The Stylometry of Maoism: Quantifying the Language of Mao Zedong (2023)

Abstract: Recent advances in computational stylometry have enabled scholars to detect authorial signals with a high degree of precision, but the focus on accuracy comes at the expense of explainability: powerful black-box models are often of little use to traditional humanistic disciplines. With this in mind, we have conducted stylometric experiments on Maospeak, a language style shaped by the writings and speeches of Mao Zedong. We measure per-token perplexity across different GPT models, compute Kullback–Leibler divergences between local and global vocabulary distributions, and train a TF-IDF classifier to examine how the modern Chinese language has been transformed to convey the tenets of Maoist doctrine. We offer a computational interpretation of ideology as reduction in perplexity and increase in systematicity of language use.

## introduction stylometry, the quantitative analysis of literary style, has been extensively used to study various authors' writing styles, leveraging linguistic features such as word frequencies, sentence length, and syntactic patterns @xcite . historically, stylometry dates back to analyses of narrative style in shakespeare @xcite and attempts to identify the authors of the disputed federalist papers @xcite . the advent of computational methodologies has significantly enhanced the scope and depth of stylometric analyses, allowing for the examination of larger textual corpora and the incorporation of multifaceted linguistic features, such as lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and semantic coherence @xcite . computational stylometry has evolved to include a range of techniques, from principal component analysis (pca) to various machine learning algorithms and large language models (llms), enhancing the reliability of stylistic differentiation @xcite . however, the focus on precision metrics in authorship attribution comes at the expense of interpretability and applicability in humanistic research and teaching. the fact that a particular author uses definite articles or certain grammatical particles more often than others might shed light on their subconscious stylistic preferences, and it might even be decisive in distinguishing their stylistic fingerprints, but similar analyses can hardly explain why a given language has been particularly successful at conveying political messages and furthering domestic mobilization, as was the case of maoism in post-1949 china. ## quantifying maospeak maospeak, mao-style prose, or maowenti (毛 文 体, also called maoyu 毛语), is a set of stylistic features influenced by the writings and speeches of mao zedong , the leader of the chinese communist revolution @xcite . maospeak has had a transformative impact on the way people in china express themselves, and it continues to affect the everyday language in the prc even today. consider the following examples: there is also [class] struggle within the communist party. without struggle, there can be no progress, no peace. with a population of 800 million, how can we not struggle? there are two types of social contradictions in front of us: the contradictions between ourselves and our enemies and the contradictions within the people. these are two types of contradictions with completely different natures. such repetitive, redundant, and depersonalized sentences are a staple of the little red book, a compilation of mao's quotations and a condensed example of the maoist prose. despite its thematic coherence, however, maospeak is not simply a set of lda topics: revolutionary themes appear in marx, lenin, stalin, and mao, for example, but their writing styles are recognizably different. neither is it a matter of function words, since maospeak exudes an affective strength and a clarity of purpose that cannot be reduced to corpus number of tokens (words) vocabulary size total characters type-token ratio maospeak 1,684,294 55,113 2,890,605 0.0327 contemporary 18,219,475 515,468 28,509,185 0.0283 eileen chang 994,025 70,484 1,532,465 0.0710 mo yan 2,546,989 131,317 3,978,079 0.0516 ## conclusion in this paper, we have analyzed three different aspects of mao-style prose: perplexity, systematicity, and words with the highest tf-idf values. the results of these experiments demonstrate some of the important features of maospeak, an engineered language which reinforces the ideological tenets of maoism through its formal characteristics. the conducted experiments also offer partial evidence to question the alleged maoist influences on mo yan. while his violent literary style reflects china's revolutionary experience, it is hardly comparable to the redundant party parlance. while our analysis pertains chiefly to maoism, we believe that our findings will be applicable also to more recent contexts, in china and beyond @xcite . in particular, evaluations of next-token perplexity and kl divergence underscore the pivotal role of originality and subjectivity in language use. from this perspective, fiction reading and humanistic education become especially important. reading widely and increasing one's exposure to various language data counters the influences of ideologies on our linguistically mediated perceptions of the world and increases the perplexity of our imaginations.