Chinese as a Master Signifier and the Becoming of Present Chinese: Symbolic Construction, Linguistic Compression, and Platform-Mediated Language Production

This paper proposes the concept of “Present Chinese” as a theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary Chinese language is continuously produced through symbolic institutions, platform media, and AI-mediated corpus circulation. Rather than treating Chinese as a naturally unified language, the paper approaches “Chinese” as a Master Signifier that temporarily sutures heterogeneous linguistic forms, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Min, Wu, classical writing, vernacular Chinese, platform discourse, and AI-generated language. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Bourdieu’s theory of legitimate language, Foucault’s discourse theory, and Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, the paper examines how linguistic legitimacy, symbolic authority, and platform visibility shape what can be recognized as “Chinese.” Particular attention is paid to contemporary linguistic phenomena such as state-oriented expressions (“banwei”, “songchi gan”, “qingxu jiazhi”), danmu culture, lexical compression, and AI-generated discourse. The paper argues that contemporary Chinese is increasingly characterized by processes of conceptual compression, state nominalization, symbolic condensation, and corpus circulation. Language no longer merely describes reality but actively produces public topics, structures desire, redistributes visibility, and reorganizes collective perception. In this sense, Present Chinese should be understood not as a fixed linguistic object but as an ongoing process of symbolic and technological production.