The History of Chinglish: From Treaty Ports to TikTok

In 1793, a British diplomat named Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing to negotiate trade relations with the Qing Empire. He refused to kowtow before the Qianlong Emperor. The mission failed. No trade deal was signed. And yet, something far more enduring emerged from the encounter: a new way of speaking that would eventually produce one of the most successful Chinese exports in history—not tea, not silk, but a mode of English so distinctive that it now has its own name.

We call it Chinglish.

Most people think of Chinglish as a modern joke: funny signs in Beijing subway stations, bizarre menu translations, viral internet memes. But Chinglish is not a mistake. It is a three-hundred-year linguistic experiment, born from necessity, shaped by politics, and turbocharged by the internet. Its history mirrors China’s relationship with the world: first forced open by gunboats, then isolated by revolution, and finally unleashed online with the confidence of a culture that no longer asks permission to speak.

The Pidgin Era: When Necessity Invented a Language

The first Chinglish sentences were not spoken in classrooms. They were shouted across harbors.

After the First Opium War (1839–1842), the Treaty of Nanjing opened five Chinese ports to foreign trade. Canton, Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen suddenly filled with British, American, and Dutch merchants who spoke no Chinese, and Chinese laborers who spoke no English. They needed to communicate. So they invented a language that belonged to neither side: pidgin English, a stripped-down trade language that sacrificed grammar for survival.

The rules were simple. Drop articles. Ignore verb conjugation. Use Chinese sentence structure with English words. If a Chinese laborer wanted to say “I cannot do this,” he applied the Chinese negation pattern directly: no can do. If he wanted to greet a friend after a long absence, he translated 好久不见 word for word: long time no see.

These were not errors. They were solutions. And because they were shorter, punchier, and more efficient than their grammatically correct alternatives, they stuck. No can do entered American slang by the 1880s. Long time no see became so natural that most English speakers today do not realize it is a Chinese import. The ultimate measure of a successful loanword is invisibility, and by that standard, long time no see is the most successful Chinglish phrase in history.

But pidgin Chinglish carried a darker undertone. It was born from unequal trade, colonial arrogance, and racial hierarchy. Chinese speakers used pidgin because they had to; English speakers used it because they could not be bothered to learn Chinese. The language was functional, but the power dynamics were not. When the era of treaty ports ended in the mid-20th century, pidgin Chinglish died with it—only to be replaced by something stranger.

The Mao Era: When Politics Became English

In 1949, Mao Zedong stood atop Tiananmen Gate and declared that China had “stood up.” The new People’s Republic shut its doors to the West, expelled foreign missionaries and businessmen, and launched a campaign to remake Chinese society from the ground up. Linguistically, this meant severing ties with English almost entirely. English became the language of the enemy.

And yet, paradoxically, this was the era that produced some of the most durable Chinglish phrases in existence.

Mao was obsessed with making China legible to the world. He wanted foreign revolutionaries to read his writings, foreign governments to understand his threats, and foreign workers to join his cause. The result was a wave of political slogans that were translated into English with almost poetic literalness. A “paper tiger” (纸老虎) was an enemy that looked fierce but would collapse under pressure—a concept Mao applied first to the United States, then to anyone who opposed him. “Good good study, day day up” (好好学习，天天向上) was an exhortation to self-improvement that applied Chinese grammar so faithfully to English words that it became almost musical.

These phrases were not pidgin. They were propaganda, carefully crafted by state translators who valued ideological precision over grammatical conformity. They were meant to be read by foreigners, and they were. Western newspapers quoted Mao’s “paper tiger” speech in 1946. American radicals in the 1960s wore badges saying “Good good study.” The language had traveled from the mouths of dockworkers to the pages of The New York Times.

What is remarkable about this era is that Chinglish was no longer a byproduct of trade. It was a deliberate export. China was using English on its own terms, bending the language to fit Chinese political concepts rather than the other way around. This was a preview of things to come, though nobody recognized it at the time.

The Internet Era: When Memes Became Currency

If Mao used Chinglish to export politics, the Chinese internet used it to export humor.

The transformation began in the early 2000s, when Chinese bulletin board systems and chat rooms produced a new form of linguistic creativity: internet slang that was simultaneously Chinese and English, native to neither and both at once. The rules were simple. Take a Chinese internet meme. Translate it literally into English. Watch it go viral.

No zuo no die (不作死就不会死) arrived first. “Zuo” (作) is a character with no English equivalent—it means to actively seek trouble through foolish behavior, to poke a sleeping bear and then complain about being mauled. The literal translation made no grammatical sense, but it made perfect emotional sense. By 2014, it had been added to the Urban Dictionary.

You can you up, no can no BB (你行你上，不行别哔哔) followed close behind—a challenge to critics who complained without contributing. Smilence (笑而不语) combined “smile” and “silence” to describe the Chinese internet’s favorite emotional state: knowing something but saying nothing. Niubility (牛逼) attempted to capture the full spectrum of Chinese admiration—from “awesome” to “unbelievable”—in a single, clumsy English word.

What made this era different from the pidgin era was confidence. The internet Chinglish speakers were not dockworkers trying to survive. They were young, educated, and globally connected. They knew standard English perfectly well. They chose Chinglish because it was funnier, sharper, and more precise than the “correct” alternative. No zuo no die conveys a shade of schadenfreude that “if you don’t seek trouble, you won’t find it” completely misses.

The internet also gave Chinglish a global distribution network that Mao could only dream of. A phrase coined on Weibo on Monday could be trending on Twitter by Wednesday, memed on Reddit by Friday, and printed on a T-shirt in Brooklyn by the weekend. Chinglish had become a transnational youth dialect, spoken by millions who had never set foot in China.

The Dictionary Era: When the Gatekeepers Surrendered

The final stage of Chinglish’s journey began in 2018, when the Oxford English Dictionary made a decision that would have horrified Lord Macartney: it added add oil.

The phrase is a literal translation of 加油 (jiā yóu), a cheer that means “step on the gas” or “inject fuel.” In standard English, telling someone to “add oil” before an exam makes no sense. But in Hong Kong, Singapore, and increasingly in global English, it is used exactly as a Chinese speaker would use 加油: to encourage, to cheer, to say “you’ve got this.” The OED’s editors recognized that the phrase had crossed over from Chinese immigrant communities into general usage, and they made it official.

This was not the first Chinglish phrase in a major dictionary. Long time no see and no can do had been there for decades. But add oil was different. It was modern. It was internet-age. It was chosen, not inherited. And its inclusion signaled something profound: the English language had stopped treating Chinglish as a historical curiosity and started treating it as a living source of new vocabulary.

The linguist David Crystal has estimated that a new English word is born every 98 minutes. Most die unnoticed. But add oil survived because it filled a gap. English has dozens of ways to encourage someone—“go for it,” “keep it up,” “you’ve got this”—but none of them carry the mechanical, engine-roaring energy of add oil. It is not just encouragement. It is fuel. And English needed that.

Why This History Matters

The history of Chinglish is not a story of bad translation. It is a story of how language adapts when cultures collide.

The pidgin era produced efficiency. The Mao era produced ideology. The internet era produced humor. The dictionary era produced legitimacy. Each phase answered a different question: How do you trade with someone who does not speak your language? How do you threaten them? How do you joke with them? How do you finally make them accept that your way of speaking is valid?

Today, Chinglish sits at a fascinating crossroads. On one hand, machine translation and AI are erasing the “errors” that once produced gems like people mountain people sea. On the other hand, Chinese internet culture is more globally influential than ever, producing new Chinglish phrases faster than any dictionary can keep up.

The future of Chinglish will likely be decided not by linguists or politicians, but by TikTok users, gamers, and meme creators—the same people who turned no zuo no die from a Weibo post into a global catchphrase. They do not care whether a phrase is “correct.” They care whether it is true. And in that sense, Chinglish has never been healthier.

Lord Macartney refused to kowtow in 1793. Two hundred and thirty years later, the English language is doing something far more significant than bowing. It is learning to speak Chinese.