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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

Not really. He just meant that old people find it hard to learn to speak Mandarin, even if they can read the Chinese script (which is the same for all Chinese languages). He likely saw this as a major obstacle to his vision of a grand, unified China. He's also responsible for the simplified Chinese script, which was introduced everywhere but in Hong Kong and Taiwan. They are still very mutually intelligible, from what I understand.

I mean the part about actually bombing people is of course a joke, I think even such an exceptional psychopath-stateman like him wouldn't do it.

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Just to touch on this - Cantonese is not really mutually intelligible with modern Chinese, that's CCP propaganda. They're big on the idea that there's only one Chinese language, and there are "regional dialects" but...those dialects meet an awful lot of criteria for being a different language. It's very similar to their push to make all Chinese culture and history Han Chinese.

The mandarin spoken in Taiwan is 1:1 with that in Beijing (minus the accent) but the characters for the language are radically different, to the point where someone knowing simplified Chinese is essentially illiterate in Taipei and vice versa.

I wouldn't say it's quite that bad. The simplified characters are a lot older than the CCP and are often used in handwriting all over the Sinosphere. The traditional characters are still sometimes used in West Taiwan for things like shop signs.

> sometimes used in West Taiwan

LOL. I was confused and thought you meant the Western part of Taiwan, which made no sense. But I get your joke now: West Taiwan = mainland China.

Moreover, I doubt that the use of Mandarin was widespread in Taiwan before 1949 when Kuomintang occupied Taiwan.

Before that, most people from Taiwan were either natives, who spoke an Austronesian language, or Chinese immigrants who had come during the previous 4 centuries from Fujian, who spoke a Hokkien dialect very different from Mandarin.

Yeah if you want to shut down a conversation in Taipei, or suddenly run into "oh no I don't understand your English," bring up the treatment of the native Taiwanese.

To be fair to the ROC, the Japanese colonial era was FAR worse to them than anything that happened post 1949, but still.

many would say the white terror was far worse then the japanese

That's the dilemma with the CCP. They are a murderous regime but they also made China into a powerful centralised state that can meet as equals with any Western country. They've always been the real nationalists.

China has been a unified empire before Europeans traded seashells with each other (I'm exaggerating here a bit). It is about 10 times older than the United States or Russia in its current post-mongolian iteration.

China being weak was unusual in the history of civilizations.

While I am firmly in the western camp, not recognizing reality is foolish.

Exaggerating a lot. The first unified empire (Qin dynasty) is comparable to Alexander the Great's empire and didn't last much longer.

China being weak is also remarkably common -- but there often wasn't a strong enough nearby power to exploit the situation.

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