Chinese Character of the Year

2014 is gone. 2015 is here and several countries and regions in East Asia that share Chinese cultural origins have already come up with their own Chinese character of the 2014 through various selections. China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea are among the countries that regularly hold similar character polls each year.

The selection of the Chinese character of the year was, as a matter of fact, first started in Japan in 1995, with the original intention to enhance Japanese identity and understanding of traditional culture. In addition, such a “word game” can offer ordinary people an opportunity to express their opinion on what matters most in the society they lived during the past year. It also offers a clue of the social panorama, which, inevitably, has drawn the participation of a huge variety and number of people.

Although it is impossible to use one single character to cover all aspects of the past year’s social life, yet it is still doable to find one to stand for the most distinct and representative issue or issues that happened throughout the year, or at least, it could remind people of what was most impressive in their memory of that particular year.

From 2014’s final results, it seems the majority of the people who took the survey shared concerns over either the hot political issues in these different regions that influenced their life most.

For example, the Chinese Character of year 2014 in Malaysia is hang (“aviation” in English), which is suspense-free given the two incidents in the first half of last year and the most recent missing flight in December, which again heavily hit the nation and victims’ families. And for Japan, the character was shui (in English, “tax”), not surprisingly, as the increase since April in the consumption tax to 8 percent from the previous 4 percent has laid a heavy burden on the underclass, people who have been suffering from the bad economy in recent years.

The word fa, in English, “l(fā)aw”, has been chosen as Character of the Year in China from a pool of more than 7,000 other Chinese characters recommended by netizens and initial screening by language experts. The word was picked following a survey conducted by the Chinese National Language Monitoring and Research Center and the Commercial Press. And “rule by the law” was selected as the top among 10 annual buzzwords by Chinese media.