Apparently this fear exists within China as well, especially for baby formula. This stems from the 2008 milk scandal. That incident had 300k victims, hospitalized 54k babies, and killed 6. Four years prior 12 babies died from watered down milk [0].
In 2007, pet food produced in China killed ~3600 pets around the world after being contaminated. On further investigation, the FDA later determined that 2.5mm to 3mm Americans had consumed chickens who had been fed tainted vegetables imported from China [1].
In 2003, the State Food and Drug Administration was created to improve safety of the food supply. However, it seems that individual farmers may not be incentivized to make safety improvements, as produce from multiple farms is typically combined prior to being sold to distributors [2]. There have been several publicized incidents since 2003, often involving counterfeit or contaminated foods [3].
I'd argue it's entirely rational to have concerns about the safety of these goods, especially since Chinese companies (as recently as 2014) have demonstrated they are willing to export unsafe and expired goods internationally.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
In the wake of that, so many Chinese came to Hong Kong to buy milk powder that a new law was introduced in HK restricting its export (to 1.8 kg per person), with violations punishable by 60,000 USD or 2 years prison :-)
(promptly giving rise to baby formula smuggling rings, naturally...)
In the US, losing power means looking for a new job, or retiring with a pension. I believe the consequences of losing power are typically worse in China.
In the US, it required regulations and the creation of institutions like the FDA. These will remain sufficient to prevent further abuse hinges on the combination of regulatory institutions and the press (who reports grievous abuse when regulators allow grievous abuse, given regulatory capture is a constant threat). China's press and public institutions seem to be getting weaker and weaker. Thus things may or may not get better.
The key phrase here is used to.
Because things were bad in the United States over 100 years ago (The Jungle was published in 1904), doesn't mean that today's adulterated Chinese food is somehow magically OK.
I love a good tussle, but a lot of people are really, really bad at it. Political discussion online is like the Dunning-Kruger Effect made flesh.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/12/thieves-f...
That's not quite true. Bilingual speakers tend to have a smaller vocabularies in each individual language than monolingual speakers (even though they have a larger total vocabulary across both languages).
According to some studies monolingual speakers also have faster word retrieval and better verbal fluency overall.
Of course this has to be weighed against the benefits of learning another language, but there are costs.
Do you have any citations to support this? From the research I have read (and my own anecdotal experience) this is not necessarily the case, especially when taking into account the bilingual speakers' dominant language.
See e.g.
Pearson et al. (1993). Lexical Development in Bilingual Infants and Toddlers: Comparison to Monolingual Norms.
Allman (2005). Vocabulary Size and Accuracy of Monolingual and Bilingual Preschool Children. – although note the difference in English vs Spanish vocabulary scores for monolingual vs bilingual speakers.
From your 2nd link:
"However, on tests of vocabulary bilinguals frequently seem to perform at lower levels than monolinguals (Ben Zeev, 1977b; Doyle, Champagne, & Segalowitz, 1978). The reason for this seems to be that bilingual children have to learn two different labels for everything, which reduces the frequency of a particular word in either language"
"These findings also support Bialystok’s (2001) suggestions that bilinguals have a greater Total Vocabulary than monolinguals..."
The conclusion says nothing about vocabularies within individual languages, it's only talking about total vocabulary across languages.
Here's another study:
"The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages."
"The distributed characteristic of bilingual knowledge provides an explanation for the low standard scores that have often been reported in bilingual children on vocabulary tests in both the first language (L1) and the L2 (Ben Zeev, 1977a; Fernández et al., 1992; Pearson & Fernández, 1994; Umbel et al., 1992). The low scores do not indicate that bilingual children are poor vocabulary learners, but that some of the vocabulary possessed by bilingual children is encoded in the L1 but not the L2, and vice versa, the signature pattern of the distributed characteristic."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3358777/
If you want to read more you can follow up with the citations from that last paper.
If you learn the other people's language, you will communicate in their language. If you are inside a company with mixed languages, that company will be run in the language of the people that do not speak the other language.
As you know, companies are highly political, and if you are missing all the nuances of a language because you are not a native speaker, your chances of taking a good position within that company will be lower.
This is exactly what I saw in a company in Brussels when I worked there. All help-desk operators were Flemish, because they are bilingual in Dutch and French (and English of course). Management were all native French speaking, unable to communicate in Dutch. My direct manager, who was Flemish, had a hard time covering his own ass in this political environment, because of the foreign language nuances.
So in effect, the ones who don't speak the other persons language have the benefit.
To be fair, that has been pretty much the world bank playbook for decades. I dont see why an exploitation in that form would revert back to more classic forms of colonialism. Upholding a colonial regime is simply not worth the effort if you have similar financial benefits with loans with horrible conditions.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free...
> Neocolonialism, neo-colonialism, postmodern imperialism, or neo-imperialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country in lieu of direct military control (imperialism) or indirect political control (hegemony). It was coined by Kwame Nkrumah in the context of African countries undergoing decolonization in the 1960s.
In my humble experience, they are disproportionately likely to be the descendants of colonizers and are sometimes uncomfortable with their own privilege.
Countries and cultures have been doing this all throughout history, and still do this today.
Which country has taken over another "slowly and peacefully"?
It's hyperbole at best to claim that kenya offering chinese as "an elective" ( not mandatory ) to its student is an "invasion". My high school offered spanish, french and japanese as language electives. Last I checked, we weren't invaded and conquered by spain, france or japan.
I've read that children in Hong Kong now have to learn Mandarin in school instead of Cantonese. So using language as influence isn't foreign to the Chinese state.