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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5694 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 33 of 121 17 July 2011 at 3:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I should point out that technological development has two elements - attention to practical details and attention to scientific thinking. China and the nations of East Asia are really good at the first factor but lag far behind in the second. This is the fundamental reason why I believe that China will never converge on the US in terms of per capita wealth. Not without fundamental cultural changes.
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| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5694 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 34 of 121 17 July 2011 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Just to cover the point about education once more. Just look at world universities.
The Shanghai index places China's best university, Peking U, at around 150. It is ranked just below the Oregon Health and Science University and slightly ahead of the Radboud University Nijmegen. They must have some awesome engineers coming out of there. Of course the best ones are being sent abroad for their education. Why is that? Japan only manages to get 5 universities ranked in the top 100 in the Shanghai index. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have no universities ranked in the top 100. http://www.arwu.org/ARWUMethodology2010.jsp Edited by Fiveonefive on 17 July 2011 at 4:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5999 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 35 of 121 17 July 2011 at 4:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
...I think some of the pro-China extreme-extreme-extreme-time-one-hundred optimists of this thread would do themselves a great favor if they read the (banned book) 农民调查, there's an English translation out now: "Will the Boat Sink the Water?" Really, if you just read the first few chapters if you can continue to have this kind of optimism, I would question your sanity. What "middle class"? A nation which still has (quoting from the first chapter) 900,000,000 farmers, a very significant portion of whom are actually worse off than they were in the revolution era. This book got banned for a reason, it is antithetical to the smoke and mirrors the one party wants everyone to see. Why would they feel threatened by such a thing if it were trivial to debunk as "lies"? (It's not.) Edited by parasitius on 17 July 2011 at 4:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5175 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 36 of 121 17 July 2011 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So I went and found a whole bunch of statistics comparing the US and Europe in terms of standard of living and wealth. I strongly disagree with your post, nway. Median income in the US is higher than most European countries. Our poorest decile is low compared to Europe, but I don't know if those numbers include transfer payments. I actually found an interesting article by a Swede comparing Swedish-Americans and Swedes in Sweden at every income decile. I also found some interesting numbers on how the individual EU countries compare to the individual American states.
I don't want to see this thread (d)evolve into a discussion on economics, so I'll private message the links to anyone who is interested. Just send me something. Edited by HenryMW on 17 July 2011 at 4:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 37 of 121 17 July 2011 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I just graduated from the university that ranks number 32 on that list. These types of rankings are a complete joke, nothing more than a product of historical reputation and prestige. Combine this with the fact that many of the highest performers at these Western universities are international students — with the lion's share from the Sinosphere — and this ranking becomes all but meaningless with respect to this discussion. Just take a look at the student body composition of these "elite" Western universities: 
Yes, international students comprise a quarter of each of Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge, and the scientific mecca of the academic Western world — MIT — is fully 30% foreign. Furthermore, this data was from 2008, and American universities have since rapidly been been turning to enrolling even *more* international students in order to make more money. But hey, who can blame 'em, considering the following?: 
I'll ignore the fact that China had a recorded urban population of 665.57 million at the end of 2010, accounting for nearly 50% of the PRC. So let's go ahead and use your figure. *drumroll* 900,000,000 farmers still leaves 400,000,000 urban dwellers. No, these 400 million urbanites are not by all part of the middle class, but if you need proof of the expanding middle class in China: 
And lest one might think there's any gender discrimination in this economic phenomenon... 
....^ Yes, that's J.K. Rowling at the bottom. And as for talks of China "running out of steam"... 
It's important to note that unlike most of the West — with the notable exception of Germany (whose economy has been doing fantastically throughout the recession) — China's economy is actually built upon the solid foundation of actual tangible products, rather than the fluff of the "service industry" that accounts for so much of the British and American economies: 
I've seen a lot of pretty ridiculous claims about the limits of China's economic transformation, but the notion that things have regressed *since* the Great Leap Forward (courtesy of 16.5 to 46 million deaths) reaches a new zenith. I'll just respond to this with two more self-evident charts: 
Hell, let's try a different approach! Why don't we ask citizens of different countries to judge their countries' own economic situations? After all, these are the hard-working folks who actually have first-hand experience with unemployment and inflation. Fortunately for us, the PEW Global Attitudes Project just published its 2011 results a mere three days ago: 
Ok, so that's the current situation. But surely things can only go downhill from here, right?? 
Well, hey, we all know Chinese citizens can be quite patriotic. Maybe they're answering these questions to make China look good. We should consider the actual direct variables of the economic situation... 
Oh, Jesus. Well I guess that settles it, eh? I'll end this with two more charts for some long-term historical context. First, the past: 
And now, the extrapolated future, courtesy of those commies at Goldman Sachs: 
Now, unless you have a crapload of quantitative data to back up your claims, please spare me the empty Eurocentric retorts. Edited by nway on 17 July 2011 at 7:19am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 38 of 121 17 July 2011 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The crux of the argument being made by the China-pessimists seems to be "China can't innovate". But I don't know how they reconcile that with the development patterns we have seen in countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (who even shares the same language and culture as China). First build a strong manufacturing base, then copy and steal technology from more developed countries, then based on that foundation start innovating yourself. If Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan can do it, why on Earth can't China? In fact, China is more or less just following the blueprint provided by these other East Asian countries and on top of that learning from their mistakes. And as anyone who can read a graph now knows thanks to nway's helpful posts, things are going quite swimmingly!
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| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5694 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 39 of 121 17 July 2011 at 7:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have not been innovating themselves. Compared to the west that is.
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| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5694 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 40 of 121 17 July 2011 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm talking about innovation and you respond with a whole bunch of spam about how many electric cars (might) get sold in China and how large their broadband service is going to be.
Of course it's going to be a huge market. But the point I am making is that certain aspects of Chinese culture are always going to prevent China from being the country that invents something like broadband , the electric car, spaceflight, air flight, computers, atomic energy, and so on. They can't even invent the technology to keep the free flow of information suppressed on that broadband you touted... Also, way to ignore the total and utter lack of world class Chinese universities. We all know that secondary school education is not the same as college education. East Asian emphasis on rote memorization will always result in their students scoring higher on math testing. It is not an accident that Chinese high school students have these excellent math scores. It is also not an accident that international companies have huge troubles finding Chinese engineers and scientists who can think for themselves and take intellectual initiatives. Like I said before. A technician is not an engineer. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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