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China is spending billions on soft power

economist.com

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Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#101

Post by Blahah »

m-j-fox wrote: post #34
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.

Awesome, that worked! Thanks to you and your wife :)

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#102

Post by everybodyknows »

CossieRay wrote: post #95
leesalminen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you characterize what's happening in Africa with regards to China? Am genuinely curious.

This is highly anecdotal and based on personal (and professional) experience here in Kenya. Though the Chinese have been present in the country for a while, their signature project was the Thika Superhighway (2009-2012). This captured the imagination of everyone from citizens to the government. Since then, virtually all the major infrastructure projects have been undertaken by Chinese contractors that have set camp i…

Those 'cheap' loans -- how are they secured? Could a percentage of toll revenues be involved?

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#103

Post by Blahah »

prodmerc wrote: post #27
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…

> built using modern techniques and quality materials. Uh, I would double check that, they've been building bridges, malls and apartments in Eastern Europe and the quality was found to be subpar even by local standards (not to mention EU)...

OK yeah so I haven't closely inspected them, but compared to the way roads built by the Kenyan government are made, these ones are high quality.

For example I've seen a road being laid between Nairobi and a nearby town since last June. The original road made by the county council only had a few centimetres of tarmac rolled over the bare dirt (the money for the proper materials all went missing). It disintegrated pretty quickly and led to a horrific cratered road that was impassable to all but the hardiest of vehicles - much worse than the original dirt track.

The new road was dug deep, hardcore laid, months of surveying, measuring, marking out, then several layers of different materials laid over the hardcore adding up to a couple of feet of solid road, with a beautifully smooth finish. I'm not qualified to say whether it meets international standards but it's a lot better than what was being built before.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#104

Post by wodenokoto »

gommm wrote: post #19
ajross wrote: post #7

It's a digression (because honestly the fact that China markets itself is not hugely notable, nor "bad" or "good" no matter how effective or ineffective it might be), but: Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like th…

There was also the anti-Japanese riots in China in 2012. I was in Shanghai at the time and a lot of my Japanese friends living there were very worried. Some of them went back to Japan for a few weeks to wait for things to calm down... And yes the LDP does not help things with their racist nationalist discourse. They tend to use foreigners as a scapegoat responsible for all problems Japan has... (Abe Shinzo might not…

Just to add to this, the anti-Japanese riots in China were a really big deal:

The Japanese Embassy advised Japanese people in Nanjing to stay in door.

Japanese clothing store "Uniqlo" temporarily closed all stores, and covered store windows with giant Chinese flags and removed/hid other visible branding for fear of rioters razing the stores.

Some stores around Nanjing would even give you a discount if you yelled "I hate Japan"

It was and unbelievable situation.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#105

Post by david-given »

foldr wrote: post #87
nneonneo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see. I was confused because you linked to a LanguageLog article specifically about polysyllabic characters . Yes, indeed, "compound words" as mentioned by the GP post are just plain words that are composed of multiple characters.

Yes, I should have explained that I was just referring to the examples of multisyllabic words at the beginning of the post, sorry.

I don't really follow here. One of the examples of a multisyllabic word given is fēijī, 飛機, 'aeroplane'. But this breaks down into 'fly machine', which is a classic example of a compound word.

Later on it talks about 'library', túshūguǎn, or 'picture book museum' (according to the dictionary I just found). Again a compound word, and one which raises fascinating questions about whether they had museums before they had libraries. The article says that it can be written as a single character, 圕, or as multiple characters, 图书馆, but surely that's just an artifact of the writing scheme?

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#106

Post by david-given »

nneonneo wrote: post #40
david-given wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does such a thing as a completely pinyin tutorial exist everywhere? I am quite happy (or would be, if I had the time for this to be more than a theoretical exercise) with ignoring the ideograms completely.

...when I was working in Beijing, with 45 minute tedious taxi journeys to and from work, I amused myself by trying to learn enough ideograms to puzzle out street signs. The only one I can remember now is 门, mén, which is 'gate'. Beijing had quite a lot.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#107

Post by krapp »

Axsuul wrote: post #56
ajross wrote: post #7

It's a digression (because honestly the fact that China markets itself is not hugely notable, nor "bad" or "good" no matter how effective or ineffective it might be), but: Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like th…

The resentment is quite reciprocal as well. Almost every Chinese mainlander shows resentment toward Japan (and Korea) to the extent that they don't even buy their products.

Chinese people going to Japan in droves to buy their products is enough of a thing that it has its own word (bakugai[0].)

"Almost every Chinese mainlander" is, what, almost a billion people? I doubt that any statement describing what most Chinese think or believe is likely to be very true.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/bakugai/

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#108

Post by dave_sullivan »

kristianc wrote: post #74
dave_sullivan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boo. False equivalency. Can we acknowledge that this is the favored argument by authoritarian propaganda machines and it's a baseless distraction? It has no place here. More: http://www.npr.org/2017/03/17/520435073/trump-embraces-one-o...

The article explicitly cites Nye and how American concept of soft power is being adopted by authoritarian regimes.

Huh? Not sure how that's relevant to you trying to use a garbage argument in response to very valid criticisms of modern China. Everything PP said was accurate, US doesn't come close by comparison, your observation is manipulatively off base.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#109

Post by foldr »

david-given wrote: post #105
foldr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I should have explained that I was just referring to the examples of multisyllabic words at the beginning of the post, sorry.

I don't really follow here. One of the examples of a multisyllabic word given is fēijī, 飛機, 'aeroplane'. But this breaks down into 'fly machine', which is a classic example of a compound word. Later on it talks about 'library', túshūguǎn, or 'picture book museum' (according to the dictionary I just found). Again a compound word, and one which raises fascinating questions about whether they had museums before they had…

The meaning of the compound words isn't predictable in general -- a library is not in fact a picture book museum. And remember that many multisyllabic words in English are composed of morphemes with a distinct meaning, with varying levels of compositionality. E.g. we would not say that "airport" is two words just because its meaning has something vaguely to do with the meanings of "air" and "port", or that "return" is two words because it can be split into "re" and "turn" (again with each component contributing some element of its usual meaning). But of course, you can imagine a parallel universe where the orthographic conventions of English are such that we write "air-port" and "re-turn", and such combinations are referred to as "compound words".

As far as I can see I'm not saying anything controversial here. As the article I liked to earlier points out, there are at most a few thousand distinct syllables in Mandarin Chinese, and it would be absurd to suggest that Chinese is limited to a vocabulary of a few thousand words.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#110

Post by dilemma »

product50 wrote: post #62
yomly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a look at America: They spy on you, regardless of if you live in the country or not, committing global espionage[0][1] They do not observe human rights when imprisoning you [2][3] They are happy to bomb civilians using automated robots in the name of freedom and enlisting you to their brand of freedom[4] They are happy to arm terrorists then assassinate them when they are no longer relevant to their cause[…

At least there are articles/opinions written down for what is happening in US which you can quote. For China, in many cases, you can't even do that given press/govt restrictions. Also, to say that China has better human rights record vs. US is almost blasphemy. Why even quote that? For the last point, what are you trying to say? Democracy doesn't work - lets all most to the communist model!? I know you are trying to…

>At least there are articles/opinions written down for what is happening in US which you can quote. For China, in many cases, you can't even do that given press/govt restrictions.

Which Chinese news publications do you read?

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