China is spending billions on soft power
economist.com
economist.com
In north America, what I get is China is controlled by dictators. Life sucks over there because there is no freedom, a lot of corruption, no respect to rules, and is generally a chaotic mess. While in north America, democracy and freedom is wonderful, and everyone has the power to make changes of society, and in the end the government has to care about people to stay in power.
In China, what I get is the US (Canada is usually less discussed) is controlled by a corrupt and impotent government. Life sucks over there because the majority of the people, who actually has the power, believes the doublespeak of the government and are easily manipulated by the wealth. While in China, people make jokes about the official media, and if the government decides to do something people don't like, people simply ignore it and with enough people (there is always enough people in China) doing this, the government has to care about people's opinion to do anything.
I'm a little worried about the situation of both sides now. They seem to go towards what the opposite believes: on one hand in China, the government starts to get better at propaganda and manipulating public opinion; on the other hand in the States ... there is enough happening in the past year.
Here in Kenya, infrastructure investment by the Kenyan government is very poor. Whatever money gets theoretically assigned to things like building and maintenance of roads and the power and water grids usually goes missing at various stages until the final project, if implemented at all, is shoddy.
Enter China, who have been directly funding infrastructure here. They are managing the supply chain and personnel themselves, and it's having a huge effect. Beautiful roads have sprung up around Nairobi in the last year especially, built using modern techniques and quality materials.
One can't help but wonder what concessions the Chinese government will eventually come looking for in return, because it's pretty certain that the debt will never be repaid in money.
According to the Kenyan resident in the thread , it was corruption that was stymiying progress. That's something that Chinese contractors have bypassed.
But look at this photo in this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
Imagine if that chinese guy in sun glasses and boots on the desk would be white. Would it look racist/imperialist/exploitive to you?
Uh, I would double check that, they've been building bridges, malls and apartments in Eastern Europe and the quality was found to be subpar even by local standards (not to mention EU)...
For example I've seen a road being laid between Nairobi and a nearby town since last June. The original road made by the county council only had a few centimetres of tarmac rolled over the bare dirt (the money for the proper materials all went missing). It disintegrated pretty quickly and led to a horrific cratered road that was impassable to all but the hardiest of vehicles - much worse than the original dirt track.
The new road was dug deep, hardcore laid, months of surveying, measuring, marking out, then several layers of different materials laid over the hardcore adding up to a couple of feet of solid road, with a beautifully smooth finish. I'm not qualified to say whether it meets international standards but it's a lot better than what was being built before.
My muggle wife taught me this trick.
(Somebody should propose to the Cool Japan Fund that they do something to make Japanese technology more visible in Silicon Valley. Everybody here thinks Shentzen, not Tsukuba.)
China on the other hand is definitely playing that game. Like only last month they banned most imported children's picture books, especially from SK and Japan, and they've pumped a lot of money into their content industry to match their nationalistic agenda and S Korea's. Hollywood seems to be helping too :)
There are feature films produced directly by the People's Liberation Army, such as "Sky Fighters". This is the Chinese version of "Top Gun". It's not very good, because the entertainment takes second place to the propaganda. It's possible to do a good feature film which is also propaganda; "Strategic Air Command" with Jimmy Stewart is one such. But China isn't there yet.
But I don't know, maybe their creative machine really is running out of steam. I haven't really watch much recently (currently on a Scandi kick!) But I do recommend you to explore the classics like Once Upon a Time in China and Infernal Affairs.
Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like this.
What happened between China and Japan in 2011? I'm genuinely ignorant.
Lots of things have been happening between the two countries for a while now, not since 2011.
As others have said, there is a territorial dispute that to the best of my knowledge really flared up when Japan actively nationalized the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. China's moves in the South China Sea have not made things better.
Aside from that, China blocked rare earth minerals to Japan in 2010. [1] There have been numerous boycotts by China (to the point of outright vandalism of Japanese cars, business property) over political issues [2] There is always the whole WW2 apology issue (over comfort women, wartime crimes, etc.) In 2015, China made a jab at Japan during their 70th anniversary of WW2 victory. [3]
On the bright side, China did help Japan out during the big earthquake/tsunami of 2011. [4]
[1] http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2013/08/18/did-china-really-ban... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-boycott-hurts-japan-2... [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-boycott-hurts-japan-2... [4] http://www.npr.org/2011/03/15/134567659/china-acts-fast-in-a...
And yes the LDP does not help things with their racist nationalist discourse. They tend to use foreigners as a scapegoat responsible for all problems Japan has... (Abe Shinzo might not be as bad as Trump but only just..)
The Japanese Embassy advised Japanese people in Nanjing to stay in door.
Japanese clothing store "Uniqlo" temporarily closed all stores, and covered store windows with giant Chinese flags and removed/hid other visible branding for fear of rioters razing the stores.
Some stores around Nanjing would even give you a discount if you yelled "I hate Japan"
It was and unbelievable situation.
"Almost every Chinese mainlander" is, what, almost a billion people? I doubt that any statement describing what most Chinese think or believe is likely to be very true.
The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed.
I might start learning Mandarin, someday.
One could even say Trump is America's most Chinese president, considering his proposal to build a "Great, great wall" (his words, not mine)[1] and proposal to up America's military by nearly double digits to mimic China's recent years. [2]
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/wild-donald-trump-quotes/14/ [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/04/china-reins-defen...
> they have basically ran a "China first" agenda for the last decade or two
I totally agree, but that is what every country, tribe and empire has done for thousands of years. I don't expect anyone to be different. My issue is about how you sell it. Soft power (the theme of the article) comes from the empire sales pitch, from being able to convince others that you are being good when you are protecting your assets.
Again: my point is not what you are, is what you sell. And the "art of the deal" president is actually a very bad salesman. This is an overture for the Chinese. No, I don't "trust" China as much as I don't "trust" America.
Unfortunately every written tutorial I've found seems heavily focused around ideograms, which I find completely impossible, so I don't know what it's like in practice. Can any beginner learners comment?
(It's also a tonal language, which I am completely unable to pronounce intelligibly. On a trip to Beijing a few years ago I tried to learn a few basic phrases, like 'hello', 'please', 'thankyou', etc. Ha ha fat chance.)
[ * ] It can be interesting to use Google Translate to turn an English word into Mandarin, then insert newlines between each ideogram and reverse translate it to see what it is literally. 'Grammar' is 语法, which is 'language law'...
This is an artifact of the writing system. Mandarin Chinese has multisyllabic words in exactly the same way that e.g. English does.
The writing system remains very strongly monosyllabic, in that one character corresponds to one syllable >99% of the time.
Later on it talks about 'library', túshūguǎn, or 'picture book museum' (according to the dictionary I just found). Again a compound word, and one which raises fascinating questions about whether they had museums before they had libraries. The article says that it can be written as a single character, 圕, or as multiple characters, 图书馆, but surely that's just an artifact of the writing scheme?
As far as I can see I'm not saying anything controversial here. As the article I liked to earlier points out, there are at most a few thousand distinct syllables in Mandarin Chinese, and it would be absurd to suggest that Chinese is limited to a vocabulary of a few thousand words.
Note that just because a word is a compound word doesn't mean it's not a word. A compound word has a meaning which is distinct from the sum of its parts; otherwise it wouldn't be used. But the meaning of a picture book museum, or fly machine, or language law, though, is still quite clear. But a library has nothing to do with lies or bras, and the last syllable isn't even a valid word.
('Airport's not a good example in English because it actually is a compound word. Contrast with 'sea port'.)
Right. That's the point. This clearly shows that Chinese has multisyllabic words.
And yes, there are plenty of examples of compounds with meanings that have nothing to do with their components, e.g.:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8A%B1%E7%94%9F
But of course, if you already have the preconception that the parts of a compound word are independently meaningful, it's easy to tell yourself some kind of story about how they actually do contribute something to the meaning of the whole. Similarly, there are cranks who insist that particular non-morphemic sound sequences in English carry an independent meaning.
It really is amazing how confused people can get by orthography. Chinese has words composed of multiple syllables whose parts are not independently meaningful. Period. Again, this is information that's available all over the place, e.g.:
http://www.101languages.net/chinese/morphology.html
Or from Wikipedia:
>The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.[b]
Or here:
http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/message-details1.cfm?asklin...
...but I never said it didn't.
I think you're trying to respond to a different argument than the one I'm making. I'm not trying to say that Chinese only has single-syllable words. I'm saying that it has multisyllable words made up out of single syllable words --- that's what compound words are. All the examples you've given are clearly compound words, including 'flower born' (which I'll admit is not very like a peanut).
The article you just linked to uses jī as an example of a word which is only used to make up compound words. But they're still compound words. jī has a meaning of its own (well --- several meanings, depending on context). You glue it together with another word to produce a compound word with additional meaning. That's pretty much the definition of a compound word.
I don't know where you're going here --- sorry.
Only in an orthographic sense. For example, the linguist list post that I linked to talks about the bound morpheme -zi. This is written using the character which in classical Chinese was the word for 'child'. But clearly there's no sense in which 'zhuozi' (table) is a "compound word" containing the word for child. It's just that since the final syllable of the word happens to be pronounced the same way as the classical Chinese word for child, it's written using that character. This is a purely orthographic fact. And in fact 'zi' cannot be used by itself as a noun in modern Chinese (except in a few fixed idioms).
It's as if English (a) was written like (b):
(a) I realize that.
(b) I real eyes that.
And we then said that 'realize' is a compound word made up of the monosyllabic words 'real' and 'eyes' (which of course "have a different meaning depending on the context").
If you don't mind being thoroughly unable to read or write the language, you can ignore the ideograms. I've found that spoken Chinese and written Chinese differ quite significantly anyway in grammatical convention, word choice, and concision, so it kind of feels like learning two separate languages with overlapping vocabulary sometimes. Of course, you'll probably still want to learn _some_ ideograms so you can navigate around, but luckily English translations are widely displayed in China nowadays.
Spoken Chinese is really only challenging because of the tones; the rest is vocabulary and a _small_ amount of grammar. Written Chinese is challenging because of the need to recognize thousands of characters, and the general concision of the written language.
If you're going to focus on spoken language, you'll have to get good at the tones - there's no way around that. I lucked out by hearing Chinese [Mandarin] spoken consistently from a young age, but this will be a big challenge for people who only speak English (or any number of other Western European languages).
...when I was working in Beijing, with 45 minute tedious taxi journeys to and from work, I amused myself by trying to learn enough ideograms to puzzle out street signs. The only one I can remember now is 门, mén, which is 'gate'. Beijing had quite a lot.
I feel very good putting America first. Countries that do not protect themselves are exploited and overrun. Always. It has always happened and it always will happen.
Do you really think China has good intentions?
Every empire pretends to be more than imperialism. Soft power comes from being convincing at it. No, China doesn't have good intentions, as much as the U.S., the British, the Ottomans, Spaniards, French and Romans also didn't. But, still, you are more powerful when you convince others that you are also "good".
If America explicitly gives up on even pretending to be good, what is the point of respecting America?
Putting your own needs first != bad. I greatly respect those who solve their own problems and have a sense of nationalism, rather than fleeing into other countries.
"Sponsor content by The Government of Japan"
which I always find slightly amusing.
Sounds like a state-run version of Alliance Française (which is a nonprofit). I think that'll be really cool: China has a really old history and culture (the latter part wrecked with the rise of communism). The only thing though is that China should be prepared for increased immigration (it tends to happen when you go out and teach your language and culture, and your home country is a nicer place to live).
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/26/asia/africans-leaving-guan...
> Over the past 18 months, although concrete numbers are hard to come by, hundreds -- perhaps even thousands -- of Africans are believed by locals and researchers to have exited Guangzhou.
The US does spend... Well, hundreds of billions on making the world love US.
The actual problem is two-fold:
1. We spend trillions on making them hate the US.
2. We aren't actually very efficient with the hundreds of billions we spend on making them love the US. It's spent on short-sighted projects that often transparently benefit the US at the cost of the locals. To some degree, this is getting better with leadership from eg, The Gates Foundation, but we could wield our economic power much more efficiently.
These problems stem from a fundamental lack of leadership in the US: the US population are emotional-high junkies who are led by a bunch of spineless, selfish people. This is crippling the US, at home and abroad, because we are unable to do anything but lurch between emotional highs, are unable to have an actual vision for the future (and make reasonable plans to see it through), and are unable to wield our power effectively.
The US is trapped in short-term optimization thinking because of the junky behavior of its population.
Since 9/11, the US has probably spent around 500 billion on helping countries develop, fighting famines, curing diseases, etc. We've just also spent something like 3 or 4 trillion on ineffective and damaging wars, spy programs, etc.
My point is that we're spending the money on goodwill already, we'rr just undermining it with other actions and not spending it effectively.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Could you explain?
Nearly every country does a lot of foreign aid, the U.S. just happens to be one of those who do less than others so that surely does not help their global image.
I think you're just making a tangential nationalist dig, because this tangent has nothing to do with the US a) getting recognized for their work in poor countries (they do) or b) being able to use their money more effectively (which is what I was talking about).
I mean $40bn for the 40m at risk of starvation in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia given directly would not only stop starvation but pull the whole region out of poverty and do more to make people think the US cool than spending that on nukes they don't need say.
India has Bollywood.
Both have garnered quite a following in the West thanks to that.
It is independent though, which gives it some grounding.
No need to spend billions. Just don't cancel my flight one week before I depart and everything will be fine!!! :[
- lead by a billionnaire dictator and son of veteran communist party member, who has shown to purge his enemies, jail innocents/reporters without trial, disappear others. He oppresses the will of hong kongers to self govern, and acts like a crybaby whenever Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, does anything political
- controlled by a "congress" of billionnaires, who work together to exploit workers for pennies on the dollar, turn a blind eye to deadly air pollution/water pollution/poisonous food in favor of money, and when in danger, flees to Australia/Canada/US with billions
- member in WTO, but never abides by any of the rules. Foreign companies are forced to give up tech, partner with locals, suffer 30% import tax, and eventually, leave due to unfairness. And other countries loses factories/jobs/communities. Internet companies are sometimes banned outright.
Of course China needs to spend billions spreading its false/hateful messages via its 50cents army on reddit, facebook, etc. It has a cruel and evil authoritarian dictatorship, that if unchecked, will swallow the world
They spy on you, regardless of if you live in the country or not, committing global espionage[0][1]
They do not observe human rights when imprisoning you [2][3]
They are happy to bomb civilians using automated robots in the name of freedom and enlisting you to their brand of freedom[4]
They are happy to arm terrorists then assassinate them when they are no longer relevant to their cause[5]
They will wage illegal wars when it is convenient for them[6]
They were happy to obliterate people's homes to conduct nuclear tests in the name of freedom[7]
They institutionally protect the interests of the people with the most access to wealth[8]
They have elected a narcissistic nepotistic sexist bigot for their president, and do not have free healthcare [no citations necessary]
I'm not here to spark a tally of which country has committed more atrocities or which country is better - the world is simply a dirty place, and to this day, humans are still as capable of committing human on human sin.
China is no doubt guilty of many crimes too but I find China bashing by other countries reeking of hypocrisy and evidence that our own nations' propaganda machines are well oiled and in full-throttle.
The victor writes history.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/wikile...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/wikile...
[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/10/23/marion_prison_lo...
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/guantanamo-...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-oba...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
[6]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chilcot-report...
[7]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/06/marshall-islan...
[8]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925858
EDIT: added an additional point
When I lived and worked in China, for a government entity, the insurance didn't cover anything I ever needed it for and I had to pay out of pocket 100% of the time for all costs. The private healthcare industry is exploding in China right now because the public healthcare system is inadequate.
There is no such thing as free healthcare. Even if you install single payer and ration health supplies to the extent more people die on waiting lists like in Canada, the government will still be paying for the little care that remains through your own taxes or debt obligations.
More enlightenment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peVLkW7uirI
People die on waiting lists in America too, so if you are going to make this argument, be specific. How many people, what are they on the waiting list for, and how is it worse than what we have in America?
It's not that the free market provides a panacea utopia, it's that it's empirically better than everything else. The government system in Canada predictably and steadily broke down as efficiency left due to the lack of a free market.
>The study, an annual survey of physicians from across Canada, reports a median wait time of 20 weeks [in 2016] —the longest ever recorded—and more than double the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited in 1993 [when single-payer began], when the Fraser Institute began tracking wait times for medically necessary elective treatments.
http://canadafreepress.com/article/canadas-health-care-wait-...
I've already spent significant amounts of effort in this thread gathering and summarizing data only to be repeatedly downvoted for bringing hard evidence that challenges the status quo opinion.
The study I've already cited more closely than international comparisons isolates the variable of single payer because it measures the same data points over time using the same methodology in the same country.
Comparing the US and Canada tends to be less reliable in comparison because the properties involved are more fluid, although it's still a useful comparison in some ways. Furthermore, the US healthcare system already has major single payer elements such as Medicare, which would complicate the isolation of the variable.
I just googled "difference in procedure wait times between the united states and canada" and literally every result on the front page supports the longer wait times in Canada that you asked to be shown.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-...
http://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/comparing-health-care-in-ca...
https://www.amsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/WaitingTimes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_healthcare_s...
http://getbetterhealth.com/wait-times-for-medical-care-how-t...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/sunday-review/long-waits-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2585450/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3633404/
https://books.google.com/books?id=McL2UV9_QGUC&pg=PA176&lpg=...
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/reducing...
"I'm not here to spark a tally of which country has committed more atrocities" lol you just did.
Also, to say that China has better human rights record vs. US is almost blasphemy. Why even quote that?
For the last point, what are you trying to say? Democracy doesn't work - lets all most to the communist model!? I know you are trying to be a the devils advocate, but using one off examples (while ignoring everything that China represents) to justify your points seems wrong.
Which Chinese news publications do you read?
Also, are you really trying to say that press in China has unfettered rights to publish anything? This is a country which has a giant firewall to prevent users from reading news/articles critical of it published outside China.
There is no free press in China so you can only see a small fraction of the life-destroying problems that are pervasive throughout the country, let alone shine enough light on them to solve them.
An extended PR campaign such as this is only going to exacerbate the distortion of reality.
More: http://www.npr.org/2017/03/17/520435073/trump-embraces-one-o...
In the former Soviet Union and even in modern China it's fashionable and a sign of wealth to have American technology and fashion. Among many trade barriers, China artificially limits the number of American movies allowed in theaters to a couple a year because they're so popular.
Even countries with extremely friendly relations to the US take some actions to limit the pervasiveness of US culture. In the case of Japan, limiting the number of US baseball players on Japanese teams comes to mind.
It's telling that even with the magnitude of recent intel leaks there has been nothing found to indicate the US uses government funded propaganda. They don't need to.
Not to go too off my chain too much on why US culture is looked up to, but we're talking about the country that invented the car,microchip, transistor, computer, atomic weapons, GPS, and the internet.
Most of the great inventions of modern history were created in the United States, some of them by the government itself. Silicon valley continues to pump out the most valuable companies in the world at an astounding rate to this day.
So what is soft power exactly? Is it bad that a lot of countries look up to the US model of society? Is that unfair? Your claim is baseless, American culture is popular simply because the US is so successful.
And there's plenty of intel out there in the open that the US funds propaganda abroad, such as Omidyar's co-funding of the Ukraine resistance (https://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukrain...).
Or in Chile, where the United States overthrew a democratically elected leader and installed a dictator who went on to commit over 300 human rights atrocities.
Indeed many of the technologies you cite as being invented by the US were invented within a military context! Atomic weapons were not, I'm sorry to say, America's wonderful altruistic gift to the world.
The US has certainly been successful projecting its power around the world - arguing that that has come from the sheer force of American global popularity is more of a stretch.
However, my arguments are easily verifiable and widely known. Why do other countries feel the need to block things like US movies and sports stars? Are your seriously suggesting that such things are secretly US govt propaganda?
The most reasonable explanation is that US movies and sports stars are known for their high quality and allowing the US to compete in those countries would totally wipe out local movies and sports stars. This would obviously contribute to the spread of US culture and continue propagating the believe that the US model of society produces superior products.
Countries like Russia and China depend on their propaganda machines to keep the population complacent. Allowing foreign competition to overtake local firms and show their superiority to the local populace would result in questions those governments don't want these citizens asking.
Foreign companies find little trouble competing in the US, because the US govt by large is not concerned with the influence of foreign culture. The government is slight corrupt but not to the point that it makes widespread lies necessary to maintain order. Many foreign companies have the US as their primary market, something China and other countries that depend on propaganda for peace would never allow.
Using HN primarily for political and ideological battle is also not allowed here, nationalisms included.
Where did that number come from? Going by this,
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2016/12/06/import-export-...
I would expect the usual 10% for WTO members without other trade agreements. If you add the higher 17% VAT rate to that and round up, I guess you can sort of justify "30%", but that's misleading, since VAT applies to domestic companies too.
These would actually make China a country I could support, but currently: no, thank you.
That can be argued: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Most decisions are not made within a democratic process but decided by leaders who are usually not voted for ether
Do you really believe that China's 1.3 billion people would be better off if the country just switched itself to American styled "democracy"? Look at who our democracy just elected.
And only because the US democracy is going the way of Poland and Hungary and it is close to fail in Turkey doesn't mean it will fail everywhere.
Taiwan has a democracy, South Korea just ousted their president because of allegation that she is corrupt.
You guessed it, don't like China? Nobody gives a damn.
Taiwan is a defacto independent country for 60+ years now and until the 1970s, the Republic of China was China. It is time that the relationship between those two countries find a way to recognize each other. West and East Germany reached this in the early 1970s, See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Treaty,_1972
Btw, the US opened itself to Cuba again. Way too late, way too slow. The embargo on Cuba did nothing against the regime. Embargos rarely work.
This isn't about if I like China or not. It was an idea how China could improve its imagine, by actually improving. Recently I heard Chinese scientists complaining, that the censorship in China is preventing research.