In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
> The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.
China is terrible at diversity. They don't look like it because they don't have a history of foreign colonialism or slavery like the West. It's not based on greed/hate. But look at how they treat indigenous minorities (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols). Banning minority language instruction, banning religious texts, mass surveillance, etc. They have a very hard time even integrating their own rural Han population (hukou system)!
In the CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength. Historically to them, diversity=fragmentation=weakness (Warlord Era, Century of Humiliation). In contrast, Unity+Homogeneity is real strength. They want everyone moving to the exact same beat. (And maybe they're right, what the fuck do I know about running a population of 1.4B people)
In much of America and Europe especially the large cities you can become a citizen, because that's a legal construct. In China you'll never become Chinese. Look at how Africans were targeted in Guangzhou during the early stages of Covid, regardless of visa status. Evicted from apartments/hotels/restaurants, etc.
They have the hardest permanent residency system in the world. Between 2004 and 2013, they issued only ~7000 green cards total (the US issuing ~1M per year!)
100% agree even as someone who grew up around people speaking mandarin. I still cannot write despite having taken the language in both GCSEs and IB, while also living in the country for 3+ years.
i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
It's not just about language.
There's no common practical path to becoming "Chinese", either in a legal or cultural sense. Save for a few rare exceptions, you cannot move there, join the culture, become a citizen, etc even if you're fluent. The western systems arent perfect but they allow a greater number of people who really want to assimilate do so regardless of background.
You can by marrying a Chineze citizen. It won't make you a citizen, but you can get long term residence permit, and your children will be Chinese citizen.
They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.
Why would anyone want to become a Chinese citizen? How's everyone discussing linguistics while completely ignoring the authoritarian elephant in the room?
Because we hn people are used to reduce the world to a set of technical parameters. I am not intending to blame or shame anyone here, but to take it more broadly, the discussion around Doge showcased many such problems that arise from unawareness about the limits of our approach: context blindness, taking narratives at face value, narrow focus on technicalities, no consideration for ethics etc.
Tech people need to reduce complexity to make it computable, that's our job. Our strong points are the weak points too. Again: no blame or shame. Just wanted to point out we are susceptible in these matters.
How is it that the form of government comes up so often when discussing the decisions of ordinary people?
I would think for most people, you care about whether you can fit economically before you consider something that is unlikely to matter.
Obviously don't go and try to immigrate to China if you are planning to be a political commentator.
But for most people in most places, what will you notice? Are there jobs, how is tax, are the streets clean, are there homeless people, can I see a doctor, is there a lot of paperwork? Will I find friends?
Comparatively few people live under worse authoritarianism than the one in China. Definitely not enough to form a talent pool that would make any dent in whatever China already has. Especially when you factor in education quality.
It's not exactly a linguistics discussion, it's a discussion about attracting talent to live/work somewhere. Im not saying whether it's good or bad on China's part, that's a separate issue. Im saying that the possibility of integration is harder than just learning the language.
I seem to recall that is a problem with Switzerland too; people can be refused citizenship by bureaucracy at the local level. Yet people still flock there (perhaps because of the money).
Switzerland's draw is the money. It's true that a significant proportion of the population is foreign born, but the whole country is smaller than some tier 2 cities in China and many foreigners do not stay longterm. If China paid Swiss-level salaries there would be more people going for sure, but the country is so big that at a relative level I'm not sure if the proportion would change significantly
It’s true that learning Chinese as an adult—especially if you come from an English or other European language background—can be extremely challenging. I have several colleagues who have lived in Beijing for more than a decade, are married to Chinese spouses, and still can barely speak the language, it becomes even more challenging for reading.
This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.
Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
Since everything is essentially opening WebApps via QR codes on your WeChat/AliPay app, it's actually great for tourists.
The apps have a built-in option to do machine translation of the screen to English, which I used when I took a trip to China. In the case where it doesn't translate some part of the UI, I could still use screenshot translation on my phone, so overall it's very easy to get around speaking/reading zero Chinese.
Can you explain how the rise of apps would make things more difficult for those who know little Chinese, as opposed to easier?
> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing
Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.
Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.
> Chinese is too difficult of a language.
> I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
> Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English.
Real voices like this coming from English speakers are always interesting to me as a Japanese speaker, showing how the concept of "learning $foreign_language" to many isn't default expected to be another one of those complimentary bag of lemons. The first thing many Chinese learners among Japanese populace are keen to point out is that the syntax is "practically identical" to English, unlike European languages. Learners of e.g. French or German never make such a point but rather chooses to bring up complicated language quirks that they can't get the knack of. And everyone laments on pronunciations.
Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.
Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.
The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.
Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.
Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).
I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.
I'm sure it used to make sense when words when pronounced differently. Pronunciation changed but not the writing. Which means it doesn't make sense at our point in time.
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
I've learned Japanese and I understand your point completely. I can't say for Chinese but in Japanese there are some words (and even kanji) that you can read even if you see it for the first time–if you get better at reading kanji. Some words just make no sense but that's true even for native speakers–especially for place names.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress.
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is.
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
> I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal (especially regarding exposure).
English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.
There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.
I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood.
Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.
Say what you want about Sapir-Whorf, but it's just the reality that translation of anything to anything is generally gibberish. It's just a fact. The more literal it gets, the less coherent it will be. A complete word-for-word "translation" is just garbage out.
Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)
But you were, sort of, accusing Chinese language as being an illogical and primitive amateur language. That's an extraordinary claim, with such absurd notions as "rote surgery" thrown as a side. It's more likely that you were just confused about what a language is than such claim being valid.
Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is.
The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.
I think you're assuming a lot of nonsense here out of some sort of insecurity or obsession with your pet theory.
Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing.
Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.
It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1].
Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.
Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol.
English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.
It's just that pilots have no capacity left to be fluent in every languages everywhere. You don't avoid ambiguity speaking in the second language in a critical situation, you just incur significant responsiveness plus bandwidth penalty.
There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.
Saphire-Worff is dead; but I think language matters more than we usually assume.
My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.
In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.
Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.
Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.
It has a Root-pattern morphology in which words optimally derive from a set of 3 or 4 consonants.
To some extend those roots can even be grouped into meta roots.
Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.
Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.
China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].
At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?
Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.
Did you just compare Chinese immigration enforcement favorably against "ICE stormtroopers"? Foreigners in China have to tell the police where they live, even if it's just a stay in a hotel, and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes. There isn't a problem of illegal immigration in China because the police are so strict, nobody can get away with it!
I'm just going appreciate the irony someone comparing Chinese civil liberties with relation to internal security forces favorably with the US.
Say what you want about ICE, but the reason they wear masks is that the US citizenry still holds power (explicitly with firearms, implicitly with voting, and legally via the judicial system).
Seems like everyone forgot that before locking down in early 2020,
Beijing was trying to ship the view that healthy people wearing masks is immoral - because HK protesters needed those to protect themselves from persecution. Oh, and umbrellas too, because surveillance cameras :) Really shows you the people in PRC huh?
(And then a U-turn where anyone that doesn't wear a mask [even for participating volleyball matches or flute concerts] is an enemy of the state. And if you are a disabled elderly and lockdown yourself, refusing the state-mandated tests, you are an enemy of the state. And they knock down your apartment doors to gas your cats and dogs.)
I really hope the red necks tearing down the procedural system of justice, as well as the left network hosts that got bedazzeled just after a trip to china know what they're asking for. Beware the wishes you make.
>>and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes
As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.
Concentration camps, work camps and extermination camps are three different things. Concentration camps have already been used by US to house Japanese citizens during WW2 and no one objects to that naming. What ICE is running is exactly this.
> Godwin's law? It seems dismissive of the holocaust to call ICE facilities concentration camps.
Concentration camps have a long history (you can start with the Wikipedia article on the topic). Nazi concentration camps in 30s and 40s, and the holocaust that they are linked to, happened over a relatively short time period in that history that continued even after. So Godwin's law indeed, brought about by yourself.
I don’t know but I and my friends still visit China regularly, but not the US anymore, because we have no clue what’s the expectation there to not be in a jail for weeks. I have quite clear idea what the expectation in China, but not the US. Maybe there is something to it.
China is great for visitors, especially lighter skinned visitors. You probably won’t go to jail in China unless you have a thing for drinking a lot in Chinese bars, even then you will probably be ok as long as you don’t pick any fights.
Illegal immigration really isn’t a thing in China beyond a few North Koreans in Dongbei and a few Laotians in Yunnan. So they just won’t assume you are an illegal immigrant.
I know that China is an authoritarian near-dictatorial country that oppresses minorities and commits cultural genocide. And I am not an American.
That does not seem to be all that related to the original post I was answering to. An average person / citizen / visitor has way less to worry about around (trained) Chinese police than they have to worry about around an (gangster) American ICE agent.
You should also know that China doesn't have as much rule of law as America and indeed average people have a lot to worry about around the police, and generally are very careful not to do things that will get them beaten up. But it happens nontheless - violent assaults on street sellers by police, for instance. In China, people are actually scared of the police because the policemen have so much arbitrary power. They're not strictly and fairly enforcing the law at all.
China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
> As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.
On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.
No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".
> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.
The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.
I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live.
All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
What nonsense. The "rest of the world" understands the message loud and clear: China shows up to do business. America shows up to bomb. It's a pretty reasonable choice. Anyways, people now ant a BYD, not a Chevy - because its a better car.
I can't think of any time in the last 50 years when anyone outside of the US actually wanted a Chevy, aside from a rare person who wanted a Corvette maybe.
The car that's actually been super-popular outside its own national borders for a long time now is the Toyota, not anything from the US. BYD is indeed changing this.
We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.
The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.
I think the corporate/globalist perspective looks at the liquidity of talent as well as cost. Having a native talent pipeline is possible, but it's expensive and takes a long time to create. On top of that, it's not very flexible if an industry suddenly shifts. Re-training is a much more difficult than simply hiring a different set of immigrants. It's important (at least to corporations) because it makes a significant difference for how quickly a company/industry can adapt and evolve to stay competitive in global markets.
Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.
But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
This is not true at all. China’s education system is nationally standardized. Although economic development is uneven with far greater investment concentrated in major cities than inland regions, the structure of education itself is consistent across the country. Schools follow the same national curriculum and use the same core teaching materials.
Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.
Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.
But even if you combine Tier 1 and New Tier 1 Chinese cities alone, their populations are around 200M. That's close to 66% of the US. Besides Tier 2 cities like Xiamen, Hefei, Foshan and Zhuhai are still excellent.
So quantitatively, China’s pool is still very strong.
Those third world provinces have the potential to be improved up to the standard, especially when you have first world provinces to draw talent/knowledge from.
Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient
US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigration... and PRC can push that 6m disproportionately into STEM.
But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.
They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.
If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?
Mandarin is weird, because I don't think it's that hard to speak at a passable level, mostly because the grammar is so simple. Many people are spooked by tones, but I think their importance for simple communication can be a little overstated.
But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.
I learned it in high school and university as European and I can speak decently. China isn't that good of a place for foreigner due to difficulty of getting permanent residency/citizenship. Hong Kong is the exception but the economy is not too hot there now.
I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.
Even if I was fluent in mandarin, China still wouldn't be in my shortlist of countries to move to due to low salaries in engineering, poor working conditions (996), authoritarian government, etc.
>>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.
China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.
It may look that way on the surface, but they are absolutely no better than other ethnicities. The main difference is the culture of pragmatism and the constant strive to better their lives. Education is seen as a path to better opportunities, which becomes a major focus for their youth of all social standing.
Contradicted by the research. You're just repeating misinformation. It doesn't matter if there's also a culture of striving because both things can be true at the same time.
China doesn't want as a prime goal to become world leader. They just want to expand their infrastructure, science, production, everything for their own prosperity. If there is no other competitor left, then world leadership will be a by product. They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal (see military presence, coups and secret diplomatic deals in foreign countries that the US was doing after WWII in order to remain at the top by all means). They don't want (until now) to spread their culture worldwide (see language, movies, video games etc) due to the language difficulty. They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
> They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal
They are just pacifically planning on invading Taiwan at the moment.
They also install secret police stations in foreign countries to chase and pressure Chinese citizens or people of Chinese decent into doing their bidding.
> They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal
Oh hell yes they do. Chinese overfishing is wreaking havoc across the planet [1], not just near Asia, but the reach of Chinese fishing fleets goes as far as Africa and South America. In the case of Africa, this has been one of the contributing causes for people to flee to Europe.
Then you got the stealing. America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level.
And finally, you got artificial subsidies. Solar, batteries, cars - the CCP is engaged in insane pricing wars backed by practically infinite funds. They already managed to "outcompete" most solar production and are on their best way to screw up our automotive industries as well.
> They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].
I haven't found any references to Japan fishing in the Mediterranean, the only thing I could find is illegal fish farms in Croatia that farm fish to be exported to Japan and potentially "launder" illicitly caught Libyan fish [1].
While that is bad, it still is only a case of your typical piece of Balkan corruption - and actually being a Croatian citizen, I can only say one thing to these particular arseholes: jebo vam pas mater - and nowhere near comparable to what China is doing.
you posted an opinion piece by "Director of National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office (NMIO) and Commander, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)" (i.e. State Department mouthpiece) and the other source is from 2022, with airport still operating, (no evidence that it belongs to china), directly refuting your own point.
> America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level
Chinese have actually been investing into infrastructure and helping build Africa out. What are you smoking? Do you need a reminder who ran Transatlantic Slave Trade and what IMF represents? There are no good guys in the lending world. Are you assigning a moral value to loans and repayments now? If someone gives you money they expect interest. Doesn't matter if they're Chinese or American.
P.S. judging from your other comments, you're European, not American, and so at this point of Trump presidency (and listening to Carney's speech), you should realize that "The West" isn't about moral hegemony. This isn't America good, China bad. It's a calculus of power. Trump just laid that bare by showing that might makes right, which is why he's renegotiating our already dominant position, and showing how this hegemony and loan structure was built. The liberal veneer was there as a pretty varnish. The fact that you're still out here pretending like we're the good guys is strange to me, unless you're one of those NAFO guys that are kind of going extinct because US is screwing itself over by hurting its allies.
German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university and get help with their visa application.
> German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university
Is this true? Is there a link to the policy? Anything is possible, but this sounds fishy. German research funding isn't known for either generosity or particularly wide reach.
This, as written, is just an idea. Lots of forward looking statements on how the EU must do this and that and no explicit promise to offer funding to all affected US scientists. Not even many details on the funding. Is it the same funding? Equivalent funding? Some funding (how much? what are the conditions? etc.).
Not claiming that this will not entice anyone over, but it is far, far different from the original claim. Sorry.
Chinas political stance more closely resembles right-wing policies than left leaning ones.
All the xenophobic notions you are talking about china has in spades.
I am not saying China is not doing things right here will lead to your described outcome, what I am saying you conflation with western politics is completely out of this world, and is a excellent example of why the outcome you describe may be a reality for China.
Why do you think right-wing policies are intrinsically tied to anti-science sentiment?
Yes, politically China does look very right-wing with some of their policies (like those trying to push women to have babies), despite the "communism" moniker. However, unlike the US, they are very pro-science and they put their money where their mouth is.
I didn’t say right-wing policies are inherently anti-science. I said your contrast makes no sense. You’re blaming Western decline on xenophobia and far-right politics, but China has strong nationalism, social conservatism, demographic engineering, speech controls, and limited immigration. All things typically associated with the political tendencies you are criticizing.
So which is it?
If nationalism and social conservatism are corrosive to long-term success, then China shouldn’t be your example of strategic competence. If those traits aren’t inherently corrosive, then maybe "far-right politics" isn’t the explanatory variable you think it is.
You can’t simultaneously argue that right-wing xenophobia is sinking the West while praising a country that institutionalizes many of those same tendencies.
If your actual claim is about state capacity and science investment, then say that. But don’t smuggle in partisan framing as the cause of decline and then retreat to "pro-science funding" when the comparison falls apart.
Go back and re-read my comments. I never specifically said that xenophobia was sinking the West. That's something that you said, not me.
The West is sinking due to many causes, and is predictably turning to xenophobia as a distraction. It's a typical far-right playbook: find some minority group to blame all the country's troubles on, instead of looking at the real reasons.
China doesn't need to amp up xenophobia because it just doesn't have a lot of immigrants in its borders in the first place, and it isn't sinking (yet) compared to the West, and seems to be generally outperforming them for now. In fact, they can distract people from the problems caused by their government's bad policies by blaming "the West" instead.
Depends on if the Chinese can get over foreigners messing up the tones all the time.
English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.
That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.
Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.
It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.
I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.
Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.
A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.
> Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
Russian is not more difficult than English and a lot of the satellite states were speaking other Slavic languages.
If you already speak Spanish, it's less difficult to pick up Italian too.
There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).
Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.
The US also did annex large parts of what used to be Mexico in the 19th century, so you don't even technically have so be an immigrant to speak Spanish
Unless you're 126 years old, that excuse doesn't really hold up. Plenty of immigrants came from Italy, Poland, and Russia more recently than your mentioned time, but you don't hear Press 3 for Italian too often.
They didn't have to. But they also shouldn't expect the annexing government or populace to accommodate them.
Their country lost the war, lost the territory, and those that stayed and chose to take American citizenship should've learned English, the (de facto) language of the country they chose to join.
Your comment makes no sense. I think it’s pretty safe to say that China has higher technological momentum than the U.S., and the U.S. has higher technological momentum than the EU. But that’s also the same ordering for xenophobia and far-right leadership: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effemina.... China clearly is the most xenophobic and right wing, followed by the U.S., followed by the EU.
It is kind of crazy that a lot of those moves that are so massively successful is a social media and other actions to specifically destabilize the US. And it was only possible to do BECAUSE we're so open. In China you can't get past the firewall and you can't migrate there without being on watch lists and very easily removed in a way that would make ICE look like an Ice Cream parlor.
I sort of agree with this but also keep in mind that (at least until tiktok) the social media companies doing the destabilization were all entirely home grown. And they actively pursued harmful practices. So rather than blaming outside actors I think we need to confront the fact that what we actually have is an underlying gross political failure directly leading to a lack of effective regulation.
The right moves are state control, long horizon policies and regulations, all things the US willingly throw out in the name of freedom. For all its restrictions on human rights and personal freedom, the Chinese people and government have a mutual understanding. As long as the government better the lives of the people, they will be given free reign to do as they wish. This gives the government a long leash to enact far sighted policies to improve themselves. On the other hand, US politics is based on mistrust and the default assumption that anyone with power will abuse it, culminating in the "small government" rhetoric. Idealistic at best, but entirely crippling in the face of powerful organisations and corporations.
China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU