Re: time to learn chinese?

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 10:45 AM -0800 2/9/98, Adam Back wrote:
>Listened to an analyst on the radio expressing view that towards 2010
>China will be leading world economic power.

Like the predictions in 1970 of Russian as the language to learn? Or the
predictions in the 1980s that Japanese was the language to learn?

China is indeed a large country, so any reasonable per capita output makes
it, ranked as a "nation," very large indeed. So?

I'm not much of a believer in nation-states as influencers of world trade.
While it is true that, for example, India is a larger economic power than
Denmark is, so?

Oh, and on the specific prediction...I have my doubts about even the per
capita numbers rising as fast as some think. It's still a Communist system,
with periodic crackdowns on anyone or any entity who is perceived to be
doing "too well."

Sort of like all the moaning and gnashing that Microsoft did research and
invested money and kept working along and didn't "let" Netscape become the
"next desktop OS." Recall that Netscape was claiming the browser would
become the OS, with applets running under the browser.

Anyway, China does not as yet have even a single reasonably state of the
art chip making plant in its entire country. Given the timescales and
learning curves involved, it seems unlikely they'll be a high tech leader
in little over 10 years.

Maybe in terms of gross output of chop sticks, rice, fertilizer, etc.


--Tim May


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