Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#51

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

reversengineer wrote: post #18

cepth wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the parent commenter is far off here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic... . Granted, Han Chinese in the modern sense is a bit of a constructed identity ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e312e/is_th... ), but it’s a construction that has held up in China. With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers tha…

>With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters…

Mandarin is 普通话, the common speech, standard Chinese. It is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. The written form of it, which absolutely is also Mandarin is the form of Chinese which took over from Classical Chinese during the Republic of China.

Traditional and Simplified Charcters are only barely relevant to this. The only spoken varieties of Chinese with vernacular literatures are Mandarin and Cantonese. All writing in Chinese is in one or the other. Even in Hong Kong and Macau the overwhelming majority of writing is in Mandarin. It follows Mandarin grammar and vocabulary and can be read without any special difficulty by Mandarin monoglots. Written Cantonese is basically unintelligible to them. It’s used for songs, occasionally subtitling, a very small corpus of fiction and dialogue in court transcripts and scripts. This is orthogonal to the use of Traditional or Simplified characters. You can write any of the dialects of Serbo-Croatian in Latin or Cyrillic characters. That doesn’t make any of them Russian, or German.

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#52

Post by cirrus-clouds » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #43

m3nu wrote: post #3

With China being very homogeneous in terms of race, they never worked through those issues. I don't blame them. My grand parents, who lived in the countryside all their life would react in a similar way. Small anecdote: I attended an English class at a Chinese business university. The teacher (young girl, never left China in her life) told us that everything "French" means "sex/porn/etc", i.e. "french book", "french…

For what it’s worth even non-homogenous countries like the US haven’t solved their racial-related issues either. For a while I had thought that Brazil was as close to color-blind as a economically-developed country can be but after reading and learning more about their internal politics and especially after their latest presidential elections it seems that I was wrong.

"For what it’s worth even non-homogenous countries like the US haven’t solved their racial-related issues either."

Problems with racism are global.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) recently published a survey (Nov 2018) that examines the experiences of almost 6,000 people of African descent in 12 EU Member States.

The report includes survey results from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.

The FRA state:

"While the survey results paint a dire picture of reality on the ground, they can serve as an important resource for policymakers committed to promoting the full inclusion of people of African descent in the EU."

Summary of weighted results across all surveyed countries (taken from the report): https://imgur.com/a/gcHR5dk

Report: Being Black in the EU

https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/eumidis-ii-being-b...

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#53

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 12:45 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #32

jmknoll wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations. Si…

The situation is somewhat comparable to English and French, where a significant shared vocabulary with identical orthography allows making educated guesses. That's not enough for fluent understanding, since many words that are common in one language only appear as rare alternatives to more natural expressions in the other. For example, the Cantonese pronoun 佢 doesn't ever appear in Mandarin texts.

Except the average educated Macanese or Hong Kong person can’t write in Cantonese. They write in something much closer to Standard Mandarin, with its grammar and vocabulary, than Cantonese.

It’s much more similar to the sistuation with Arabic where the various “dialects” are as distinct from each other as the Romance languages, i.e. French, Spanish, Italian etc. but the only written standard is Modern Standard Arabic. Mandarin or something close to it is at least someone’s native tongue. MSA is about as close to Maghrebi or Mashreqi Arabic as Latin is to Portuguese or Romanian.

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#54

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

elgenie wrote: post #35

jmknoll wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations. Si…

Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations. For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire. Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army…

Less than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading.

If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#55

Post by yostrovs » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #46

jxramos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were possibly exaggerating. There really is such an ad. Pretty horrible. I never heard of this news almost 3 years after the fact. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-d...

Focussing on a single Ad in the entire continent of China is a bit weird. This only caused outrage in the US, where political correctnes seems a national political passtime; who can be offended the fastest and most often? Win TV time as a politician! Here is the _exact_ same ad in Italy, but reversed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dntfod-Cbo No one bats an eye. The is a big problem in China regarding racism, mostl…

Not exactly reversed. A clean Chinese guy never comes out of the laundry. One additional note: you will not see a gender reversal for these ads, where a men gets himself a more attractive girl. At least in the West.

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#56

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

stefanfisk wrote: post #27

jmknoll wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations. Si…

Interesting! Is it at all comparable to how Scandinavians can read each other’s languages but most have a hard time understanding the spoken languages?

Much more divergent, less like Danish and Bokmal (Dano-Norwegian) or Swedish than French and Romanian. But Romanians write in French which they can translate on the fly into Romanian as they read though a very different form of Romanian than what people speak. And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels. French is Mandarin, Romanian is Cantonese. None of the other topolects have a standard written form that’s used much.

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#57

Post by yostrovs » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #49

paganel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth even non-homogenous countries like the US haven’t solved their racial-related issues either. For a while I had thought that Brazil was as close to color-blind as a economically-developed country can be but after reading and learning more about their internal politics and especially after their latest presidential elections it seems that I was wrong.

it's always strange to see communities which have the least amount of foreigners being the most xenophobic (East Germany, US Midwest/flyover, Australian Western Territory, large parts of Eastern Europe etc ...). Not saying xenophobia doesn't exist in the other territories, but it seems exposure and mixing can help a lot. EDIT: it seems the places where xenophobia doesn't exist are mere pockets in a vast ocean of bigo…

Funny how you lump the Midwest "flyover" here, the one that elects minorities to Congress, that has giant populations of immigrants from Somalia, middle East, etc, and that doesn't live gated in or secured by a doorman. Maybe your xenophobia for the people of the Midwest arises because you fly over them?

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#58

Post by taneq » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

djtriptych wrote: post #39

someperson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism in China is a big problem, but the laundry advert alone isn't certainty not a big issue and is pretty over blown: being overly political correct around lighthearted comedy. The skin pigment 'melanin' is what causes a black person's skin to be black, and is also the same as in a non-black person's tanned skin. It's a added pigment that the absence of causes light skin. Removal of melanin can happen (through non…

Wow your long history goes all the way back to Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Thanks for enlightening us Professor 26 Year Old.

You tell 'em, Grandpa!

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#59

Post by guroot » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

djtriptych wrote: post #39

someperson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism in China is a big problem, but the laundry advert alone isn't certainty not a big issue and is pretty over blown: being overly political correct around lighthearted comedy. The skin pigment 'melanin' is what causes a black person's skin to be black, and is also the same as in a non-black person's tanned skin. It's a added pigment that the absence of causes light skin. Removal of melanin can happen (through non…

Wow your long history goes all the way back to Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Thanks for enlightening us Professor 26 Year Old.

Interesting that you select only one example from the parent to construct an ad-hominem attack, and conveniently ignore the example that was provided that started in the 70's. Such a sharp rebuttal of parent's thesis is sure to convince many readers.

Re: Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination (2018)

#60

Post by spacehunt » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #51

reversengineer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters…

Mandarin is 普通话, the common speech, standard Chinese. It is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. The written form of it, which absolutely is also Mandarin is the form of Chinese which took over from Classical Chinese during the Republic of China. Traditional and Simplified Charcters are only barely relevant to this. The only spoken varieties…

As a native Hong Konger, I concur this is the most succinct and accurate description of the situation with Cantonese. Thank you!