China is betting on the reverse and honestly I think they’ll win. The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy is just not there.
It's already happening. China is no longer the us' #1 trading partner. Europe is deleveraging off of china. Canada is on the verge of boycotting the chinese olympics.
Even if there weren't geopolitical conflict involved, it's going to happen out of sheer economics; labor costs in china are no longer competitive with those in neighboring countries e.g. thailand, vietnam, bangladesh, and, for the US, mexico, and there is going to be a rough demographic transition as due to decades of one child, there are fewer entry-level people to take on entry-level low-skilled jobs in china (and basically no one wants to immigrate to china because the government has stoked chauvinistic nationalism way worse than trump ever did).
They are working hard on eliminating the language barrier.
The rurals do not benefit.
But more than that, China is hard at work at ensuring that all Chinese speak Mandarin.
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
Source: I’m native Chinese
You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.
My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.
Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.
So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.
As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.
The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.
> the written form is universal
That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.
This is only true in a very strained sense of "the Latin alphabet". No two of the languages you mention have an alphabet in common.
The Latin alphabet has no U or J, and while Y and Z were known to Latin speakers they do not appear in any Latin words.
Compare ø, ç , ß, and ő.
Even alphabets that appear visually similar may be quite different. The Spanish alphabet I was taught went:
A B C CH D E F G H I J K L LL M N Ñ O P Q R RR S T U V W X Y Z
The Ñ is not the only difference there.
Something analogous is true for the different varieties of Chinese; there are a handful of "regional" characters with no standard use.
But here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
Can you articulate a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.
> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН
Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.
> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.
¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.
² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.
I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.
Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages
Spelling with Chinese characters is a tricky business. It is not enough to write the syllables; for each of ~1200 syllables there are several characters to choose from. Which to use in each word is purely a product of history, but the rules people learn are only for Mandarin.
It is funny that Chinese people who only know Mandarin mostly don't know this; it is not safe to talk about in China. So, Cantonese speakers let them continue to believe that Cantonese is "just pronounced differently", rather than being a whole language of its own. (Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?)
Italian syllables/minute: 405
Spanish syllables/minute: 526
https://irisreading.com/average-reading-speed-in-various-lan...
Italian: 6.99 syllables per second
Spanish: 7.82 syllables per second
https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/list-of-the-fastest-spoken...
Whose fertility has for the last several decades taken a historically massive hit from one child, sex-selective abortion and the policy of taking young rural women to single-sex urban dorms to provide their once cheap labor. A rural region with increasingly middle aged farmers with a rapidly shrinking highly gender imbalanced youth is not a recipe for medium to long term abundant labor supply. Certainly, China’s economy is a profligate debt fueled fever, however, their biggest bill coming due is the demographics.
According to highly suspect official Chinese statistics.
> The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost.
It’s not a sunken cost because it’s ongoing and must be ongoing as if it ended the whole Chinese economy would sink.
> They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.
They’re not exactly rich to begin with. Or by poor do you mean let them starve? Nor is that a recipe for staving off revolution!
One example. Drones have proven to be a strategic gamechanger in the 2020 Azeri-Armenian war. In the same league with the musket, the machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the carrier. Who is the world leader in commercial drones? DJI, a Chinese company. US market share? 76%. It's not even close.
https://dronelife.com/2021/03/05/has-the-u-s-china-trade-war...
is there anything cutting edge about DJI products aside from volume? TBH I think probably the only thing truly special about DJI is that their software interface actually works, but in the world of "all software" it's still pretty janky (the bar is low in drone-world).
I keep waiting for a model that will do something I want (image -> language with a transformer model that doesn't have a fixed token length during training). I have been waiting for about 3 years, haven't seen it yet.
You can't measure innovation by bulk flow of humans through a system. If anything if you force too many humans through a pipeline that needs innovation you risk kneecapping progress because the separation of wheat and chaff becomes quadratically harder, increasingly gamed, and the people who actually have talent and creativity inevitably burn out and fuck off to do something else.
Cutting business ties is a playable card, but not over this. China knew. If you were the president of a country, you wouldn't either. There is too much on the table already to just give it away.
The focus of the 2020s and 2030s will be decoupling and decentralizing. New trading partners will be comfortably lower down the value chain, and we won't make the mistake of letting suppliers turn into adversaries again.
You wouldn't read this thirty years ago, not when the Soviet Union still have its influence. When the US is trying to have China on its side. Shared and competiing interest is, and will always the core of any diplomatic relationship. China isn't any less commie or more worker-friendly back then, but that wasn't the focus of the conversation isn't it.
Vietnam isn't less commie than China is. India doesn't have better working conditions than China is. We aren't reading them because they are not as significant. Vietnam is simply too small, and India is still struggling to find its own way.
I don't think the parent post is implying they'll do anything over a writer. But there is significant awareness now regarding the threat CCP poses.
Last week Lithuania recalled their ambassador to China, and they're urging EU to cut dependence on China. Post-Merkel Germany might take a stronger stance against China, going by what their leaders are saying of late.
That changing entirely depends on who wins the election in a month. If it will be Red-Green (Social Democrat + Greens) or Red-Red-Green (Socialists + Social Democrat + Greens), it might very well be that we will cutting down the influence of the automotive lobbyists... but if we end up with the free-market liberals (FDP, yellow) or, worse, the endemically corrupt Conservatives (CDU/CSU, black) we will keep on bowing to the whims of everyone who can't grow in the Western markets.
For everyone in Germany: please vote. This election is crucial.
But as so often, things are not that easy and are more grey than black and white:
The liberals (FDP) are among the biggest supports of closer contacts to Taiwan, while some parts of the Socialists (Die Linke) argue that the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen.
Regarding the tankies in our leftie rows... you are completely correct and I hope that in an R2G coalition the foreign ministry ends up at someone from the Greens. SPD botched it the last time with Maas and we have too many questionable comrades to fill that job with someone guaranteed sane...
China has never been the US' #1 trading partner. That has been Canada, because Canada imports ~300 billion, and exports ~300 billion to the US. China only imports ~100 billion from the US, but exports ~452 billion. Both numbers are growing, year over year.
If anything, maximising interoperation with non-free countries only benefits free countries, making their position more exclusive. Say: Chinese rich are likely to settle in US and Europe once they made it, just because it's too scary to stay in China, but they spend and pay taxes there.
The world will never be "free" in the Western sense of it, because even the very concept of "society" is foreign to the vast majority of people, the concept of "public good" is foreign too, damn it, in the most countries people can't even queue: they fight for their turn to be served and everyone accepts it as fair. Not just democracy, but even freedom or "rights" in the very basic sense are not understood, or actively rejected by people from all walks of life in most of the world.
Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia? Extent of human right abuses in the former is bigger than in either of the latter; it's a no-brainer to invade and occupy it - it's a plain desert great for tanks and they have no nukes; and they have oil. Yet this isn't done for the simple reason - no one is going to benefit from it.
On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country. China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea and Taliban. And threatening democratic Taiwan almost every other week with invasion.
SA has been directly involved in funding terrorism(1), they're fighting a war in Yemen for their own national interest(2), they are pressuring countries in very concrete ways (e.g. Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's resignation in 2017 was basically forced by SA)(3), they've been trying to isolate Qatar since 2017(4), they have no qualms about murdering a critic in an embassy overseas(5), they're increasing their influence in places like Bosnia(6).
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(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Lebanon%E2%80%93Saudi_Ara...
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_diplomatic_crisis
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
(6) https://www.france24.com/en/20181113-focus-bosnia-herzegovin...
Lmao what. Have you followed anything at all they've been doing?
>China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea
You know they've had those relations with north korea since forever. You might remember a bit of a war that split the country.
>and Taliban
Just like every other surrounding country and countries like the US with business interests in the nation.
Saudi Arabia was the second country to recognize their government in the past. Pakistan was bombing for and aiding the taliban before the invasion because they prefer them over pashtun nationalists and for other reasons. Iran which was fighting the Taliban has dropped their rhetoric a good bit.
Even older, it is the classic "don't pay the danegeld" situation:
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...
Combined with the fact that the Assange situation is not at all similar, I don't see it as relevant.
BTW, even the historical example of Russian "and you lynch blacks" to the US in response to human-right criticism is relevant, as exemplified by the export of BLM as a general civil rights movement. The US/UK should still be able to criticise China, but without pretending to be a laudable moral example.