China is spending billions on soft power • Hacker News Board

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#31

Post by jonnathanson » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:36 PM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #5

I wonder how much Japan spends on that front, or if it's even official state policy to make the world love it.

Cultural promotion isn't a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. I'd guess that most countries with the cash to spend will spend at least something on promoting and sponsoring cultural awareness abroad. Or their tourism bureaus will advertise in target markets. The crucial difference with China is the magnitude of the investment. It rises to the level of strategically significant state priority.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#32

Post by paganel » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:36 PM UTC

amgin3 wrote: post #25

If they really want people to like them, they really need to teach their citizens how to behave before they travel, or prevent them from traveling altogether. Maybe force them to take a mandatory etiquette class or something.

The same goes for the English youth who get wasted in different Southern European countries. The only two times when I got verbally harassed on the street while I was minding my own business (I'm talking as an adult) happened on a Greek island during the summer months, on both cases the culprits were English guys in their late-teens, early-20s we were drunk out of their minds.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#33

Post by elefanten » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #21

molikto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.quora.com/Is-China-colonizing-Asia-and-Africa/an...

Case in point... that read like propaganda to me.

Yes. Glance through the author's other articles and a very clear pattern emerges.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#34

Post by m-j-fox » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

Blahah wrote: post #6

Paywalled article, so hope this is relevant. Here in Kenya, infrastructure investment by the Kenyan government is very poor. Whatever money gets theoretically assigned to things like building and maintenance of roads and the power and water grids usually goes missing at various stages until the final project, if implemented at all, is shoddy. Enter China, who have been directly funding infrastructure here. They are m…

Right-click (or long-press) -> open in incognito tab.

My muggle wife taught me this trick.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#35

Post by tehabe » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #30

tehabe wrote: post #28

It would be cheaper to open up the country, introduce a democratic system and actual human rights, and abolish the death penality. Make peace with Tibet, agree with Taiwan on a good neighborhood. Support a democratic change also in North Korea. These would actually make China a country I could support, but currently: no, thank you.

Are you talking about the United States here ?

The US could also finally get rid of the death penalty, but it is still a democracy, with a working court system. Can change faster than you think but maybe, just maybe, it won't.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#36

Post by foldr » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

david-given wrote: post #15

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Smart move, the path is wide open for China. The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed. I might start learning Mandarin, someday.

I've heard it's a pretty straightforward language --- every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ * ]; and that the grammar is supposed to be really straightforward, at least for English speakers, with no inflection, SVO sentence order, limited tenses, and sentences made from gluing words together. Unfortunately every written tutorial I've found seems heavily focused around…

>every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[

This is an artifact of the writing system. Mandarin Chinese has multisyllabic words in exactly the same way that e.g. English does.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3330

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#37

Post by mentallymeta » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

tehabe wrote: post #35

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the United States here ?

The US could also finally get rid of the death penalty, but it is still a democracy, with a working court system. Can change faster than you think but maybe, just maybe, it won't.

>but it is still a democracy

That can be argued: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#38

Post by wordpressdev » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:51 PM UTC

Blahah wrote: post #6

Paywalled article, so hope this is relevant. Here in Kenya, infrastructure investment by the Kenyan government is very poor. Whatever money gets theoretically assigned to things like building and maintenance of roads and the power and water grids usually goes missing at various stages until the final project, if implemented at all, is shoddy. Enter China, who have been directly funding infrastructure here. They are m…

This is how China is penetrating in most of the developing world, be it Africa or Asia. Consider the recent, and on-going, example of the CPEC in Pakistan.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#39

Post by Animats » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:51 PM UTC

There's a soft power war going on in Asia. Korea has a major effort to make K-pop a major cultural influence. Korean drama has become an export. In response, Japan has the Cool Japan Fund [1], funded by the Government and some of the big banks. They now run the largest anime translation operation, and a large anime site, "daisuki.net".

(Somebody should propose to the Cool Japan Fund that they do something to make Japanese technology more visible in Silicon Valley. Everybody here thinks Shentzen, not Tsukuba.)

[1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#40

Post by nneonneo » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

david-given wrote: post #15

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Smart move, the path is wide open for China. The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed. I might start learning Mandarin, someday.

I've heard it's a pretty straightforward language --- every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ * ]; and that the grammar is supposed to be really straightforward, at least for English speakers, with no inflection, SVO sentence order, limited tenses, and sentences made from gluing words together. Unfortunately every written tutorial I've found seems heavily focused around…

I'm not a beginning learner - I grew up in a Chinese household with weekly lessons from a young age. However, this is still a far cry from real, immersive learning, and I've recently recommitted to learning the language more fully.

If you don't mind being thoroughly unable to read or write the language, you can ignore the ideograms. I've found that spoken Chinese and written Chinese differ quite significantly anyway in grammatical convention, word choice, and concision, so it kind of feels like learning two separate languages with overlapping vocabulary sometimes. Of course, you'll probably still want to learn _some_ ideograms so you can navigate around, but luckily English translations are widely displayed in China nowadays.

Spoken Chinese is really only challenging because of the tones; the rest is vocabulary and a _small_ amount of grammar. Written Chinese is challenging because of the need to recognize thousands of characters, and the general concision of the written language.

If you're going to focus on spoken language, you'll have to get good at the tones - there's no way around that. I lucked out by hearing Chinese [Mandarin] spoken consistently from a young age, but this will be a big challenge for people who only speak English (or any number of other Western European languages).