So, the official English name for the governing party in China is the Communist Party of China, or CPC for short. But basically every Western media calls it “CCP”, or “Chinese Communist Party”, which doesn’t exist. Wikipedia’s page about the CPC will auto-redirect from “Communist Party of China” if you enter that in, to “Chinese Communist Party”, its title and URL is “Chinese Communist Party”, and then, in the first sentence, literally says that the official English name is Communist Party of China, and THEN proceeds to use CCP for the rest of the goddamn article anyway.

And yes it matters from a language standpoint. While it isn’t the case here, you sometimes do see “X Party of Y” and “Y X Party” both being separate organizations, and they could have extremely different ideologies despite being similarly named. Also, it’s basic grammer rules you learn in first grade: proper nouns can’t just be rearranged all willy-nilly!

So I have this conspiracy theory: CCP sounds worse subconsciously due to its proximity to “CP”, you know, that really disgusting type of sexual imagery. And of course sinophobes want to portray China in the worst way possible.

The thing the prompted me to think this: I have seen “jokes” on R*ddit comparing the acronyms of “CCP” and “CP”. Which get thousands of upvotes despite using child sexual abuse as a punchline.

Am I saying everyone does this, obviously not. But it could explain why mainstream media keep pushing that wrong acronym.

The effectiveness of this trick isn’t conjecture either. There have been plenty of psychology studies that have shown that if the name of one benign thing has even a tangential resemblance to a word for a unrelated bad thing, it dramatically reduces a person’s opinion of that thing vs. if it had a neutral name. I think the most interesting for this one is the study that showed that people whose initials are things like P.I.G., D.I.E., or A.S.S., have lower self esteem than people whose initials are neutral or look like nice words. Same with if someone’s name has letter combos like “hell” or “ass” inside of the spelling.

I KNOW I sound crazy here. BUT: From the regime that gave us MK Ultra, Project Stargate, and the GAY BOMB, is it REALLY that hard to picture them playing around with associative naming in popular media?

There’s another not conspiracy thing I should mention: If you can’t even get the name of the organization you’re vilifying right, then why should I trust you on the factual accuracy of anything else you say about them? If you don’t even care to look up a simple name, then your “research” deserves to be called into serious question. If I went to the hospital and the cardiologist assigned to me keeps spelling the word heart wrong, I’m probably not going to trust them to correctly insert a wire into that organ without killing me.

Communist Party of China