Liu, Bohan: 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