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Comment by shuzchen | Hacker News Reader

Here's another theory (not saying yours isn't possibly right): the Chinese government has an agenda involving more and more people studying Chinese language, culture, and traditions. I'm not insinuating any malicious intent here; as any sensible country would they want to promote trade with other nations, and trade goes a lot smoothly if the other party speaks your language/knows your culture/has a connection.

One manifestation of this agenda is the Confucius Institutes that have spawned hundreds of branches around the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute). They're pretty nice organizations: they run programs, give funding for projects, give scholarships (heck, my web development job during college was paid partly through the local CI). All in all promote Chinese language/culture, though all pretty much funded by the PRC.

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One advantage of this policy for foreigners is that it's remarkably easy to get into the best Chinese universities (even Tsinghua) compared to the effort the average chinese student has to expend to achieve the same goal.

Source: a visiting professor from China

There's no shortage of Chinese overseas students at Western universities, many of which have a strong financial incentive to accept more overseas students (they can usually charge higher fees) even if their ability to read and write English lags behind the average European student.

The resulting cultural cross-pollination is usually likely to be a good thing...

It makes sense. They have dominated the culinary world by making their food ubiquitous! Now they want to dominate the philosophical world. The fiends. I knew it! Palpatine's behind it all.

Despite the cynical nature of that assertion, the basic argument holds true. The Chinese had several thousand years of practice at assimilating (as in Borg-assimilation) of foreign culture, and they did it by standardizing on language and culture.

Even today, if you go China or Taiwan and you start asking about how to say things in Chinese, people start treating you as a candidate for a civilized person, rather than a foreign barbarian.

Having said that, the cynicism obscures a deeper truth. The core teachings of all religions are essentially the same, and for the people who got deep enough to do that, they know that language and culture are "local flavor". They are genuinely trying to help people get in touch with themselves, regardless of age, race, sex, culture, religious affiliations, political philosophy, caste, likes and dislikes, and the wrongs you have done or have been done to you in the past. None of those things are who you are.

If these activities are funded by Chinese government, I would suggest you make good use of them. The ancient China (around 600BC-200BC) is the golden age of Chinese culture. If you can learn from Rome people, you will benefit from China history and philosophers.

25 years ago you would have written the above, but with simply replacing Chinese with Japanese. Lets fast forward to now and see how that worked out.

Nope, still speaking English.

Huh? If he had said "everyone should learn Chinese because it is going to be the most important language," then your response would make sense; as it is, it just sounds like a canned reassurance. Where in his comment does he even say that people should learn Chinese, let alone that they should stop speaking English?

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