Love Our China: A Patriotic Speech

Welp, you can’t get more forcefully patriotic than this. This transcript of a student’s classroom speech reads like a political call-to-action and includes rousing images of bloody soldiers, strong Chinese athletes and Chinese workers throwing off the yoke of imperialist might. This might be upper intermediate level reading, but I’m classifying it as advanced, as the sentence structure really isn’t very straightforward, and there are quite a few new words.

There’s a saying in the third paragraph that makes no sense in English, only in Chinese. The saying is: ‘国家国家，有国才有家’. This translates to “Country, country, have country, then home.” Doesn’t mean much, does it? But we must examine the structure of the sentence to see that this is actually a play on words. The word for “country” is 国家. 国, by itself, means “country” or “kingdom”. 家, by itself, means “home” or “family”. Put them together, and you get the complete, proper word for “country”. So the author is first saying the word “country” twice (国家国家), then the second part means “the word country is made up first of the character for country, THEN then character for ‘home'”, in other words, “you must have a country before you can have a home or family”. This seems to also insinuate that “country should come before family”.

If you remember no other word in this whole essay, remember this one: 祖国 zǔ guó. Look at it: 祖国 祖国 祖国 祖国. It means “motherland”, and once you know it, you will see it everywhere.

Another interesting word here is 帝国主义者, which means “imperialist”. If you ever have plans to use your Chinese skills to read old Maoist textbooks, you’d better remember that one as well. It also contains a useful grammar point: 主义者 is equivalent to the English suffix “ist”, as in “imperial-ist”. 主义, without 者, is equivalent to the “ism”. So 帝国主义 is “imperialism”. This can be applied to other words, such as 女权主义者 (feminist) and 女权主义 (feminism), and 理想主义者 (idealist) and 理想主义 (idealism).

The title of this speech is: 爱我中华

You can find the original here