From: New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31expo.html?scp=1&sq=Shanghai%20Expo%202010&st=cse
"Special Report: Shanghai Expo 2010 Turns Spotlight on Nations," by Julie Makinen. NYT summary:
"National pavilions at the world's fair are likely to influence visitors' decisions about vacations, study abroad and business dealings."
May 30, 2010
Shanghai Expo 2010 Turns Spotlight on NationsBy JULIE MAKINEN
HONG KONG — Two years ago, athletes from more than 190 countries came together in Beijing, vying for international acclaim on basketball courts and balance beams at the Summer Olympics. Now, a rematch of sorts is occurring in Shanghai — but this time, the competitors carrying their national flags are the architects and designers of hundreds of pavilions at a 184-day marathon of image and commerce, Expo 2010.
The ultimate winners of this contest will be decided not by referees with stopwatches or judges with scorecards but by the 70 million people — mostly Chinese — who are expected to attend the modern world’s fair before it ends Oct. 31. The impressions they take away are likely to shape such decisions as where they will go on vacation, where they will study abroad, what countries their companies will do business with and even what kinds of food they will eat.
“While the Beijing Olympics gave China the chance to host the world and show the world what China is, at Expo, the Chinese people are the guests and the various nations are playing host, showing China what the world is,” said Urso Chappell, who runs Expomuseum .com, a Web site documenting the history of such events, starting with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
“It’s a great opportunity for countries to dispel old myths or create new ones,” he added. “I doubt the average Chinese person ever thinks much about Luxembourg, for instance, but they have a really playful pavilion, and that’s going to certainly leave a lasting impression on those who see it.”
With a theme of “Better City, Better Life,” the Shanghai Expo is loosely organized around the idea of sustainable development. There are “urban best practices” pavilions showcasing cities like Vancouver, British Columbia, and Hamburg and corporate pavilions from companies like Coca-Cola and Cisco. But the main attractions are the national pavilions, which range from modest to imposing, simple to lavish, representational to abstract.
Some, like Britain’s, are the product of national competitions, significant government outlays and years of planning. Others, like that of the United States, were cobbled together at the last minute and funded by the private sector. Macao’s is shaped like a rabbit. The United Arab Emirates’ entry resembles a sand dune. Japan’s has been nicknamed “purple silkworm island.”
By far the most buzzed-about pavilion among both architects and the public is Britain’s “Seed Cathedral,” designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The structure is a six-story cube pierced by about 60,000 thin, transparent rods that extend from it like porcupine quills and sway in the breeze. During the day, the rods — each 7.5 meters, or 25 feet, long — act like fiber-optic filaments, drawing natural light into the building. At night, they project light from inside the structure outward, making it glow like a spiky marshmallow. Locals have dubbed it “the dandelion.”
Each rod, moreover, contains seeds of different plants collected in the Millennium Seed Bank Project, an international conservation effort of the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Before beating out architects including Zaha Hadid, John McAslan and Marks Barfield in the pavilion design competition, Mr. Heatherwick was perhaps best known for art installations.
The British government is touting his project as “a striking, visual demonstration of the U.K. as a creative and innovative nation.” Or, as Sir Andrew Cahn, director of U.K. Trade and Investment, which promotes Britain abroad, has said, it is an effort to show the Chinese that Britain is about more than “cobblestones and fog.”
At earlier world’s fairs, the key draws were often exotic products from distant lands and gee-whiz inventions like the Ferris wheel and the alternating current system of electricity. In today’s world of globalized trade and rapid communications, some architects say, there is a higher premium on the form of the Expo pavilions.
“All pavilions face a content problem,” said Yung Ho Chang, the architect of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, known as the Dream Cube. “These days, what can you put in a pavilion that will be a real experience, that people can’t find on the Internet? That’s why people are putting so much energy into the architecture, and the ideas.”
Michael Speaks, dean of the University of Kentucky College of Design, said the Expo offered the chance to see exciting projects from several young firms, particularly the pavilions from South Korea, Austria and Denmark.
“There’s a real difference between countries trying to represent what they’ve already done and countries trying to prototype what might be possible,” Mr. Speaks said. “Some choose to make a big square box and show movies about what happens at home. The most successful pavilions are about prototyping new ideas.”
Austria’s entry, designed by the Vienna-based architecture firms SPAN and Zeytinoglu, is a curved structure clad in 10 million porcelain tiles that allude to the long tradition of chinaware exported from China to Europe.
“It’s a coming to fruition of a digital design aesthetic, and a way of fabricating, that’s been emerging in the last six to seven years,” Mr. Speaks said, noting that Vienna had been in the vanguard of the trend. “It’s become easier and easier to create digital files and make a machine directly output those things. The result of that is much more formally organic shapes not using off-the-shelf materials or components.”
South Korea’s entry is by the seven-year-old firm Mass Studies, founded by Minsuk Cho, who studied in Seoul and at Columbia University in New York.
The design assembles the letters from the Korean alphabet into a cubelike structure, thus using signs to create the space. The exterior appears pixelated, with black-and-white alphabet squares alternating with colored ones created by a Korean artist, Ik-Joong Kang, that will be sold off piece by piece when the Expo is over to raise money for charity.
Inside, the exhibition is oriented around an abstract map of a Korean city that expresses the convergence of mountains, water and a dense metropolitan area.
The structure, Mr. Speaks said, is an updating of a discussion launched in the 1970s by the seminal book “Learning From Las Vegas,” co-written by the architect Robert Venturi, which looked at how the signs and images adorning buildings can be more important than the buildings themselves.
“What they’ve done here is reverse that or make an argument of that,” Mr. Speaks said. “Here we have images as form — they’re not representing something, they are the form. And that’s just one of the things going on with this building. It’s more evidence that Seoul is emerging as a design capital.”
Previous world’s fairs have left their architectural marks on their host cities. The Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco all began as attractions at such events before becoming landmarks.
If the Expo were being held anywhere but China, it might not be a very big deal, Mr. Speaks said. But given the state of the global economy, and China’s rising economic might, “every architectural firm, from small to big, wants to be in the game in China,” he said. “This is a way that architects and countries can announce to China what their capabilities are.”
Monday, May 31, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Chinese Language School of Connecticut Elects New Board
Photo caption: Newly elected and outgoing Board members celebrate at a recent luncheon in Greenwich. Pictured, left to right, are top: James Lee, Greenwich, CT, Darwei Kung, Harrison, NY, Joab Tjiungwanara, Stamford CT, Jeffay Chang, Pelham, NY, Thomas Myers, Redding, CT; bottom: Mei Nishiwaki, Scarsdale, Dr. Sue Chang, Orange, Susan Serven, New Canaan, Cynthia Chang Scanlan, Greenwich, CT
The Chinese Language School of Connecticut Elects New Board of Directors
-- Local professionals to help expand school’s success in bringing Chinese to students --
“CLSC is entering its 9th year with a very dynamic, very dedicated Board of Directors, and we are excited to be a part of the school's continued growth,” noted CLSC Co-Chairs, Greenwich resident Cynthia Chang Scanlan, and Stamford resident Joab Tijungwanara.
Riverside, CT, June 1, 2010 – The Chinese Language School of Connecticut (www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org), the fully-accredited, non-profit, Riverside, CT-based provider of Chinese language programs to students, schools and corporations, has elected their new Board of Directors for the upcoming year.
New members of the CLSC Board is Pelham, NY resident, Jeffay Chang, and Harrison, NY resident, Darwei Kung.
Jeffay Chang explained, “I am excited to be part of a growing school and community of families that has developed a way to introduce children to Chinese interactively while providing the tools and resources for parents to support their child’s efforts.”
Darwei Kung explained, “My family speaks English at home. We would like our son to learn Chinese as a second language. My wife and I chose CLSC for the communicative style used for teaching Chinese, since this teaching style best reflects how language is taught in the U.S. educational system."
Greenwich, CT, resident Jim Lee and Scarsdale, NY resident, Mei Nishiwaki, are retiring from their roles as Directors. Jim has been involved with CLSC since its inception, in 2002, and has been a Director since May, 2006. Mei has been a Director since 2009. Both have made tremendous contributions to the growth of the school.
Mei Nishiwaki, although retiring from the CLSC Board of Directors, has generously agreed to serve on the school’s Advisory Committee. She noted, “CLSC’s program is perfect for my family. We are of Asian descent but do not speak Mandarin at home. Through the program's extensive use of technology and pace of delivery, my daughters are able to learn Mandarin in a supportive, engaging and enjoyable way.”
Jim Lee noted, “Looking back on my association with CLSC, I have fond memories of my children, starting at ages 7 and 11, learning Mandarin. The foundation was so good they are still taking classes at Greenwich High School and the University of Michigan. Service on the board was especially rewarding. I had the opportunity to shape curriculum, guide CLSC, and help in fund raising. I will miss my colleagues and friends at CLSC and I am grateful for the opportunity to have been asked to serve.”
CLSC Board of Directors for 2010 / 2011 include:
Cynthia Chang, Greenwich, CT (co-Chair)
Cynthia was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to New York City at the age of six, learning English after Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and received a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked in real estate and banking in New York City. Her husband, Brian Scanlan, founded a software company, and Cynthia joined the company soon after to manage administrative operations and facilities. The company had an initial public offering in 2000 at which time, Cynthia left to concentrate on family and community service in Greenwich, having moved there in 1997. She has been a board member at the YMCA of Greenwich since 2001, serving as the annual campaign chairman, Facilities Committee chair, and currently as Secretary of the Board. She also served as the First Selectman’s representative on the Board of Trustees of the Greenwich Library. Cynthia is also active with her alma mater, chairing the University of Pennsylvania’s Secondary School committee in Greenwich. Cynthia lives in Greenwich with her husband and two children, Kevin, 17, who attends the Brunswick School and Paula, 10, who attends Greenwich Country Day School.
Joab Tjiungwanara, Stamford, CT (co-Chair)
Joab is a Risk Manager with General Electric and has worked extensively in the credit and market risk area at GE Corporate Treasury. He is a graduate of University of Bremen, Germany (Electrical Engineering) and University of Rochester (MBA in Finance). Joab is an overseas Chinese who was born in Indonesia, went to Germany after high school and came to the US for graduate school. He speaks fluent Mandarin, German, English and is conversant in Indonesian.
Dr. Sue Chang, Orange, CT (Secretary)
Sue is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her B.S., followed by her M.D. degree at Michigan State University. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Nephrology at Yale University where she served as a research fellow in the genetics of hypertension. She is in private practice with Metabolism Associates of New Haven, CT.
Jeffay F. Chang, (Director) Pelham, NY
Jeffay serves as the East Coast Trust Strategist for the Goldman Sachs Trust Companies. He was named Executive Vice President with responsibility over national marketing and sales in 2008. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs in May 2004, Jeffay was a Corporate Vice President in the Private Wealth Services Group of UBS Financial Services where he provided counseling and planning services for ultra high net worth clients in such areas as wealth transfer and philanthropic planning, stock option exercise planning, and hedging and monetizing concentrated equity positions. Prior to UBS Financial Services, Jeffay was a Financial Planner in the Financial Planning Group of US Trust and before that was a Trust Officer in the Trust Settlement Department of US Trust. Jeffay obtained his B.A. from Brandeis University and J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. He is a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, New York State Bar Association, New York Bankers Association, Estate Planning Council of New York City and the Westchester Estate Planning Council.
Darwei Kung, (Director) Harrison, NY
Susan Serven, (Director; CLSC President) New Canaan, CT
Susan has been with CLSC since the school’s founding in May 2002. Susan is a graduate of Pace University (BBA, Marketing) and is pursuing her MBA in Finance and International Business (Fairfield University). She has held positions in global marketing at Lever Bros. Co., and Save the Children Federation, and as Special Events Director for the American Cancer Society.
Susan founded the Chopstix preschool Mandarin program in 1998 so her daughters and other children could learn Chinese; Chopstix proceeds were donated to help fund various non-profit groups working with Chinese orphanage programs. She continued running Chopstix until it joined CLSC in 2003. Susan and her husband Lawrence adopted their daughters Emily in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China in August 1996, and Becky in Gao Ming City, Guangdong Province, in October, 2000. They live in New Canaan, CT
Thomas K. Myers, Jr., (Director), Redding, CT
Tom is the Director of Sales and Marketing for FocusVision Worldwide based in Stamford, CT. A graduate of Bucknell University with a B.A. in Political Science, Tom spent his early career in account service with New York based advertising agencies. During this time he met his Taiwan born wife Katy. Since then Tom has held sales and marketing positions for several international companies. Tom’s interest in Chinese language increased quickly with the birth of his daughter, Emily. “I have always believed a second language to be a useful tool. But a second language with ties to one’s heritage is a gift that should not be missed. My goal is to help CLSC continue its efforts to make learning Chinese as enjoyable and satisfying as possible”.
For information on CLSC’s weekend or weekday language classes, summer programs, private tutoring, corporate services, or any of their other programs, please visit www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org or email them at info@ChineseLanguageSchool.org.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Chinese Language School of Connecticut Registration Opens for Fall 2010
Press Release
For immediate release
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Susan Serven, Chinese Language School of Connecticut
203/918.8085
susan.serven@chineselanguageschool.org
please visit our web site: www.chineselanguageschool.org
photo caption: principal Daisy Chen Laone with students from the Chinese Language School of Connecticut
Chinese Language School of Connecticut Opens Registration for Fall 2010
-- Chinese Dance and Chinese Art Workshops New for 2010/2011 School Year--
RIVERSIDE, CT May 25, 2010 -- The Chinese Language School of Connecticut (www.chineselanguageschool.org) has announced that registration for its Fall 2010 programs is currently open. The school, which teaches Mandarin Chinese as a second language to students ages 18 months and up, uses age appropriate, interactive methods to introduce children to Chinese.
The school welcomes all students, from Beginner levels through Advanced, and offers multimedia, interactive, online support tools to make practice engaging, relevant, and fun for students.
New for 2010 is a Chinese dance class, and Chinese Art Workshops on calligraphy, origami, Chinese bookbinding using traditional rice paper, and much more. For more information, or to register, please visit www.chineselanguageschool.org.
Expanding programsAccording to CLSC’s President, Susan Serven, “We have focused considerable energy and resources on building the quality of our faculty and curriculum during the past eight years since our founding in 2002. The results of this strategy are evidenced by program expansion into various public and private schools, our conducting before and after school programs at more than 20 schools and organizations, the expansion of our private tutoring and small group private classes, and our new corporate program.
Our school consists of families who have no Chinese background, but want their children to learn Chinese and about Chinese culture, adoptive families, who want to have their children maintain language and cultural ties, Chinese-American families who may not speak Chinese at home, but encourage their children to learn, and many families who do speak some Chinese at home, but who want a more interactive, age-appropriate, engaging learning experience for their children.
“We are currently entering our 9th year, and we look forward to continuing to focus on providing students with a high quality educational product that strives to make learning Mandarin and experiencing Chinese culture fun by incorporating traditional language training techniques with interactive supplements, games and other activity based exercises.”
We’re very pleased that our school now consists of about 25% of families from the Westchester area, as well as 70% from Fairfield County, and about 5% from farther away, in upstate Connecticut.
Parent and Harrison, NY resident Darwei Kung, said, “My family speaks English at home. We would like our son to learn Chinese as a second language. My wife and I chose CLSC for the communicative style used for teaching Chinese, since this teaching style best reflects how language is taught in the U.S. educational system."
Why study Chinese at an early age?
Principal Daisy Chen Laoneg explained, “Our approach is unique because we stress interactive usage over rote memorization. Lessons are organized around themes such as family, food and travel so that children can quickly gain useful communication skills. More than 50% of class time is devoted to conversation and activity-based learning to give children ample opportunity to practice communicating in Chinese. We’ve done considerable research to determine which learning methods and interactive, online support materials work best for American students learning Chinese as a second language, and it seems to be working; many parents say their children love doing their Chinese homework!”
Ms. Laone continued, “Generally, younger children acquire a second language better than older children. Early introduction to Chinese exposes each child to a wider variety of its contexts. These contexts foster language proficiency and help develop insights into the nature of the language. With time, each child will gain a deeper understanding and better command of the Chinese language. He / she will ultimately develop a life long interest of Chinese language and culture.
CLSC Advisory Committee Member and Parents Committee Chair Deborah Serianni noted, “We joined the CLSC community 3 years ago. Our son, Aaron (an 8 year old at Rye Country Day School) certainly enjoys the program. Learning the Chinese language is no doubt not easy, but he does not want to quit. He will be promoted to Level 5 next year! He likes the interactive internet program of "Better Chinese" as the core part of the curriculum. He also enjoys the cultural activities and the homework projects, which are challenging and fun. As a family, we have met a lot of great people and good friends."
Many CLSC students have gone on to continue their Chinese at area high schools. Norwalk resident and parent of former student Alexa Williams, Janet Williams said, “We’ve been with CLSC for five years and my daughter Alexa loved it. Alexa graduated Roton Middle School [in Norwalk] and will be taking Chinese next year at Brien McMahon].” Alexa noted, “Learning Chinese is a good experience for any nationality and any age group. I hope to use Chinese when I become an adult and get a job."
The CLSC faculty consists of experienced, native-speaking, Chinese instructors who are graduates of universities in the U.S. and China. CLSC teaches Mandarin Chinese using effective, proven methods, allowing the efficient acquisition of practical communication skills.
For information on the Chinese Language School of Connecticut’s weekday and weekend language programs, including their Before and After School programs, special workshops. lectures, events, private tutoring and their corporate language program, please visit www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
NY Times book review: When China Rules the World (and the importance of learning Mandarin...)
Will China's growing global clout increase the need for all of us to learn Mandarin?
Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.
WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD
The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
By Martin Jacques
Illustrated. 550 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95
Related
Excerpt: ‘When China Rules the World’ (December 4, 2009)
Times Topics: China
Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘When China Rules the World’ (December 4, 2009)China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.
In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.
This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.
Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”
Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power.
China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.
Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.
The enduring loyalty of its enormous diaspora and even the global popularity of Chinese food testify to the appeal of Chinese culture abroad. But the pervasiveness of a country’s culture depends only partly on its appeal. It also depends on strength, which China is acquiring, and scale, which it already has.
Skip to next paragraph
WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD
The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
By Martin Jacques
Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia. In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.
China has pioneered its own style of economic production. If the Japanese became known for obsessive quality and just-in-time inventory controls, China has developed a reputation for speed and flexibility. Its companies mix and match suppliers; buy, copy or steal ideas; and churn out products just good enough and just cheap enough to sell. Many multinationals have trouble competing, even when they use Chinese labor.
China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.
As China finds its own path economically, it is unlikely to look west for political advice, Jacques suggests. Its ruling Communist Party, having largely set aside its socialist ideology, has become a modern version of an imperial dynasty. China’s Communist leaders have flirted with reviving Confucianist thought, positioning themselves as protectors of Chinese unity, the state’s traditional role. Many Chinese see that mission as sacred. Jacques argues, credibly, that most Chinese will back their leaders, with or without democratic reforms, as long as the country keeps getting stronger.
So how might the world work under Pax Sinica? Jacques ventures some fascinating guesses: The United States often promotes democracy within nations. China insists on democracy among nations. If the power of countries in the international arena were determined by how many people they represent, China would have more clout than all the Western democracies combined.
Jacques has lived in China, and he writes about his travels there. But it seems clear that he has developed his views from reading books and newspapers (a voluminous quantity of them, to be sure) rather than through any immediate experiences in China or by getting to know its people.
Possibly as a result, he dwells little on the everyday turmoil of Chinese life — the mélange of cultures in its cities, the violent uprisings of its peasants, the factional struggles in its leadership, the pollution in the air, the gridlock on the streets, the bubbly economy and the corrupt bureaucracy. Others have and will be more successful at conveying the human struggle for China’s future.
But the fact that China looks messier in practice than in books does not invalidate Jacques’s thesis. He has written a work of considerable erudition, with provocative and often counterintuitive speculations about one of the most important questions facing the world today. And he could hardly have known, when he set out to write it, that events would so accelerate the trends he was analyzing.
Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.
WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD
The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
By Martin Jacques
Illustrated. 550 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95
Related
Excerpt: ‘When China Rules the World’ (December 4, 2009)
Times Topics: China
Michiko Kakutani’s Review of ‘When China Rules the World’ (December 4, 2009)China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.
In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.
This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.
Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”
Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power.
China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.
Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.
The enduring loyalty of its enormous diaspora and even the global popularity of Chinese food testify to the appeal of Chinese culture abroad. But the pervasiveness of a country’s culture depends only partly on its appeal. It also depends on strength, which China is acquiring, and scale, which it already has.
Skip to next paragraph
WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD
The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
By Martin Jacques
Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia. In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.
China has pioneered its own style of economic production. If the Japanese became known for obsessive quality and just-in-time inventory controls, China has developed a reputation for speed and flexibility. Its companies mix and match suppliers; buy, copy or steal ideas; and churn out products just good enough and just cheap enough to sell. Many multinationals have trouble competing, even when they use Chinese labor.
China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.
As China finds its own path economically, it is unlikely to look west for political advice, Jacques suggests. Its ruling Communist Party, having largely set aside its socialist ideology, has become a modern version of an imperial dynasty. China’s Communist leaders have flirted with reviving Confucianist thought, positioning themselves as protectors of Chinese unity, the state’s traditional role. Many Chinese see that mission as sacred. Jacques argues, credibly, that most Chinese will back their leaders, with or without democratic reforms, as long as the country keeps getting stronger.
So how might the world work under Pax Sinica? Jacques ventures some fascinating guesses: The United States often promotes democracy within nations. China insists on democracy among nations. If the power of countries in the international arena were determined by how many people they represent, China would have more clout than all the Western democracies combined.
Jacques has lived in China, and he writes about his travels there. But it seems clear that he has developed his views from reading books and newspapers (a voluminous quantity of them, to be sure) rather than through any immediate experiences in China or by getting to know its people.
Possibly as a result, he dwells little on the everyday turmoil of Chinese life — the mélange of cultures in its cities, the violent uprisings of its peasants, the factional struggles in its leadership, the pollution in the air, the gridlock on the streets, the bubbly economy and the corrupt bureaucracy. Others have and will be more successful at conveying the human struggle for China’s future.
But the fact that China looks messier in practice than in books does not invalidate Jacques’s thesis. He has written a work of considerable erudition, with provocative and often counterintuitive speculations about one of the most important questions facing the world today. And he could hardly have known, when he set out to write it, that events would so accelerate the trends he was analyzing.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Extraordinary Chinese Restaurant
This is a restaurant, built high into a cliff somewhere in China where, if you can actually make it there, the food is free.
Monday, May 3, 2010
NY Times: Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish
Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times
Shanghai has been trying to harness English translations that sometimes wander, like “cash recyling machine.” More Photos »
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: May 2, 2010
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For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Multimedia
Slide Show
A Sampling of ChinglishThose who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation in Shanghai who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times
Shanghai has been trying to harness English translations that sometimes wander, like “cash recyling machine.” More Photos »
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: May 2, 2010
Sign in to Recommend
Sign In to E-Mail
For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Multimedia
Slide Show
A Sampling of ChinglishThose who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation in Shanghai who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
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