 years ago

    So, the official English name for the governing party in China is the Chinese Communist Party, or CPC for short.

    ? Communist Party of China.

    • AgreeableLandscape☭OP
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      2 years ago

      Shiiiit! And in a rant about it too! Sorry about that!

      This is why you don’t rant about stuff when sleep deprived. I wrote this at 1 AM lol.

      • @BlackLotus
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        22 years ago

        No worries, just figured I’d let you know! It seemed like an accident.

  • Perhaps I’m misremembering, but didn’t the official translation of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Wade-Giles, eww), the one by Foreign Languages Press, use CPC and CCP interchangeably?

  • @Exercise_Both@lemmygrad.ml
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    42 years ago

    Ive always thought that there was an element of grouping to it too.

    CCP= Chinese Communist Party = the chinese variety of (the monolithic) communist parties of the world ( the enemy )

    CPC= Communist Party of China = the communist variety of the many political parties in China

    but also it is worth noting that it seems the acronyms are used quite interchangeably in chinese media as they’re only translations anyway

  • @DPUGT2
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    02 years ago

    It could be that American English, as an unwritten rule, discourages the X of Y form for any long name, and prefers Y-suffix X forms instead.

    Probably originally a CIA propaganda effort designed to fatigue good revolutionaries like yourself. Do not let it get to you. What we should worry about is their temporal displacement technology that allowed them to start this sinister tactic of theirs back in the 1700s. The CPC needs to develop its own time travel technology so that it can counter them and free the 13 colonies from the British themselves without the Slaveholder General’s help… it will be the victory we’ve always hoped for.