That’s the thing about this word: it feels remote, but it’s so familiar, too.I can’t think of another expression in the modern Chinese language that is such an anomaly—ubiquitous yet somehow invisible. In China today it’s only officials who have “the people”* on their lips every time they open their mouths, for the people themselves seldom use the term—perhaps they hardly recall its existence. We have to give those voluble officials some credit, for we rely on them to demonstrate that the phrase still has some currency.In the past this was such a weighty phrase. Our country was called the People’s Republic of China. Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people.” The most important paper was the People’s Daily. “Since 1949 the people are the masters,” we learned to say.In my childhood years “the people” was just as marvelous an expression as “Chairman Mao,” and when I first began to read, these were the first words I mastered; I could write them even before I could write my own name or the names of my parents.
