Posted on 05/01/2005 8:22:59 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
NEW YORK, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- China's rise is no longer a prediction. It is a fact, writes Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria in a special report in the current issue of Newsweek. "It is already the world's fastest-growing large economy, and the second largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves, mainly dollars. It has the world's largest army (2.5 million men) and the fourth largest defense budget, which is rising by more than 10 percent annually. Whether or not it takes over the United States economically, which looks to me like a distant prospect, it is the powerful new force on the global scene."
In the May 9 Newsweek cover, "China's Century" (on newsstands Monday, May 2), Zakaria examines China's astounding growth and analyzes all the strategic issues that come with it, including challenging U.S. pre-eminence. "For centuries, the rest of the world was a stage for the ambitions and interests of the West's great powers," Zakaria writes. "China's rise, along with that of India and the continuing weight of Japan, represents the third great shift in global power -- the rise of Asia." He continues, "Inevitably, the China challenge looms largest for the United States. Historically, when the world's leading power is challenged by a rising one, the two have had a difficult relationship. And while neither side will ever admit it publicly, both China and the United States worry and plan for trouble. To say this is not to assume war or even conflict, but merely to note that there is likely to be tension between the two countries."
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
I remember "Japan's century" was declared about 1987 or so. What ever happened to that?
Their whole culture is based on picture-writing...
I thought Japan was going to own us in a few years. Oh sorry, that was the MSM's line in the '80's.
The MSM took the '90's off. Their boy was in the Oval; too many hot parties to go to.
Now it's the 21st century, and a GOP dumb-dumb is in the WH. And the Chinese are going to own us in a few years.
(steely)
I thought Japan was going to own us in a few years. Oh sorry, that was the MSM's line in the '80's.
The MSM took the '90's off. Their boy was in the Oval; too many hot parties to go to.
Now it's the 21st century, and a GOP dumb-dumb is in the WH. And the Chinese are going to own us in a few years.
==========
Yup. Deja vu all over again.
Guess we'll see. I suspect it is wishful thinking on the part of Newsweek (and, probably, Madeleine Albright).
More wishful thinking by the leftists in the MSM and the "It Takes a Village" crowd.
For everyone else, a world dominated by Red China would be a very grim place indeed.
Who's hurtin' now?
This sounds comical but it's true. And Japan suffers from the same problem. Their children spend thousands of their schooltime hours learning how to read and write the tens of thousands of ideographs.
Children in Western countries learn their letters in the first grade or before, and then spend a few years learning proper spelling, but after that they can figure out how to read and write practically any word they use in speech.
In Asian countries, by contrast, they have no true alphabet, and they cannot "sound it out". There is nothing that helps you pronounce a character properly, except asking someone who already knows.
Scholarly Chinese enjoy using characters that most of the common people do not understand. But even highly educated people run across characters they do not recognize. Forcing your colleague to ask you how to pronounce a character is a droll faculty-lounge game in China.
-ccm
Hah. And we don't even need to talk about the problems of organizing a list of names in alphabetical order. Or, for that matter, of producing a usable dictionary. Or phone book.
(steely)
phew, now that the always-wrong media has declared it, it's safe from not happening ...
I was worried for a while there.
Actually, Japanese has two phonetic systems, hiragana and katakana.
Japanese children usually first learn hiragana quite early since the system is quite logical without the complexities about pronunciation that we have in English.
Children's books are generally written largely with hiragana, and if a kanji is used (and this is also often true for difficult or non-obvious words in normal publications) it generally has the pronunciation written in small hiragana beside the character. (For what it is worth, these pronunciation keys are called furigana.)
These days, katakana are generally used to indicate gairaigo, words from taken languages outside Japanese.
For that matter, Korean also has a phonetic system called hangul.
"With silver mines,
recruiting grounds,
a general of real genius,
he thought himself invulnerable:
in one battle
he lost all three."
--W.H. Auden
I am aware of that, but it is also true that educated adults use primarily kanji, and if you depend on hiragana too much, you are considered an uncultured oaf.
You are right about Korean hangul. But don't educated Koreans learn Chinese characters too? I know the Korean wife of my cousin can read Chinese, but not speak it.
-ccm
Dictionaries aren't all that difficult; in Japanese, you can even buy dictionaries ordered according to a character system or by pronunciation.
I don't know much about Korean, but a friend of mine told me that in South Korea that Chinese characters were studied only at an older age and were largely used for names of places and some things such as flowers. (That was at least 10 years ago, so I could be way off on either of those points.)
The jinx is on them now.
Except for Korean. The Korean alphabet is remarkably well organized and phonetic.
"Kanji" means "Chinese words (characters)"
In Japanese universities, they have to use a lot of kanji
When a Japanese and a Chinese try to communicate, one way is to write kanji characters on the palm of the hand or on a scrap of paper, and then the "ah..so, I understand.."
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