Language Log » The stock market warrior-desperado's last-ditch fight
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Chǎogǔ 炒股 (lit., “stir-fry stock”) means playing with stocks and bonds (stock market speculation). This is probably THE hottest term in the PRC vocabulary today. The term itself is not in the following widely circulating cartoon, but the spirit of the term is very much present:
Complete translation:
rén zài zhèndì zài 人在阵地在 (lit., “people [rén 人] exist, i.e. I/we exist, the front line exists”); this is difficult to put into decent English, so I’ll devote a special paragraph to its interpretation below, after this indented portion
chí gǔ xìnxīn 持股信心 (“hold on to your stocks with faith”)
gǔmín 股民 (“investor”)
dǔ guāng shū guāng wèi guó zhēngguāng 赌光输光为国争光 (“gamble everything lose everything, win glory for the country”) — guāng 光 is used three times in this sentence, but with two very different meanings, the first two occurrences meaning “bare; naked; used up” and the third occurrence meaning “honor; glory”
gǔshì 股市 (“stock market”)
What to do with rén zài zhèndì zài 人在阵地在 (lit., “people [rén 人] exist, i.e. I/we exist, the front line exists”)? It’s next to impossible to translate that into good, idiomatic English. Instead, we may paraphrase its implication as “We will hold the ground as long as we live”; or “We will not yield / retreat from the front line as long as we live”; or “fight till we die”. A zhèndì 阵地 is a position on a battlefield, and, in this case, the battlefield is the stock market. The idea is that, so long as we, the people, have blood and breath (so long as we exist), we will not shirk our duties at the front line of the stock market battleground.
Now that the Chinese stock markets have been so erratic and dramatically down in recent weeks, there is a pervasive sense that investors, many of whom are relatively new at the game and got caught up in the stock frenzy of the last year, have lost half or more of their investments and consequently are embattled. Still, as patriotic citizens, the government is encouraging them to hang in there and fight the good fight. The nation is depending upon them to be steadfast soldiers in the stock market war, which has broad implications for the fate of the state.
[Thanks to Maiheng Dietrich, D. Pan, Fangyuan Yuan, Fangyi Cheng, and Xiuyuan Mi]
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Language Log » The stock market warrior-desperado's last-ditch fight
