The Iceland volcano halted flights across Europe and the
Atlantic, a humble reminder that our
lives are still at the pleasure of nature. Whether it’s people, cargo or digital bits, our planet gets
smaller by the day. Check out this stunning video of global air traffic
patterns, and note the seemingly lost continent of Africa.
We would be wise to do away with German and French altogether and begin a massive campaign to teach our young Mandarin – giving them and America the advantage it will reap well into the future. Yet it’s the Chinese taking the initiative.
Excerpts from a New York Times piece, January 21, 2010, written by Sam Dillon.
Foreign Languages Fade in Class — Except Chinese
WASHINGTON — Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.
But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.
Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world — and paying part of their salaries.
No one keeps an exact count, but rough calculations based on the government’s survey suggest that perhaps 1,600 American public and private schools are teaching Chinese, up from 300 or so a decade ago. And the numbers are growing exponentially.
Among America’s approximately 27,500 middle and high schools offering at least one foreign language, the proportion offering Chinese rose to 4 percent, from 1 percent, from 1997 to 2008.
“It’s really changing the language education landscape of this country,” said Nancy C. Rhodes, a director at the center and co-author of the survey.
“We’ve all been surprised that in such a short time Chinese would grow to surpass A.P. German,” Mr. Packer said.
A decade ago, most of the schools with Chinese programs were on the East and West Coasts. But in recent years, many schools have started Chinese programs in heartland states, including Ohio and Illinois in the Midwest, Texas and Georgia in the South, and Colorado and Utah in the Rocky Mountain West.
America has had the study of a foreign language grow before, only to see the bubble burst. Many schools began teaching Japanese in the 1980s, after Japan emerged as an economic rival. But thousands have dropped the language, the survey found.
Japanese is not the only language that has declined. Thousands of schools that offered French, German or Russian have stopped teaching those languages, too, the survey found.
Experts said several factors were fueling the surge in Chinese. Parents, students and educators recognize China’s emergence as an important country and believe that fluency in its language can open opportunities.
“Chinese is really taking root,” she said. Starting this fall, Jackson High will begin phasing out its German program, she said.
“As great as the economy's immediate challenges are and have been, our country’s economic problems are also deeper and more long-standing. For nearly a decade, typical American families had seen their incomes stagnate instead of rising steadily as they had for generations. Much of the economic growth that we had experienced in the past decade was fueled by consumers and the Government running up large debts, aided by a financial system better at making short-term profits than managing long-term risks. And as a country, we were failing to invest in education, new energy technologies, and basic research and development.” http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/tg589.htm
Indeed, the financial sector that has been very entrepreneurial in the creation, sales and distribution of complex financial instruments in line with thirty years of “Washington Consensus” rhetoric and strong arming at the emerging markets – global monetization and open markets. There have been benefits and wealth creation. But on closer examination one must wonder where innovation ends and greed begins. Just take a look at corporate profits from the finance sector compared to all other parts of the American economy:
Treasure Secretary’s assessment of a “financial system better at making short-term profits than managing long-term risks” is unfortunately not a new insight.
Every since the titans of Wall Street in the 1980s became rock stars, and the barriers between commercial and investment banking were lifted in the 1990s, and hoards of talented quants headed to banking rather than MIT and science careers, more than any other point in American history, the engine of American innovation has lionized the rise of what Robert Reich aptly calls “paper entrepreneurs,” intangible, financial products and services which are big on gimmicks and light on substance.
The most striking thing about former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s prescient opinion piece below is that it was written in 1980 – yet its insights are just as relevant today thirty years on.
“The paper entrepreneurs are winning out over the product entrepreneurs.
Paper entrepreneurs — trained in law, finance, accountancy — manipulate complex systems of rules and numbers. They innovate by using the systems in novel ways: establishing joint ventures, consortiums, holding companies, mutual funds; finding companies to acquire, “white knights” to be acquired by, commodity futures to invest in, tax shelters to hide in; engaging in proxy fights, tender offers, antitrust suits, stock splits, spin-offs, divestitures; buying and selling notes, bonds, convertible debentures, sinking-fund debentures; obtaining government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, contracts, licenses, quotas, price supports, bailouts; going private, going public, going bankrupt.
Product entrepreneurs — engineers, inventors, production managers, marketers, owners of small businesses — produce goods and services people want. They innovate by creating better products at less cost.
Our economic system needs both. Paper entrepreneurs ensure that capital is allocated efficiently among product entrepreneurs. But paper entrepreneurs do not directly enlarge the economic pie. They only arrange and divide the slices. They provide nothing of tangible use. For an economy to maintain its health, entrepreneurial rewards should flow primarily to product, not paper.
Yet paper entrepreneurialism is on the rise. It dominates the leadership of our largest corporations. It guides government departments, legislatures, agencies, public utilities. It stimulates platoons of lawyers and financiers.
It preoccupies some of our best minds, attracts some of our most talented graduates, embodies some of our most creative and original thinking, spurs some of our most energetic wheeling and dealing. Paper entrepreneurialism also promises the best financial rewards, the highest social status.
The ratio of paper entrepreneurialism to product entrepreneurialism in our economy — measured by total earnings flowing to each, or by the among of news in business journals and newspapers typically devoted to each — is about 2 to 1.
Why? Our economic system has become so complex and interdependent that capital must be allocated according to symbols of productivity rather than according to productivity itself. These symbolic rules and numbers lend themselves to profitable manipulation far more readily than do the underlying processes of production.
It takes time and effort to improve product quality, exploit manufacturing efficiencies, develop distribution and sales networks. But through strategic use of accounting conventions, tax rules, stock and commodity exchanges, exchange rates, government largesse, and litigation, enormous profits are possible with relatively little effort.
When paper entrepreneurs look for solutions to America’s declining productivity and international competitiveness, they come up with paper remedies to stimulate large-scale capital investment: accelerated depreciation, tax credits, government subsidies, relaxation of antitrust laws.
Product entrepreneurs focus on techniques for improving output: better quality controls, improved labor-management relations, more effective incentives for managers and employees, more aggressive marketing and sales.
If we are to increase the economic pie, we will need to redress the balance of entrepreneurial effort. Which strategies will stimulate more paper, and which more product?”
The Chinese are reticent and reserved. The advent guard art
districts of Beijing and Shanghai are populated by Chinese intellectuals and
artists, and the Propaganda Department doesn’t much care what they paint. So
it’s turned out to be an illuminating window into the Chinese soul. More in Shanghai.
Youthful artists push boundaries more than you’d think Maybe
because they can’t elsewhere. This is an artist in Xi’an being interviewed by a
western journalist: “There is nothing anymore in China that defines orthodoxy,
in morality or anything else, so people just do what they want. Because life
here in China is brutal. So art is just a mirror of life. Life and death, love
and hate, sex and violence. People in other countries don’t have the pressure
to survive that Chinese people have.”
dejection, desperation, exhaustion
sexual repressions, oppressed emotions, fermenting desire if not expressed might destroy the Chinese soul but Beijing will do anything to repress the will of the people
Madison Avenue has arrived in China and with it an ambivalence as it rejects its past and embraces a Western capitalistic future
A Berkeley undergrad turned me on to a website that provides
English translations from (uncensored) chat rooms. Very amusing. The Chinese
would never be this blunt to a foreigner. Not these comments about the “Made in
China” ad campaign and the Hollywood movie 2012, which many Chinese are viewing
as racist.
China operates the most sophisticated system of Internet filtering in the world—ISPs, instant messaging, client software, backbone routers and servers, search engine results, banned keywords, URL blocking. 15% are about sex, the rest politics.
Its breathtakingly impressive, Orwellian in scope, and at times terrifying to comprehend.
The Googles of China: www.sohu.com and www.sina.com
Google is apparently fed up, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html?hp
Finishing
writing in the university town of Chiang Mai. So many Westerns I am not
entirely sure I am in Asia.
The Thais bend over backward to please tourist. On Christmas Day many shopkeepers don Santa outfits and hand out gifts to patrons. Of course, they are not Christian. One realizes how profoundly the Western paradigm is the de facto standard of culture and commerce.
Thailand’s
turn. E-commerce operators are seeing 30-50% year-of-year growth, as the middle
class grows and Thais become more comfortable shopping on the Internet. Similar
trends in China but on a smaller scale.Yes, Thais do love shopping.
From my hotel room, I Skype Berkeley, Singapore and Vienna; online banking; portal into my US-based PC; download music; and listen to live broadcasting of the BBC and NPR. One world. Amazing.
The posters are between 1949 and 1976, and illustrate how inward looking and closed China was during most the twenty century. The fervor of the Cold War, the defensive position against Western imperialist, the marketing campaigns behind Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Mandarin translations along the photo where I could.
· New-car emissions standards commensurate with the EU.
· About 25% of Beijing’s buses run on clean-burning compressed or liquefied natural gas, the largest such fleet in the world.
· The Beijing subway system, currently about 125 miles of tunnels and overhead tracks, is undergoing a breakneck expansion that will nearly triple its length in the next five years.
· A strict regimen allowing 4 in 5 cars into Beijing (Los Angeles, anyone?). And the oldest autos are banned all together.
· A cash for clunkers program much larger than in the US
· The city’s four coal-fired power plants — all of them major polluters — have installed state-of-the-art pollution scrubbers.
· Nearly 2,900 gas stations and petroleum storage tanks have been equipped with recycling controls.
· Hundreds of heavily polluting factories have been moved from central Beijing,
Impressive this may be, then I discover that Beijing doesn’t measure the micro particles most damaging to the lungs and it averages its reporting. The U.S. Embassy publishes data from its Beijing building monitor, a favorite website among ex-pats; it tells a different story: http://iphone.bjair.info/. So what to believe? You have to give the central government a lot of credit, all the more given an exploding urban population. Things are better but still not good. Is that not good enough?
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905736,00.html
Revealing perspective as reported by Beijing-censored Chinese media:
“Obama's limited results in part reflect the profound shift in
Sino-U.S. relations and global politics, with China's rapid rise and America's
weakened position, especially in the wake of the financial crisis.”
"It used to be the U.S. could go around and say 'Do this and do that' because they had so much leverage," said Dali Yang, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. "Today, the U.S. can't do that."
“In China, Obama's hosts show no signs of budging”
“President Obama is leaving China without any definable concessions on things such as support for tougher sanctions on Iran or currency exchange rates.”
“When it came to China, President Obama's famous powers of persuasion failed to persuade.”
“it was difficult to find anybody in Beijing who would express any real enthusiasm for Obama's visit. Even at a shop selling Obama souvenirs, the reaction was ho-hum. ‘Obama coming here doesn't have anything to do with us. He's the president of the United States. We're Chinese,’ said Yang Xiuying, a clerk at a Beijing crafts store selling dolls of Obama dressed as Superman.” Met with a Han Chinese mainland manager of a New York listed publicly-traded company today. We lunched at Humble House, near Tiananmen Square, which was not so humble. He and other business managers harp on the rise of individualism, the lose of traditional social grace, the rush to get rich, get ahead, and get positioned. Social moderates and intellectuals are concerned that everything in China is about business and making money.
Like Gen Y back home, the young have grow up during boom years. They’ve been described to me as selfish, insensitive, possessive, ultra-competitive to the point of uncivil. College graduates are also U.S. $300/month to employ!
“Great lack of personal integrity,” said one. “When everyone jumps in front of the line to get off the train, do you let others take advantage of you or participate?” said another.
This is not grandmother’s Marxism. The ad campaigns are as sophisticated and sexy as in the West. It plays into the Chinese aspirational sense.
We have arrived! Behold!
One of the strangest thing about being here is using the Internet. At government regulated internet cafes – no coffee but noodles and soda – the PCs are locked down tight and you must provide a passport.
What’s more strange as a web junkie Westerner are all the blocked sites: social networking and media sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter); any and all blog services; thousands of URLs. Google “Tienanmen Square” and “Dali Lama” and the results come up blank.
“The internet has become an important avenue through which anti-China forces infiltrate, sabotage and magnify their capabilities for destruction,” said a public security minister. “It represents a new challenge to maintain national security and social stability.”
So much for Silicon Valley’s “information wants to be free” libertarianism.
A scene to behold. All over China. They are not for tourist; they’re for the Chinese, most of whom don’t have internet access at home. Most backpackers use the internet connection in the hostel. I stumbled on one (signs in Mandarin, often in old looking buildings, on floors with no windows, you’d never know it’s there) and have been going back since.
You’re suppose to present a passport. The PCs are locked in cages. You need to use a mix of keycodes from your receipt to gain access. The desktop characters are in Mandarin, unrecognized icons. Services centers will often have hundred of stations.
You’ll find the Chinese here at all hours. Lots of boys. Playing shooter video games. Or watching pirated movies. Alas, my concern that the Chinese are overtaking us in calculus is unfounded.
