James Fallows has written a couple blog entries on this tourism poster he saw in a subway station in Beijing (here and follow-up here). Could “More Freedom, More Happiness” be a cleverly hidden subversive call for more a democratic government? There are plenty of discussions going on, and Fallows’ blog has links to some of those. Most of the discussion seems to be focusing on whether there’s an implied correlation between “more freedom” and “more happiness”. My own take on it, however, focuses on a different part of the slogan. Here’s what I think is the possible explanation, which I’ve e-mailed to Fallows:

In Chinese, the word 自由 does mean freedom, but not necessarily in the way Westerners would perceive freedom. When Westerners think “freedom”, the word seems to inherently imply an association with control by a government/some kind of authority and the right of the individual to be free of that control as much as possible. In Chinese, while 自由 can mean that, I’ve also seen it used fairly often in the venacular to mean “freedom” in the sense of leisure, as in freedom from worries, freedom from work, having the free time to sit back and be leisurely and at ease (more along the lines of the phrase 自在).

The poster is promoting tourism in Chengdu. From what I understand, aren’t Chengdu and Sichuan generally regarded as having a laid-back, easy-going lifestyle? So putting 自由 in that context, perhaps the poster is promoting the idea that Chengdu offers tourists a lot of leisurely, laid-back experiences and a lot of happiness, invoking relaxing imageries such as just kicking back and enjoying a cup of tea (hence the tea in the panda’s paw).

Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t be someone’s clever use of the ambiguous definitions of a phrase to conceal a call for democratizaiton.