People expect officials to abandon official jargon

Last week, China Youth Daily Social Investigation Center carried out an online survey under the title "Do officials around you often speak official jargon?" among 5,163 respondents, 91.7 percent of whom said it is very common for the officials around them to speak a lot of official jargon; 69.8 percent think there are "too many" this kind of officials.

91 percent of the respondents find official jargon offensive

Wang Yang (feigned name), an employee from a public institution often gets in contact with some speech scripts in his job. He admits that such scripts are often written in pages but the contents can actually be described in a few hundred characters. During meetings, the person on the stage would read exactly the scripts, making the audience feel drowsy. Actually few people care about what the speech is about.

"It is not a big problem to speak official jargon to a certain extent. But official jargon should not be used all the time regardless of the occasions and regardless of the audience. Many officials have no difficulty speaking 'human language' privately, but would unconsciously start to use the official tone and speak the official jargon at certain occasions, making people feel very disgusted," Wang Yang said.

Tianjin citizen Sun Ce said that he has been used to hear various styles of official jargons. But recently, he found the speeches by the leaders of the new Party Central Committee to be refreshing and amiable. In his view, the central government should carry out remediation on the phenomenon of official jargon and let officials speak the language ordinary people can understand and do things which the ordinary people want them to do.

The survey shows that 91 percent of the respondents find official jargon very offensive, 6.9 percent think "It is hard to comment", and only 2.2 percent approve it.

Yang Xiaojun, vice president of the Administrative Law Institute, China Law Society, and professor at the National School of Administration, said that officials are actually only expressing their determinations and shouting out slogans for their superiors to see by speaking official jargon but not wanting to solve practical problems.