Hidden character stone

The five-character interpretation posits that the characters on the stone can be translated as "Communist Party of China" (中国共产党). This is the rendition publicly accepted in the People's Republic of China. This reading has also been referred to as 救星石, literally "savior stone".[4][9] When recounting the narrative of the stone's discovery, Chinese sources usually adhere to the five-character interpretation.[3]

The six-character version suggests the characters on the stone said "Communist Party of China perish" (中国共产党亡).[1] There has been criticism that the sixth and last character "perish" (亡) has been purposely neglected to turn a "Perish communist stone" (亡共石) into a "savior stone".[10] This is not a version accepted in the PRC, hence when mainland media reports it, it has to hide the perish character.[5] Often when pictures are shown with the stone having six characters, the description still refers to it by the five-character version.[3] In Chinese text the character "perish" (亡) is often used in association with the collapse of a state, e.g. "Chu perish" (楚亡), "Wei perish" (魏亡).[11]

The characters on the stone are a mix of Traditional Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters. The first and third character (中, 共) are identical in both versions. The second character "country" (國) and fourth character "produce" (產) is in the traditional form. The fifth character, "party" (党) is in the simplified form.[12] The sixth character "perish" (亡) has no difference. Some have analyzed all the odd characters as Simplified, while the even characters are Traditional.[7]

• On the stone: 中國共產党亡
• Traditional Chinese: 中國共產黨亡
• Simplified Chinese: 中国共产党亡

The origin of the characters remain a subject of dispute.[13] There were some early speculations that the characters were put there by the People's Liberation Army, but according to the path of the Long March, they never went to Pingtang.[7] The characters also read left to right, which was not practiced at the time. The inclusion of a Simplified character before the CPC did any simplifications also ruled them out.[7] There were also some skeptics who suspected the village was creating a fraud to build their tourism industry at the time.[7] Others think the Hidden Character Stone was made in the Cultural Revolution.[14] Also, others, especially Christians, consider the message to be of divine origin, this idea being ridiculed by pro-Marxist groups.