sofiechan home

It's The Asian Century

aner said in #4085 2w ago: received

Dread it, run from it, something about the structure of American immigration, meritocracy, cursus honorum, elite status, wealth, etc. enables Asian Americans to dominate. The latest classes at Harvard, since SFFA and the overturn of affirmative action, have been plurality Asian (up to 40%, approaching some of the California-state system universities). A disproportionately high amount of the "most impressive" people from the Zoomer generation—those raising large venture rounds, starting innovative businesses, etc.—are Asian, and the influence of Indian-Americans on American politics (especially conservative & Republican sorts) has been astonishing. When we look abroad, to China in particular, we see them claim top spots in all sorts of economic and innovation-focused metrics. China is not my special focus, however.

Most responses from younger RW white folks has been to call Asians soulless, contrasting Vivek's tiger mom culture with the beautiful White American culture of quarterbacks and cheerleaders. Where are the modern day Mozarts or Isambard Brunels? The Whites nearest to keeping alit the torch of European innovation and exploration are, ultimately, in agreement with the basics of the Asian Century. How could anyone forget Elon Musk borrowing from Tropic Thunder with the line 'F*** Yourself in the Face’ to lash out at the H1B reformers on Xitter? Moreover, on RW white criticism of Asians, BAP says many of the "elite institution Asians" have traditionally been limited by admissions departments due to the fact that they pursue provincial, well-paying jobs such as medicine. However, the "Asian sublimation" of Peter Thiel's "dropout-ism" has inspired many Zoomer Asians to reach higher; many have become iconoclastic (e.g., the Cluely folks) and forthrightly ambitious. And major institutions are willing to back such folks.

Maybe European degrowth isn't so myopic after all. Instead of competing over who is going to be the better Singapore, maybe we shouldn't compete at all. Perhaps re-wilding or re-barbarizing the European man is necessary for "history" or "the species" to move again. It seems, on our current trajectory, that the Asian Century is not merely about the domination of Asian people in the West, but also the "Asianization" of White peoples. Is it really that much of a stretch to see the Large Language Model form of rationality as an extension of "Asian ways of knowing", to use that hilarious phrase of leftist anthropology?

Asian immigration is the biggest problem of the 21st century for the West. Or am I overreacting? What am I missing? Is my understanding of Asian people too simplistic? Are White people just limited by regulation and multicultural discrimination against them? Or has the White Man ceased to strive? Disabuse me, please, of this notion.

referenced by: >>4088 >>4099 >>4136

Dread it, run from i received

anon_hyhi said in #4086 2w ago: received

It's not useful or correct to group all "Asians" together.

China will continue to do well and be an important world civilization, like they have always been. Depending on how things play out, many of them may actually end up repatriating to China. Not because they get kicked out of the West, but because they decide that life is better for them there.

Indians need to be removed from the West at all costs, every single one, and the subcontinent needs to be [redacted]. I'm not joking. They're the single biggest existential threat to the human species, not just the West. They should not be grouped in with "Asians" in general. They are uniquely harmful.

Chinese contribute many things to the West, even if their interests do fundamentally conflict with ours at the end of the day due to how human tribalism works. Indians contribute nothing and are purely parasitic, hostile, and destructive. They all have to go.

referenced by: >>4136

It's not useful or c received

aner said in #4087 2w ago: received

I mostly define the grouping as such for polemical reasons, but yes I understand the vast variety in Asian group behavior in Western societies.

I mostly define the received

anon_wopa said in #4088 2w ago: received

>>4085
>It seems, on our current trajectory, that the Asian Century is not merely about the domination of Asian people in the West, but also the "Asianization" of White peoples.

Why? At a glance it seems like we're doing a much better job of turning the kids and grandkids of tiger parents into Americans (for better or worse) than the reverse. That's the direction of entropy. Tiger parenting or whatever the Vivek equivalent is doesn't seem that popular among white families.

Why? At a glance it received

anon_qyli said in #4091 2w ago: received

I'm gonna comment on this because this trope keeps coming up and I understand why but it's largely a projection.

I spent nearly a decade in Asia and the reality is that the portion of the population that has a tiger mentality is roughly the same as in the West. Most people live as we do, concerned for their families, their friends and balancing their work life with those duties. The vast majority of people aren't in some insane rat race to outcompete each other and life for the most part is more forgiving and has less pressure than in the West. You get artists, musicians, smalls shopkeepers, mechanics, athletes, models, street sweepers, wastrels and everything in between and you have a 'full' society. In nearly all the countries I have lived in (and I've been through it all - high middle and low income countries), middle class people have far less pressure and stress than any counter-part in the West. Life is extremely social and your social life dominates pretty much all other aspects of your existence. Family is very important, friendships are very important, work is a tangential concern.

The asians you meet in the West are fairly self-selecting in that (1) they generally dislike the enormous burdens that social life in Asia imposes on people (2) they were unable to hack it back home (3) they have a tiger mentality and see the west as a land of opportunity for those who are willing to grind it or (4) they come from very difficult conditions and moving to the west was a life raft for them and their families.

The Asian tiger mentality we have in the West is a pure product of our own societies and not something that is innate to Asians. Especially in the US, people define themselves and their self-worth by their work and their income. If you're in below the upper middle class/upper class bracket, your life sucks, it is composed of a series of humiliations and you are constantly reminded of how much you're unimportant. If you are in the UMC, UC bracket, your life is constantly defined by insane anxiety and how one false step will land you in the gutter. Social ties between families and friends are weak and insignificant and changing based on one's status. It didn't used to be this way. When the west dominated the world, we did so when we worked hard but also had 'complete' societies where not everything was defined by work and status competition. This is all self-imposed and I want to note that it didn't product magical economic outcomes either.

As a counter-point, my experience in China has been that what propels their economic growth and their experimentation is truly very strong social ties. The chinese are great craftsmen, they work hard when needed, but ultimately they come dominate entire fields because things can get done on a handshake. If you have an excellent reputation and people vouch for your, you can make deals and can get to work right away because someone has vouched for you or you've been introduced by someone they trust. They'll extend credit, contacts, accomodate delays, help you navigate whatever you need because you come recommended by someone they trust. This is what I call a very sophisticated commercial culture on a civilisational scale. This is the secret sauce of China's success. Chinese society is both individualist and collectivist, business, work and success matter lot but so does family, friendship and reputation, it has a respect for hierarchy and norms but is also happy being flexible around those norms, it is strict in its social rules but is also forgiving of mistakes. If the Asianisation of the west implied that we would have more of this then I'm fully in favour.

If what OP understands is more standardised testing and credentialisation, then I'm sorry to say that this is just more of the fake technocratic/managerial mismanagement that we've invented and defend at all costs.

referenced by: >>4092 >>4136

I'm gonna comment on received

anon_hyhi said in #4092 2w ago: received

>>4091
Was this post meant to be satire....?

I actually lived in China for several years. I speak Chinese, I'm very familiar with the people and culture. Chinese are absolutely much harder workers, much harder grinders, status pressures are much higher there, materialism and money are much more important to people's lives there compared to the West (which says a lot). Society is very competitive and transactional. People do not make "handshake deals," wtf. I guess you somehow don't understand guanxi after living there for years, but social and business relationships are extremely transactional in China. They were apparently just opaque to you as a foreigner. The Chinese literally invented the imperial examination system and still have the gaokao. Everything about this post is so bizarre and off-base and backwards.

The "secret sauce" of the Chinese is that they work very hard and are generally pretty smart. Exactly what you'd expect if you've ever met or spent time around Chinese people in any context in any place.

This is either high level shtick or an extremely confused person or a literal ethnic Chinese shill post(?!).

referenced by: >>4096

Was this post meant received

anon_qyli said in #4096 2w ago: received

>>4092

Not sure what triggered the chimp out or even what you're contending against what I said.

> People do not make "handshake deals," wtf.

I don't know why this is surprising to you but I've literally had 100k worth of credit extended to me in various business deals over a handshake just because someone vouched for me. Almost everyone I've worked with was operating like this. It's even weirder that you mention guanxi as a gotcha since it's essence of it. Favours are extended, favours are called. Reputation is important. Business primarily revolves around family, friendship and longstanding commercial ties. I mean you can call this 'transactional' but its definitely not mercenary. If you behaved in a mercenary way, fucking people, over you would never be able to do business again. Not to mention that truly transactional people (like the Russians who are all about 'I don't trust you. Fuck you, pay me') struggle the most in China.

> The Chinese literally invented the imperial examination system and still have the gaokao

Yes, yes. Lots of competition to get into top schools. I get it. Vast majority of people I worked with never completed university. Alot of them got started selling electronics or fish on random markets. They still managed to have pretty good lives and were largely successful. Would they want their kid to go to Beijing University? Sure but if they don't it's not the end of the world. Most of them are happy that their kids have interests outside of school like athletics, music, etc.. China has changed alot in this regard. Tons of people go to middling technical schools, or work at their family businesses - big and small. They still manage to have very normal lives. There are PLAbros who open gyms, lots of subculture music, fashion and art scenes, Uygurs slinging shisha businesses. Tons of f&b. Lots of people go between the cities and their rural/semi-rural hometowns. That's most of China. It's not all Gaokao and bugman rat race.

Not sure what trigge received

jewishman said in #4097 2w ago: received

I’ll the peripheral argument about the nature of the Chinese first.

I think it is right to say that traits identified with immigrant strivers should not be projected onto the population of China, or East Asia. In the case of China, I think, it is more fair, since the experience of the immigrant striver was not foreign to so many. The men who built contemporary China did not experience the 1960s and the 1970s not as a time of violent authoritarian, but displacement and opportunity. The Gang of Four provided the respite from control that gave us the poets and the entrepreneurs. The events of the previous decade meant that men were returning to the cities as strangers to them, building something out of nothing (this energy could be turned to retail sales, avant-garde poetry, corruption, etc.). The restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s tossed another few hundreds of millions out on the road, far from home. They relied on village or clan or familial networks more than they relied on the state. They were suffering for the next generation. So, a “tiger mentality,” which I take to mean a near-sociopathic obsession with the success of the next generation, guided a lot of people. But in contemporary China, where nobody under fifty has much memory of the struggle, where the state has returned, where the communitarian family system and local networks have been degraded, the energy has mostly burned itself out, or it has been redirected, or exported.

That does matter, I think, when it comes to the questions in the original post. The demographic decline and spiritual enervation of the Chinese doesn’t suggest that they’re going to overwhelm the United States—as immigrants, I mean. The Chinese immigrants and American-born Chinese will still for a while dominate in the fields in which they currently dominate. But that won’t last forever.

It’s important to remember that there is mutual hostility. There will be Chinese exclusion before anybody shuts off the flow of Indians, or Haitians, or Venezuelans to the United States. The fear of spiritual pollution from the West, and belief in a Chinese civilization, and the reality of geopolitical competition, mean that the Chinese state has reasons to keep its best minds in the country.

Don’t fear the Chinese. They’ll stop coming. Those that do will be tossed into the melting pot. Their daughters marry white men. Their sons don't have matchmakers to recruit pretty, dumb breeding stock from their home villages.

So, to answer the question directly: immigration from anywhere is a problem. You don’t want to run your nation according to a system that has you bargaining for suitable replacements for missing heirs. As Bernie Sanders said, “We should have picked our own damn cotton.”

referenced by: >>4099

I’ll the peripheral received

anon_bapo said in #4099 2w ago: received

>>4085

Regarding the OP, are you also a Jew? Your pattern of writing is similar in that you regurgitate a lot of information without coherent synthesis.

To answer your question directly: Chinese & Indian immigration is problematic for any group that is in power because of their potential capability and coordination is threatening. It is problematic for native born people who have to compete against them in a system originally not as competitive. If people compete in race-neutral ways, then people can mostly accept the outcome as fair. If people have an expectation that they deserve to inherit the country on basis of their ancestors, they will feel (not unjustly) aggrieved, like how Palestinians are still attached to the land.

Though this dinner appears prominent, there is no serious institution by these newcomers to America. Education is a leading indicator so you can expect those to pop up in another two or three decades. It should be race-neutral through admissions but the student body will not be because of different distribution in temperament and ability.

Regarding LLMs: Patterns of speech and mannerisms which are more suited for the environment will become more common, like natural selection. Directly stating things is faster, and we live in a fast and connected world, though I do appreciate the writing style of old.

Cluely looks like a joke. They were probably set up to fail.

>>4097

You said nothing about the innate characteristics of the Chinese, but you projected historical reasons for their behavior.

What are some traits of Jews I've observed? They're funny, in the same way Blacks are because of their history. https://reddit.com/r/Judaism/comments/15vic4s/why_are_jews_so_funny/jwws3k3/

They have an interest in a weak state as opposed to a strong state: they always manage to throw in barbs about how the government is incompetent or evil because a strong government tends to be against their interest. https://youtu.be/h1A1rbOxk7w?t=1642

Who are the groups you cannot talk badly about? Jews, Blacks, gays, and women. What are the common traits to all of them? Verbal ability, history of oppression, coordination, and natural weakness. They speak the right tune if you coerce them while those who do power politics just fight head on (and die if they lose). Ironically, that makes them pleasant to be around because they shapeshift into seemingly harmless forms.

Here's the breakdown and explanation of the different groups and their motivations. If you are an Elon Musk or Trump type leader/strong statist, your goal is to keep power, increase power, and to demonstrate power. Have giant rallies, let people know who is in charge, confront people head-on.

If you are a Sam Altman/weak statist, your goal is to keep power, increase power, and pretend you don't have power. Use consensus and a soft voice to draw people to your side, make yourself seem like the good guy. Exert influence, don't demonstrate it. Say things that confuse people. This is the fundamental difference in strategy and personality that goes beyond race, class, or sex.

For domestic policy, weak groups will attempt to stay in power by dividing others because a strong group if it came together would crush them. You can do this by letting in crime-causing illegals and using the media to divide people. Anyone who uses such general terms such as "Whites" "Blacks" "Asians" "Hispanics" are not contributing to national unity by willfully ignoring or not knowing the heterogeneous factions within each generalized bucket. To create race problems everywhere, make statements like "Asian girls marry white men" and "White women love negro seed." The response that generated the most comments on that Twitter post was "whites are to asians what blacks are to whites."

The problem many people are trying to address is societal decay. Nobody really cares who is in power and what their race is, so long as they can serve the people well. Your Eric Adams, Karen Basses, Lori Lightfoots, Brandon Johnsons seem incapable of good governance.

referenced by: >>4100 >>4111

Regarding the OP, ar received

anon_bapo said in #4100 2w ago: received

>>4099

Also, I like all people. I would hate for there to be lynchings or discrimination or pogroms, and I think it better to build a society where everybody has a chance. Unfortunately, real life is messy and complicated and not everyone agrees. Hopefully the generalizations I am making are accurate, perceptive, and not too inflammatory.

Also, I like all peo received

anon_tely said in #4103 2w ago: received

Seems like a pretty easy fix if you insist on "meritocracy" but "know it when you see it" as well, would be to ratchet up athletic performance as a marker of merit and a proxy for personality. Colleges could institute baseline fitness requirements for men and women, certain modifiers for the perceived difficulty and sociality of the sport (no getting out of it with tennis.) You could even assign these weights keeping in mind which races tend to perform at higher levels compared to other.

Roughly portion the admission weights as 40:60 physical:intellectual and you should have an elite cohort that is significantly healthier in a physical and psychological sense, and more favorable toward European and American culture.

Would that result in legions of Asian becoming linebacker chads who are just as good at calculus? Possible, but unlikely, because it would be something completely unfathomable to centuries of Oriental culture. It may break many brains that way. If they do end up pulling through at least they'll be of a better sort than what we can see in OP's pic. The current batch is inoffensive in behavior and appearance. 10 years of sports instead of Kumon would at least make them offensively handsome!

referenced by: >>4113 >>4136

Seems like a pretty received

anon_tely said in #4105 2w ago: received

If the American state proves to be too universalistic to prohibit foreigners from elite pipelines and sensible moderate good people demand that we take them in, then the sensible, moderate compromise must be to subject foreigners to an aggressive positive eugenics campaign. One that violently clashes with Gaokao ways of knowing and liberates them from their parents. Otherwise unwitting PoC will flock here like flies to honey only to discover they have been caught in the prison of nations, and America will be forever elusive to them after living here for many years.

If the American stat received

aner said in #4111 2w ago: received

>>4099
No I am not Jewish, just wanted to rile people up

referenced by: >>4112

No I am not Jewish, received

anon_xybu said in #4112 2w ago: received

>>4111

Sounds Gude to me 🙈

Sounds Gude to me 🙈 received

anon_nije said in #4113 2w ago: received

>>4103
I think factoring in athletic accomplishments would probably make the system a bit better than it is right now but its far for what it would ideally be. I believe there is a palladium article talking about how you do not want true meritocracy bc this is just test prep + grades maxxing and there is a lot more we need to consider and ultimately this is how the systems already works. As we have seen plenty of Asians with perfect SAT and GPAs are denied in favor of other seemingly more interesting(by the standards of the admissions people) candidates. So already they have dismissed meritocracy in favor of weilding their power to select the future elite of the country. Ideally the teachers writing the college recs would wield power responsibly and simply write amazing recs for the best kids and the admissions teams would pick the best kids by valuing things we already value. This is downstream of culture and other things. It's sort of a "personnel is policy" type thing. We need patriotic highschool teachers who value courage and can spot kids with real leadership capacity not just stupid stuff like being a leader on the model UN team. We need patriotic college admissions people, this may be a bit too much to ask for. I know this all sounds ridiculous, I don't see what another option is, short of the Trump administration take over the admissions process for the ivies. There is no replacement for good people with good judgement in authority roles. We can try to take people who don't share our values and give them a list of qualities to look for and send them legal threats if they enforce their own worldview too much. This may work short term but its not a real solution.

referenced by: >>4117

I think factoring in received

anon_tely said in #4117 2w ago: received

>>4113

This is largely correct, I was just having fun with the thought experiment. Solving tiger parental cluelessness and its deathgrip on PMC culture by nudging them to unwittingly participate in an East Asian stud farm project is humorous to me.

The root of the problem is that we look at the profession of "admissions bureaucrat" as disreputable, because its current practitioners indeed are. But being the gatekeeper of an elite intstitution is an extremely important task. Because of institutional capture it may be better to build up alternatives and let Harvard etc. remain a hollowed-out stud farm, but recent attempts to do this (UATX) have caused me to waver in my belief that this is the path forward. They all seem to be run by anti-woke mouthbreathers like Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, etc.

A government takeover of university bureaucracies will be necessary, as you say. In fact, that is the only "realistic" option that's been presented in this thread so far. But I doubt there are personnel in the administration capable of implementing this correctly.

referenced by: >>4119

This is largely corr received

anon_sawy said in #4118 2w ago: received

My perspective: the East Asian diaspora in the West are a genuinely capable lot who have already achieved a great deal and stand to achieve a great deal more if they can lose their fixation with the zero-sum striver "education" pipeline. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. East Asians are great at jumping through hoops created by elite institutions, and very very bad at capturing or founding said institutions. The Ivy League has lots of East Asian students and zero East Asian presidents. Lots of East Asians ace the LSAT and lots of East Asians clerk for the Supreme Court, but none wear the black. There is not a single Yamato, Han or Korean anywhere near real political power in America today, either in the Cathedral or the White House. Similarly, the "bamboo network" in postcolonial Southeast Asia made a lot of money for themselves but never once came close to fighting back against the regular pogroms or expropriations they faced. Doesn't mean that this particular "Ordeal of Civility" isn't an interesting topic, but the contrast with certain other groups couldn't be more stark. (Indians, on the other hand, are very different, and are substantially better suited to diaspora power politics.)

referenced by: >>4124

My perspective: the received

anon_nije said in #4119 2w ago: received

>>4117
This is a really interesting response. When I proposed the Trump admin taking over elite admission, I was entertaining the idea of "if I could really weild power what would be the minimum amount needed to actually solve the problem". The result I got seemed ridiculous, but I think you are right perhaps it really isnt so ridiculous that its not worth considering at all. What would this actually look like in practice? Is this in any way legal? Is there president for something like this?
It makes me think of the voting stations where you have people monitoring to make sure there is not funny business. It seems like something they would do in China but maybe having a government officer in person monitoring how they are doing everything and forcing them to follow the rules. Certainly progressive are not above doing something like this. Anything like a full takeover would be too extreme, but simple having a "compliance officer" type person could work. There are hundreds of de facto progressive compliance officers at Harvard currently.

In an ideal world what would you select for? If you could force them to follow your rules. Certainly the first standard would be minimum academic standards like 95% gpa and test scores and some athletic ability. But beyond that I really think it is a "you know it when you see it type of thing" that is unlikely to really be communicated through the application. I think the highschools should really be able to recommend kids but this would require an honors type system that currently would not work in our country. I'd imagine not that long ago in the US admissions officers at harvard would be reading an application from a student from some prep school and would be on the fence about the student and they would just pick up the phone(or write a letter) and call the highschool and talk to them about the student. This may still happen somewhat but the country is just too big theres not going to be the same familiarity.

I would love to see other institutions replace the ivies but I dont see that happening currently. Ya im not too bullish on Bari Weiss U.

I want to see Chris Rufo in the Harvard admissions committee meetings

This is a really int received

anon_nije said in #4124 2w ago: received

>>4118
I think this is sort of short sighted just because historically they have not founded companies does not mean they will not going forward also what if we are in an environment in which real innovation and entrepreneurship is not really possible and the only way to get real power to infiltrate existing institutions. It is not insignificant that many of top tech companies have Indian CEOs, just bc these people could not have founded these companies themselves does not change the fact that they now run them

I think this is sort received

anon_jyra said in #4136 2w ago: received

>>4085
>>4086
>It seems, on our current trajectory, that the Asian Century is not merely about the domination of Asian people in the West, but also the "Asianization" of White peoples.

At this point 'Asian' is an abbreviation for 'East Asian', at least in California. It is an abuse of notation but in my experience South Asians are referred to by other terms, say 'Indian' or 'brown'. For what it's worth I don't mind people calling me a yellow person.

RW white folks seem to be in fairly clear agreement about the Graeco-Roman canon, as evidenced by current aesthetic trends in the Bay. The greater accessibility of these ideas (even just visually) and American cultural dominance means that there is little debate over what is "the European man" to aspire to. I concede that it is a far more masochistic task to learn Classical Chinese than to learn Ancient Greek or Latin, but perhaps some of what I do may eventually make it easier to learn "Asian ways of knowing". As a civilization I think the Sinosphere has much to offer, though I note that wars and cultural revolutions have created this association between the region and tiger mom/striver culture. There is the gaokao, there is the Chinese urban bourgeoise - there are analogues in US college admissions and the PMC class.

Civilizationally, it's contentious whether China alone holds the leadership of Sinic civilization. Japanese and Korean culture fare much better in the West compared to anything directly out of China. If anime viewership is anything to go by, Japanese aesthetics do well in China. Yet the region is still beset with the spectre of various wartime grievances and official Chinese and Korean state policy remains one of resentment towards Japan. I do not see Americans of East Asian descent as a group (or even East Asia itself) agreeing on the merits of reading Laozi or Confucius or Han Fei, if such debates occur at all. Granted this is a mirror of the situation in the West under modernity - a break in the transmission of classical tradition, with it the attrition of traditional norms of conduct (the 'rites' of Confucianism). Arguably Japan has maintained fidelity to these 'rites' to the greatest extent, if general societal pleasantness is the metric to be used. As mentioned by >>4091, to weigh the relationship between people at the same level or even above that of the person itself is perhaps something that characterizes the Sinosphere. But to have our national relationships properly restored for a glorious spacefaring 21st century... that remains to be seen.

>>4103
>10 years of sports instead of Kumon would at least make them offensively handsome!

Concur!

referenced by: >>4137

At this point 'Asian received

anon_tely said in #4137 2w ago: received

>>4136

Contrary most claims about China's impotence in the realm of soft power, I think we're actually on the verge of a massive triumph of Chinese cultural exports. I've noticed that their film industry has been putting out movies of a superior sensitivity than their American or even European counterparts, my mother recently compared one to Tarkovsky. There is also of course TikTok cultural capital, and many people speak affectionately of the Chinese on Twitter out of light-hearted irony. These are small signs for not but I think they indicate something is coming.

I visited China last year and my impression is that Chinese culture is "Japanifying," as one commentator put it, and this could be seen as a natural result of Japan maintaining propriety and a sensitivity to the arts that the rest of Asia loves. In China I did not see people spit on the street. I didn't encounter any cutthroat behavior in public. And while the Chinese are more brusque than the Japanese by nature I felt them to be warm and welcoming as a people. The co-prosperity sphere is forming whether they know it or not... Japan truly did win WWII.

If this holds true as a general trend then it's just a matter of time until China with Japanese characteristics supercedes Korea and Japan in cultural influence. I think the key to this will require an earnest rediscovery of the Confucian tradition. Law students at Peking University had only a passing familiarity with their own classics. Renaissances are always signalled by a reevaluation of the classics.

referenced by: >>4141

Contrary most claims received

anon_xybu said in #4141 2w ago: received

>>4137

Some recent films if people want to take a look themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iefR6VbE8E&list=PLBakWosU0sfiTLqhGTV9EMDcfApEfFM6e
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdg2Af9shk4

I sorta feel the "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" is too different a meaning from the original 中国特色社会主义. If you take it literally: 中国 (China) 特色 (Special/characteristic/unique) 社会 (society) 主义 (doctrine/ideology) a better translation might be "Chinese-characterized Societal Governance." I might be off cause I'm not well-read enough in official documents. Overall when considering the English-translation attempts of the Chinese linguistic realm, most translations are not 1:1, so it makes things seem different than it actually is. Closest internet source is the Stanford philosophy wiki.

referenced by: >>4143 >>4147 >>4172

Some recent films if received

jewishman said in #4143 2w ago: received

>>4141
This sort of linguistic deconstruction is going to push you further from a clear understanding, especially for this sort of recent political terminology, made up of early modern neologisms. It reads so peculiarly in English—"socialism with Chinese characteristics"—precisely because it is such a mindlessly literal translation, and reflects how the term is understood by the people that use it. The Chinese and the Sinologists are busy debating the meanings of premodern philosophical language that is being adopted into present political usage. Join the debate about how to translate 天下 or 大同!

referenced by: >>4144 >>4172

This sort of linguis received

anon_jyra said in #4144 2w ago: received

>>4143
I agree with jewishman about checking for neologisms. The three later compounds for 'characteristic', 'society' and 'ideology' appear to be Western imports originating from the Meiji-era.

The interesting two characters are the first two for 'middle'(中) and 'kingdom/city'(國). Note that this does not necessarily imply 'China' as understood by the West. In antiquity the compound (中國) could also be interpreted simply as *the* capital city. The equivalent concept in the West is caput mundi, or head of the world, and somehow it became synonymous with Rome. In the Far East the concept didn't quite stick to any city names that much, perhaps because capital cities were often simply referred to with a geographical position, for example, Tokyo or 'Eastern Capital'.

Given the profile of the average sofiechanner I doubt there is significant debate about where is our centropolis. She is capable of attracting the very best from the four seas. Now to see if she will bring peace towards the four directions.

referenced by: >>4159

I agree with jewishm received

anon_jyra said in #4145 2w ago: received

>The three later compounds for 'characteristic', 'society' and 'ideology' appear to be Western imports originating from the Meiji-era.

Apologies for the extra post. The better phrasing is that those three two-character compounds are translations of Western concepts made by Japanese scholars during the Meiji-era. Such vocabulary is in tight correspondence with other internationalisms such as 'democracy' and 'liberalism'.

天下('all under heaven') or 大同('great unity') are concepts that depend on the Sinosphere canon. I like 勢, which is sometimes translated as 'circumstances' but usually implies the existence of some sort of potential energy therein.

Apologies for the ex received

anon_tely said in #4147 2w ago: received

>>4141

No offence but the second has the CalArts/capeshit aesthetic one can find in modern Disney. The first one seems alright for kids.

I'm speaking about movies in the vein of Jia Zhangke's Caught By The Tides.

No offence but the s received

anon_sava said in #4152 2w ago: received

Guys, 社会主义 should be translated as "socialism." It has been the standard Chinese translation of the foreign phrase "socialism“ since the 1920s. 中国特色社会主义 "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" was developed as a phrase to explain how China in the 1980s could still be part of the socialist camp while shedding many of the socialist dogmas. "“We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China,” Deng Xiaoping would report to the 12th Party Congress in 1982, “and blaze a path of our own and build a Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."

Its partner phrase was "社会主义初级阶段 the initial stage of socialism."

https://chinaopensourceobservatory.org/glossary/initial-stage-of-socialism
https://chinaopensourceobservatory.org/glossary/socialism-with-chinese-characteristics

Guys, 社会主义 should be received

anon_sava said in #4153 2w ago: received

Sorry, pressed enter before the last post was finished. Should end with: "Its partner phrase was "社会主义初级阶段 the initial stage of socialism," a concept invited to explain how the Party could be full of faithful communists while inviting markets into the country.

There is a reason Xi and company hearken back so much to Mao and his cohort; there is a reason it funds anime biographies of Karl Marx. Whether *we* think they are socialist is a different question from what think--and they think they represent the best fruits of the socialist tradition. Their constant use of the word 社会主义is meant to celebrate that heritage and draw legitimacy from it. Hard for westerners to understand: we see no magic in the word. But the word still has power in China and we distort their thinking if we translate it a way that obfuscates the term's Marxist lineage.

referenced by: >>4156

Sorry, pressed enter received

anon_mero said in #4156 2w ago: received

>>4153

But socialism has a different lineage in English. Socialism makes one think of communism, McCathy, and Bernie Sanders.

German (Marx) to Russian (Lenin) to Chinese is already a long game of telephone, losing meaning and context at every step. The Chinese usage is probably not consistent with the German or the Russian usage, so it becomes its own literary canon, which makes people think and act in different ways than the German or Russian way. The only way to actually understand another language, thus modeling someone's behavior, is to have someone model the entire other linguistic realm.

Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie.
Capital. A Critique of Political Economy.

Without the "Das," the word loses it all-encompassing framing. I think "On Capital" is preferable to "Capital." "A Critique" specifies it is one among others. I prefer "Criticism of Political Economy." Multiply that by the entire length of the book and you have something else entirely.

If anyone wants to give the Russian or Chinese versions a try be my guest.

referenced by: >>4158

But socialism has a received

jewishman said in #4158 1w ago: received

>>4156
I'm skeptical that it's encoded at such a deep syntactic level. "资本主义" is "capitalism"—and by that I mean that you couldn't get a sense of the connotations or flavor of the former by analyzing the meaning of the characters, or the linguistic vibrations, or whatever of "资本." With these modern neologisms, linguistic deconstruction and etymological analysis becomes tricky. It comes down to context. After all, 资本主义—these same four characters—are used across East Asia, as zibenzhuyi, shihon shugi, jabonjuui... It's the same with "社会主义": it means different things when read as shehuizhuyi, shakai shugi, or sahoejuui—but the characters are understood in the same way. Even within the same country, "社会主义" means different things when deployed by a left- or right-wing activist, a writer in Qiushi, a historian, an All-China Federation of Trade Unions cadre, a Party bureaucrat in Guizhou, and so on. So, if there is any use in extracting for analysis the "社会主义" in 中国特色社会主义, it has to be understood on deeper levels than a reading of the characters.

referenced by: >>4159

I'm skeptical that i received

anon_mero said in #4159 1w ago: received

>>4144
>>4158

Is it capitalism though? If your opinion is that it's better to not argue over translations for practicality you could just say it, but your premise that the characters/linguistic vibrations don't mean anything is false. I don't see how words with fundamentally different roots can ever mean the same thing, but for a working usage maybe it's good enough cause you'll never fully model another language and you just have to work with what you've got because the voting population only knows so many words.

Capital seems to come from caput too, which was capitalis - "of the head". Now I'm going to read "capital" and think of heads, which flavors the word differently for me, as if it were a leader. If we call something shit instead of poop, that sounds and feels different. Is a plebiscite, which makes one immediately think of plebeian, taken as seriously in the modern language as a vote? -scite also comes from scitum for decree, but not many would know that.

Not sure I understand your Chinese/Korean/Japanese example unless you read/write all of them. Agreed on words in every language having different meanings to different people, like capital is associated with head to me now.

>>3342

referenced by: >>4160

Is it capitalism tho received

jewishman said in #4160 1w ago: received

>>4159
I will insist that some of these early modern Sinitic calques of foreign political and economic terms don't really work with this idea. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all use 资本主义/資本主義—the same characters read differently: ziben zhuyi in Chinese, shihon shugi in Japanese, jabonjuui in Korean (the Vietnamese, too, borrowed it to make, eventually, chủ nghĩa tư bản)... We have a Japanese translator of Western philosophy to thank for this. Scholars a hundred years ago might have debated the Japanese translator's choice of characters, but the semantic roots seem unimportant now, because 资本 is an established modern word. These compounds—资本 and 主义—can't really be broken down, whether in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. I think 社会主义 is in the same category.

But, of course, I don't disagree completely with what you're saying, even for this narrow category of early modern loanwords. After all, aiguozhuyi/aikokushugi "爱国主义" ("love nation"-ism) is more compelling than patriotism (maybe if I was sure I could correctly name the Latin root...). A huodong/katsudo 活动 ("vital stirring") is more attractive than an activity. The fact that America is called 米国 ("rice country") in Japanese and 美国 ("beautiful country") is remarkable mostly to foreigners learning these languages, but native speakers do make puns on the terms. A reader two or three hundred years ago could probably guess what was meant, roughly, by ziyou yizhi 自由意志—"free will"—another combination of modern calques—because, of course, these characters were not chosen by Japanese translators at random, but sourced from classical Chinese texts—and there is, I think, a more spiritual flavor in the Sinitic term than the English.

(Attached is the entry for "capital" 资本 from Chinese Loanwords Dictionary 汉语外来词词典, 1984 ["capital is the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of labor" + the classical term that the Japanese translator had in mind].)

referenced by: >>4172

I will insist that s received

anon_mero said in #4172 1w ago: received

>>4160
>>4141
>>4143

Sort of see what you're saying, but it's likely transmission was written, not spoken. If it was spoken we would've ended up slight variations such as 米国 ("rice country") and 美国 ("beautiful country"). So adding more languages when Korean is Hanja or Vietnamese is Chữ Nôm doesn't strengthen the argument. And the AskHistorians thread says the Russian name was changed because it first meant "foolish." I see a pattern of phonetic names having no semantic character meaning, but careful consideration is taken for names and deeper terms because people will not think your son named Dick is Richard.

So is the deconstructive method better for Chinese—"Chinese-characterized Societal Governance" or "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" or another translation "socialism" even though the latter has official documentation backing it up? Well, it probably doesn't matter because language is a matter of political will, so we have the Gulf of America and Arabian Gulf on Google Maps now. As a thinker my intentionality is accuracy, but language is always politicized.

Now, should translated languages keep the order? Since Chinese and English are SVO, I find it surprising that the official English translation doesn't keep it, so any translation that maintains that order is better by me.

Modern English has become sex-infested, where people discuss trade deals in terms of "taking it down the throat," which cannot really read as neutral or devoid of meaning. And I suppose what I'm proposing is just to make clear that true understanding like all things is limited, to consider the subtext and significance of words and their context, and to revise inaccurate translations toward a hopefully better representation of truth should anyone have the time.

Modern day Japanese might associate the United States with rice (perhaps subtly influencing American rice imports) and modern Chinese might associate the United States with beauty when both terms originally derived from pronunciations dropping the A.

https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5q0kh/why_is_a_america_sometime_refer_to_as_beikoku_in/
https://dyske.com/paper/1564

Every word has significance and meaning, and I tried looking for free will's origin—supposedly liberum arbitrium from Saint Augustine. Kant also expounded upon it. However, nobody's going to read hundreds of pages just for a single meaning unless you're a lawyer. I guess a good rule of thumb is to consider the contextual meaning only when it's relevant in modern meaning. It's unlikely anyone takes second notice at "rule of thumb," but "taking it down the throat" may be.

referenced by: >>4183

Sort of see what you received

jewishman said in #4183 6d ago: received

>>4172
I agree on "rice" and "beauty."

I'm still not convinced it's worthwhile to spend so much time breaking down "socialism with Chinese characteristics" 中国特色社会主义. But, let's be productive. I'll critique your deconstruction: "Chinese-characterized societal governance" is problematic because it adds "governance," which is not tied directly to 主义, nor necessarily suggested. It's the early Meiji (as shugi) and late Qing (from Japanese, as zhuyi) interpretation of "-ism"—for historical materialism 辩证唯物主义, capitalism 资本主义, abstract expressionism 抽象表现主义, feminism 女权主义, whole-process people's democracy 全过程人民民主, Trumpism 特朗普主义... You can stick just about anything before "主义" to build in Chinese something like X-"ism." There was a reference in a group chat today to men being dabo zhuyi zhe 大波主义者 ("large-breasts-ists"), unable to appreciate the well-formed shapes of smaller bosoms. And "societal" doesn't seem quite right. The compound is "social," if it's an adjective, and "society," if it's a noun. So we have to go with: "Chinese-characterized society-doctrine." What about that?

referenced by: >>4185

I agree on "rice" an received

anon_mero said in #4185 6d ago: received

>>4183

Yes, it's connected to English words that are translated as -isms. I see this account on Twitter which makes me wonder what it would look like if English was the positioning of nouns next to each other without declension and conjugation with the removal of prepositions and conjugations.

https://x.com/WuWei113

English running on a Chinese brain turns into Singlish, which loses significant amounts of information. I don't have numbers as to whether Chinese has more nouns to make up for it or what precise translation we should use.

referenced by: >>4199

Yes, it's connected received

anon_jyra said in #4199 5d ago: received

>>4185
It's straightforward enough to create nouns or other concepts from (Classical) Chinese ad nauseum. The whole point during the Meiji Restoration was to have words that were from the West but had no previous equivalent.

More interesting is to consider words that are in the Sinosphere that don't have good equivalents in the West. Perhaps one can consider some translations of "Chinese"? There's "中國語" (central state language), "支那語" (china language, relatively popular in Japanese circa 1895-1945), "漢文" (Han (dynasty/state?) writing, i.e. literary chinese).

Technically, "中國語" (central state language) should mean a kind of lingua franca, and within the Sinosphere it now implicitly refers to Standard Mandarin. But English is more popular as a second language in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. A contradiction! Confucius would want to Rectify the Names. Maybe it's better yet to return to the classical understanding of "中國" as caput mundi.

The Sinosphere today has a northern, southern, and eastern capital, but no western one yet. Is this what the Asianization of the West means? What other Asian philosophical concepts need to be Westernized in the style of the Meiji Restoration? Is this even necessary for America to re-industrialize or are we better off raising money by defending Taiwan on laptop screens?

It's straightforward received

You must login to post.