Deng Xiaoping General Assembly Speech

[Tomsima]

I was browsing around on the UN Multimedia website and came across a full audio clip of Deng Xiaoping's 1974 general assembly speech. Deng gives his speech entirely in dialect (not putonghua), and I thought it was a pretty interesting bit of history to listen to, particularly with whats happening with changes in the government at the moment. What do others think?

 

https://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/C817/C817/

[Jim]

Well,  I'd say he's trying to do putonghua it's just his accent stays really thick! Dialect would shift a lot of the grammar and vocabulary I reckon, from what I recall of Sichuanhua when I worked down there. Great find, listening now as I work.

[Tomsima]

That's true, maybe it could be called 'formal Sichuanhua' a bit like when written chinese resembling mandarin is read with Cantonese pronunciation.

[Publius]

It's Standard Mandarin vocabulary/grammar with Sichuanese pronunciation. You can read the text here. It's highly unlikely Deng himself wrote the speech. It's in this speech that Mao Zedong's Three Worlds Theory (三個世界理論) was formally introduced to the world. Particularly interesting is the neocolonialism part.

 

In the roller coaster course that is Deng Xiaoping's political career, this was his second "up" following the ignoble demise of Lin Biao, Mao's "closest comrade-in-arms and successor" as designated in the Party constitution. In less than two years however, he would be "down" again in the Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend (反擊右傾翻案風) campaign. (It was such fun looking up these terms in English.)

 

Oh, if you're interested in Sichuanhua, I find this page quite thorough.