21 July 2012 - A newly-published edition of one of China's most authoritative dictionaries has already been criticised by rights campaigners. They complain that it has excluded a definition widely used by homosexuals in China for "gay". The word is "tongzhi", whose primary meaning is "comrade", a form of address beloved of Communists for decades. One of the compilers said they did not want to draw attention to its more colloquial meaning. The newly-revised sixth edition of the Contemporary Chinese
Dictionary has 69,000 entries, 13,000 Chinese characters and more than
3,000 new phrases. They include internet slang such as "geili" - meaning awesome
- and such non-Chinese expressions as PM2.5, which refers to a
pollution indicator for particulate matter. But "tongzhi" - in colloquial Chinese the equivalent of "gay" as in "homosexual" - is not among them. Linguist Jiang Lansheng, one of the compilers of the
dictionary, said in a Chinese television interview: "We knew about the
usage but we can't include it." "You can use the word whichever way you like, but we won't
put it into a standard dictionary because we don't want to promote these
things. We don't want to draw attention to these things."
