Han Officials Must Learn Tibetan to Serve in Tibet
This is administrative reform that took too long in coming. Another commonsensical rule that took President Xi’s exhortation to realize.
Not only a ruling but a law should be introduced for all Han officials serving in minority areas. In addition to Tibetan for Tibet proper and areas with high Tibetan populations in Sichuan and Qinghai; Uighur, Kazakh or Tajik in Xinjiang; Mongolian in Inner Mongolia; Dai, Miao, Zhuang, Yi and others in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, and so on. Officials can achieve far more with far less misunderstanding if they are able to converse with local people in their own tongue.
Of course, the opposite should be the case, too. Gladly, slowly but surely, through mandatory bilingual education at the primary and secondary school levels, ethnic minority children are learning “Putonghua” (the common language) or better known as Mandarin to Westerners, albeit with regional accents.
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Mastery of the Tibetan language will become a requirement for non-native cadres in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. All seven prefecture-level cities in Tibet have started organizing Tibetan language training for non-native cadres, according to the regional bureau of compilation and translation on Monday.
Qoizha, deputy director of the bureau, said they have handed out 40,000 books on basic Tibetan language for daily conversation.
President Xi Jinping stressed at a conference on ethnic work in September 2014 that in ethnic regions, ethnic minority cadres should learn Mandarin, and Han cadres should also learn ethnic languages. The language skill should become a “requirement” for cadres. “One cannot serve the local people well if one cannot speak the local language,” Xi said.
Tibet has adopted a bilingual policy since the regional legislature passed a law in 1987 stipulating both Tibetan language and Mandarin as official languages in the region.
Qoizha said over 90 percent of Tibet’s population of 3 million is of Tibetan ethnicity. Breaking the language hurdle can help non-native cadres better interact with local communities. In the past 20 years, close to 6,000 cadres and technical professionals from various Chinese provinces and municipalities have been sent to help develop the southwestern autonomous region of Tibet. Cadres usually stay in the region for three years.
According to Wang Fengchao, deputy head of the Organization Department of the Tibet autonomous regional committee of the Communist Party of China, seven cadre cohorts from 18 provincial regions have been sent to 74 counties and cities in the southwest region since 1994, when the cadre aid program was launched. They have worked in fields such as the economy, technology, education, and medical science.
Zhao Lei, a cadre working in Zantang Township of Shannan Prefecture, said simple conversation in the local tongue can bring a feeling of intimacy between people. He said he hopes to learn more Tibetan so he won’t have to depend on his Tibetan colleagues for interpretation wherever he goes.
Cering Banjor, Party chief of the No. 4 Chadang Village in Nagqu Prefecture, said the village committee has helped Han cadres find language partners for the required language training. Most of them have been able to use Tibetan for simple conversations.
Qoizha said in addition to Tibetan-language reading materials, the regional government plans to produce bilingual language-learning TV programs to help civil servants learn the language.
– (Xinhua) English.news.cn
Big Splash of Chinese Companies at CES 2015 Not a Surprise
American commentators are prone to underestimating the growing innovative sophistication of Chinese companies so for them the sheer quantity and quality of Chinese products at the just closed International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year came as a surprise. But, they shouldn’t be.
At next year’s CES, there will be even more Chinese companies with even more state-of-the-art gadgets on show that will garner rave reviews. And with the state’s goal to become an innovative superpower by the end of the decade, there will be a whole lot of ‘surprises’ going forward.
China’s innovation machine is just revving up!
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All the new electronic gadgets were there at CES 2015, held Jan 6-9 in Las Vegas. Android Smartphones, 4K TVs, storage devices from Korea, human-like robots from Japan, and 3-D printers from the US and Germany.
Some came from large well-established brands like Samsung, Toshiba, and HP. Others came from obscure start-ups, surprising some CES observers.
But the big surprise at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, in our opinion, was the rise of Chinese brands—both in terms of quantity and quality.
Chinese companies occupied close to one-fourth of the exhibition space, displaying, all sorts of gadgets, from tablets, to laptops, to smart projectors, to giant TVs and drones. And some attracted favorable reviews.
Lenovo’s Window Yoga Tablet with AnyPen Technology, for instance, was included in PC Magazine’s “The Best of CES 2015 list,” as was the company’s Vibe Band and LaVie H750 convertible and HZ550 clamshell laptop. ZTE’s second-generation smart projector, which built on the experience of last year’s Sprint LivePro, was also on the list.
That’s certainly a big step for Chinese companies, which so far have been considered imitators of American, European and Japanese products rather than innovators – and, in some case cases, as backyard manufacturers for American and European merchandisers and marketers.
China, the world’s second largest economy, has been trying to catch up with its American, Japanese and Korean counterparts, which have thus far dominated the consumer electronics brand space. But the country’s brands have yet to make it to popular lists – like Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands List, Interbrand’s Best Global Brands List, and Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies.
To be fair, some of China’s companies are too young to meet the criteria required by the compilers of these lists – such as presence in the US consumer market. But if this year’s strong CES showing turns into a trend, it may be a matter of time before some Chinese brands make these lists.
– Forbes
China is Big Reason Why Global Inequality Narrowed So Fast: Cato Analyst
In his Washington Post piece below (excerpted), Mr Marian Tupy, senior analyst at the Cato Institute, hits the nail on the head when he says China is the big reason why the wealth gap between developed and developing countries has narrowed significantly over the past half century. In spite of Mao’s disastrous campaigns, one after the other for two decades until his death in 1976, his successor Deng Xiaoping, the ultimate pragmatist, dared to break the shackles of the planned economy to save China from economic collapse.
At the tail end of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, the private economy was still forbidden and everything had to go through the state which dictated paltry rations and industrial coupons for basic living. People in the cities required cereal coupons to eat – about 33 to 40 catties (36.3 to 44 pounds) of coarse steamed bread or rice a month with little meat, eggs, or oil. But, there was lots of napa cabbage, nothing BUT cabbage in the winter months. Industrial workers got up to 50 catties of cereals and more meat, albeit fatty and low quality. Farmers tilled their tiny “free plots” while working for pitifully low paying work points on agricultural communes.
For clothes, cotton coupons were required to purchase cotton fabrics during a time when man-made fabrics were still a rarity. Families had to queue up to acquire industrial coupons to purchase bicycles, foot-powered sewing machines, radios, watches, and tiny b & w TVs. Travel was restricted and special permission had to obtained for leaves from state jobs to visit relatives. It wasn’t until the late 1970s early 1980s until people were allowed to purchase private phone lines at great cost.
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms eventually did away with all that planned era baggage. Especially after joining the WTO in 2001, China’s economy surged ahead and transformed itself on the back of globalized production. That spelled the beginning of the end of China’s subsistence economy, putting it on course to become the second largest economy in the world. Within another decade, it will inevitably be the largest regardless of what the nay-sayers say.
Indeed, the Chinese owe their current prosperity to Deng Xiaoping.
BTW, Mr Tupy mentions China’s 2013 per capita income in exchange rate terms was about US$6,800 but by the measure of purchasing power parity (PPP), it is closer to $10,000. That’s why, while celebrating China’s remarkable achievements over the last three and one half decades, we should not forget how much farther China needs to go.
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…Consider the spectacular rise of Asia. In 1960, the U.S. was 11 times richer than Asia. Today, America is only 4.8 times richer than Asia.
To understand why, let’s look at China.
Between 1958 and 1961, Mao Zedong attempted to transform China’s largely agricultural economy into an industrial one through the “Great Leap Forward.” His stated goal was to overtake the U.K.’s industrial production in 15 years. Industrialization, which included building of factories at home as well as large-scale purchases of machinery abroad, was to be paid for by food produced on collective farms.
But the collectivization of agriculture resulted in famine that killed between 18 and 45 million people. Industrial initiatives, such as Mao’s attempt to massively increase production of steel, were equally disastrous. People burned their houses to stoke the fires of the steel mills and melted cooking wares to fulfill the steel production quotas. The result was destruction, rather than creation of wealth.
Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, partially privatized the farmland and allowed farmers to sell their produce. Trade liberalization ensured that Chinese industrial output would no longer be dictated by production quotas, but by the demands of the international economy. But following liberalization in 1978, China’s GDP per capita has increased 12.5 fold, rising from $545 in 1980 to $6,807 in 2013. Over the same time period, the Chinese poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 10 percent.
What is true of China is also true in much of the developing world. As Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution wrote in 2011, “poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”
Developing countries have made strides in other areas too. Take life expectancy. Between 1960 and 2010, global life expectancy increased from 53 years to 70. In the U.S. over the same period it rose from 70 to 78. Similar stories can be told about child and maternal mortality, treatment of communicable diseases and the spread of technology.
Many Americans point to globalization as a bogeyman, robbing our country of good jobs and resources. But really, the phenomenon has ushered in a period of unprecedented prosperity in many poor countries. Even as we struggle with economic problems at home let us remember the global — and largely positive — perspective on the state of the world.
– Washington Post