Words of intimidation that start as figures of speech can cast a pall over an environment that already has a built-in susceptibility to extreme language.
A few days ago, Wang Mudi, a television host in Guangdong province, accompanied his girlfriend to the hospital. The nurse did an extremely sloppy job putting her on a drip. It took her four attempts to properly inject the needle. All the while she was carrying on a casual conversation with a colleague.
Wang was so enraged he wrote on his Sina Weibo account, a Chinese micro blog, that "I felt I wanted to hack someone". The next day, a healthcare industry association demanded he apologize or his employer should sack him.
Wang quickly removed his blog post and later issued a lengthy apology. He has a mild disposition, he said, and he did not name the hospital or the nurse in his original post so nobody was hurt by his outburst. It was "on the spur of the moment that I made the wrong remark", he explained.
Most online denizens seemed to agree that what Wang did exacerbated China's troubled doctor-patient relations. A recent spate of incidents where patients or their family members resorted to violence and physically harmed members of medical services has raised alarm about the vulnerability of the profession. Previously, however, the media portrayed medical professionals as greedy merchants who coerced bribes from patients.
Some say Wang got away too lightly, especially compared with Wu Hongfei. Wu, a singer and writer, made news six months ago when she was arrested for posting threatening words on her blog. She said she "wanted to blow up the neighborhood committee" and a few other government agencies. She was detained for 10 days and fined 500 yuan ($82), but not prosecuted, possibly because of public pressure. She was said to have violated two clauses of the law, including "claims to use arson, explosion or harmful material to disturb public order" and "fabricating and purposefully distributing false or horror-inducing information".
Do I believe that Wang is a potential killer and Wu a potential arsonist? Not for a minute. It's a way to let off some steam. I can totally understand their frustration. We've all been in situations when clenching our teeth was not enough.
But what they did was wrong. Weibo is a public platform. Shouting "I want to kill him!" in the privacy of your home is not the same as saying it to hundreds of thousands of people. (Wang has 377,500 followers on his weibo account and Wu 133,100.) What if someone, like the police, takes you verbatim? You may laugh at the police for an unhealthy deficiency in humor, but you would definitely point a finger of blame at them if - and it's a big if - the person who posted it actually went out and did something bad but they had assumed it was just an articulation of anger.
The Internet is supposed to be a democratic platform where everyone has an equal opportunity for expression. In reality, it has evolved into a podium for shouting matches. To stand out in a pool of hundreds of millions of voices, many people will naturally resort to extreme means. Even otherwise professional websites often coin absurd headlines to lure readers. And on personal blogs, it is the most radical opinions that usually attract the largest crowds. Rationality is the biggest victim of social media, and moderates of all stripes are essentially drowned out by torrents of venom.
A dozen years ago, I was heading a film forum on Netease, then one of the three biggest portal sites in China. I made it a rule that participants could express any opinion on any movie, but had to back up his or her view with reasoning. Simply saying "this movie sucks" or "it's the greatest film ever made" wouldn't do. Actually I had an abhorrence of that kind of vociferation. If you truly believe this is either the best or worst you've ever seen, you won't be short of words for arguments.
That bulletin board of mine became something of an anomaly. It did not have the biggest following, but the most devoted. But for a website, it's the number of participants that matters, not the quality of the discussion.
That platform was only about movies. Had it been about politics or sports, you can rest assured that cries of killing would have been the norm, more or less.
Some worry about online antagonism spilling over to the physical world. There have been cases of online celebrities of different political factions who arranged to duel it out at the southern gate of Beijing's Chaoyang Park. For the most part, the combustible kind tends to appear docile and soft-spoken in real life. They may not even be able to make a coherent argument in a debate with their opponents, let alone pick a fistfight.
This duality is often seen as a reason, rather than a pretext, for their online stridency. They are the two sides of the same coin. Because they are usually restrained in manner and speech in the physical world, by personality or by necessity, they have to find an outlet for their pent-up emotions, and what's a better conduit than an anonymous social site? You can put on the air of a braggadocio and play the role of superhero in vanquishing your foes in whatever manner you can dream up.
Then there is the penchant for hyperbole, which goes much further than the Internet. Chinese is a flowery language with strong literary roots. Being plainspoken is rarely embraced as a virtue, especially for the educated. There were descriptions of "a million-strong army" in history books when the total population of that particular jurisdiction had less than 1 million residents. Confucius was so tall that he would have towered over Yao Ming - if you take the numbers literally.
In the early 1990s when I was in the United States, I read a news story about a Chinese student leaving a voice message on a classmate's phone, saying he would have him "die in 10,000 pieces and with no place for burial". Naturally it conjured up a gruesome picture of attempted murder. Had you read this in Chinese, it simply means "You, go die!" If he had said, "I wouldn't shed a tear if you vanished from the face of the Earth", he would not have got into legal trouble. (He was promptly arrested and charged with attempted murder.)
Again, that was an example of someone blowing a fuse in a most inappropriate way. The language made it seem worse than it actually was. Sure, there are stories of classmates killing each other, as in the recent case of a Fudan University student poisoning his roommate. But I doubt that guy threw a fit before he put poison into the water cooler. For one thing, his fury would have been a warning. People who kill usually do it quietly.
The bombastic style of some parts of the Chinese language is a heritage that has been passed down to us through political slogans and costume dramas. Before we learned the art of the understatement and deadpan humor, which have also found a few exponents online, the Internet had become a breeding ground for floridity. Only this time it was for blustery rages that are considered a menace to the public.
By Raymond Zhou ( China Daily )
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恐吓威胁，最初是一种修辞手法，现在却给本就对极端语言敏感警觉的社会蒙上了一层阴影。
几天前，广东卫视主持人王牧笛陪女友去某医院打点滴，但粗心大意的护士连扎四针才找准血管。因为在此过程中，她一直都在与同事闲聊。
王牧笛怒不可遏，随即在其新浪微博上发布了一条微博“我真想拿刀砍人！”次日，中国医师协会就要求他就此事道歉，否则就要求广东卫视“责令其下课”。
王牧笛很快删除了微博，并随后发表长篇致歉。他称自己本身性格温和，而且在微博中自始至终隐去医院名字，也没有提及护士姓名，因此并没有人因他的一时暴怒而受到伤害。他解释说自己的行为是“用错误的方式表达愤怒，气时口不择言”。
大多数网民似乎都认为王牧笛的言论加剧了本就矛盾重重的中国医患关系。近来，患者或其家属暴力殴打医务人员，恶性伤医案频发，这越发警示着人们，医护人员是何其脆弱。然而此前，媒体都把医务人员刻画成贪婪的商人，迫使病患贿赂他们，给医护人员塞红包。
有人觉得对王牧笛的惩罚太轻了，特别是与此前吴虹飞一案相较而言。吴虹飞是一名歌手兼作家，六个月前，她因发布了一条带有威胁字眼的博文，而被警方拘捕。她在微博发文中写道“我想炸居委会”还有一些政府机关。她因此被拘留10天，罚款500元。但或许是迫于公众压力而未被起诉。警方称其违反了两条法律条款，包括“扬言实施放火、爆炸、投放危险物质扰乱公共秩序”以及“编造、故意传播虚假恐怖信息罪。”
但我会就此认为王牧笛和吴虹飞是潜在的杀人犯或纵火犯吗？当然不会！他们的行为只是宣泄情感的一种方式，我完全理解他们的不快。我们都会有咬牙切齿也不解气的时候。
但是他们的做法确实是不对的。微博是一个公共平台。对着成千上万人大喊“我想杀人”与在自家咆哮有着天壤之别。
互联网应该是一个让大家都享有平等发言权的民主平台。而事实上，它却已经演化成一个大声争论的平台。为了在亿万人中受到关注，许多人就很自然地采取极端方式。甚至许多专业网站也常常想出怪诞的标题来吸引读者。在个人博客上，通常是最激进的言论能够吸引到最多的粉丝。由此，理性成了社交媒体最大的牺牲品，形形色色的温和派就这样彻彻底底地淹没在了洪流般的恶言相向之中。
十几年前，我在网易公司主持领导一个电影论坛，网易是当时中国前三大门户网站。我给参与讨论者定下一个规则，那就是每个人都能就任何电影，发表任何看法，但前提是必须有理有据。若仅仅只说“这电影烂透了”，或“这是有史以来最棒的电影”都不算数。事实上，我对那种无实质内容的喧嚷深恶痛绝。如果这真是你看过得最棒或最烂的电影，你就不会对此毫无实质评论。
我的公告栏成了个反常之物。虽然它的追随者不是最多的，但确是最热忱用心的。但对于一个网站而言，参与讨论的人数才是最重要的，而非讨论的质量。
当然，那个论坛只讨论电影。若它也涉及政治或体育，我向你保证，喊打喊杀几乎多少会成为家常便饭。
有些人担心网上的敌对情绪会蔓延至现实生活中来。此前，不同政治派别的知名网友就发帖约对方在北京朝阳公园南门“谈一谈”。大多数情况下，虚拟网络中的“暴脾气”往往是现实生活中的“温和党”。他们甚至连与对手争论时都磕磕巴巴，更别说互殴对方了。
这种两面性常常被认为是他们在虚拟世界中强势的原因，而非借口。两种性格就好比是一枚硬币的两面。由于他们通常在现实世界中压抑自己的言行举止，不论这是出于性格原因还是必要性的考虑，他们不得不为他们压抑已久的情感找一个宣泄口。由此看来，还有什么比匿名的社交网络更理想的场所呢？你可以在网络中大吹大擂，也可以用你所能想到的一切方式，把自己伪装成超级英雄以打败对手。
人们往往有夸张的倾向，而这种现象在网络上又更是愈演愈烈。中文是文学底蕴深厚，辞藻华丽的语言。直言不讳向来都不被奉为美德，尤其是对接受过良好教育者而言。历史书中也常把总人口数还不到一百万的特定管辖区，称作拥有“百万大军”。身长“九尺有六寸”的孔子，如果真的按照字面数字理解，那他可真比姚明还高。
20世纪90年代早期，我还在美国。当时，我看到一则资讯，说一名中国学生给同班同学电话留言，扬言要让对方“碎尸万段，死无葬身之地”。这很自然地会让人联想到企图谋杀的可怕画面。然而倘若你看的是中文消息，这名学生的意思不过是“你给我去死！”如果他说的是“就算你在地球上消失，我也不会留一滴泪”，他就不会因此受到法律制裁。
这又是一个用极不恰当的方式发泄愤怒的一种方式。他们所使用的语言让事情看起来比实际严重得多。当然，确实有谋杀同班同学的案例，譬如近来的复旦大学舍友投毒案。但我对投毒者是否在往饮水机里投毒前，曾大发雷霆表示怀疑。因为，如果有的话，他的怒气就会让人警觉。而真正的杀人者往往不动声色。
中文里一部分语言有大放厥词的风格，这是通过政治口号或古装剧流传下来的。网上也同样有低调陈述和冷幽默，但在我们学会这两种技巧之前，互联网已然成为华丽浮夸语言的滋生地。只有这次，因为狂暴愤怒语言的出现，它才被人们看做是对公众的威胁。
下一篇： 人死后，假肢都去哪了？