Is Chinese unlearnable?

There seems to be a school of thought among Sinologists and foreigners who know Chinese, according to which the Chinese language is particularly difficult and fundamentally unlearnable, or so difficult to learn that it's basically not worth the trouble to do so. There are a number of serious articles on the internet written from such a perspective, and their aim is often to discourage foreigners from embarking on the learning of the Chinese language before they realize what they are getting into.

A good examples is this article by David Moser, from the Center for Chinese studies of the University of Michigan, entitled "Why is Chinese so damn hard". Other examples are this post on "the Lingua Franca" blog, or this rather shorter and less serious post on "the China Expat" site.

The basic argument is that Chinese is too difficult to learn as an adult for it to be worth it, and true fluency is beyond reach for most people. It will take you years of full time study, probably while living in China, to get anywhere, in the which time you could have learnt three different european languages or an entirely new profession. You will always sound like a foreigner and never master the tones correctly, except perhaps for a few who have a natural talent for it, and being able to reach a point where you can express yourself fluently and naturally and are able to read a book either takes years or is out of reach.

Chinese is Hard

That Chinese is hard to learn for someone whose own language is unrelated to it is beyond doubt. I myself have lived in China for three and a half years, studied Chinese full time for one of those years (as in 20 hours of class a week in university), and learnt Chinese on my own or in part time private classes for the rest of my time here. I have numerous Chinese friends, and I do my best to communicate with most of them in Chinese. I also chat in Chinese on the internet regularly using QQ, the Chinese instant messaging software.

The results? Well, I can get around in China, and even go through the process of renting a flat in Chinese (including phoning landlords, negotiating with housing agencies and so on). I can chat about general topics in Chinese, but I often have trouble understanding what the other person is saying, and often can't think of the word I need. If the person I am chatting to doesn't make an effort to speak a bit slower than usual and not use realtively simple language, it becomes much harder. Someone who speaks with a strong regional pronunciation can completely throw me. I have to settle for expressing myself far less fully than I could in my own language, and I normally sound stilted and unnatural. Speaking about specialist topics is almost impossible, except politics or history because I have an interest in them, and thus have learnt some of the vocabulary. My pronuncation is also not good: I can pronounce almost all sounds correctly, but I usually only know and use the tones for the most common words, and when I speak fast even those get lost. I sound very markedly foreign, and although most Chinese people can understand me, they sometimes have to make an effort to do so. When Chinese people speak to each other I can only understand some of it, how much depends on the topic. And that is provided they speak clearly and in a standard fashion.

When it comes to reading, I think my skills are actually unusually high when compared to my speaking, mainly because of the effort I put into it. If I can follow Chinese films at all, it is mostly thanks to the Chinese subtitles they almost always have underneath. I can read a newpaper article and usually understand the general point, but there will be lots of words and even phrases which I don't understand (and the headlines are always the hardest to get. If you know Chinese you will follow me). With books it very much depends on the topic. Even if I can understand enough to make it worth reading, it takes me such a long time to read a Chinese book that it's almost pointless. As for writing, I can write pretty fast with a computer or a mobile, but writing by hand is of course slow and painful, and I routinely forget how to write even elementary characters (although my Chinese handwriting apparently looks very nice and neat for a foreigner. It's odd, because my english handwriting looks horrible.)

I am not a genius at learning languages, one of those people who can go to a foreign country and starts chattering away after a few weeks. Still, I suspect my abilities in this area are higher than average, and Chinese is not the first foreign language I attempt. Needless to say, if I had spent as much time and effort learning any European (or I suspect, Indo-European) language, by now I would be far more comfortable in it, and able to function almost fully.

But are other languages really easier?

The question I want to focus on is this: is Chinese objectively harder to learn than other languages, or is it just that any language with no relation to your own is going to be tough? In the article I quoted earlier, David Moser takes the first view: "(...) part of what I'm conteding is that Chinese is hard compared to..well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people".

Some of the points made in the article seem definitely weak to me. I mean, complaining about not being able to read classical Chinese after learning modern Chinese is a bit like complaining about not being able to read Latin after learning Italian. The point about the difficulty of using dictionaries has been made irrelevant by electronic dictionaries, and at least in the PRC, there are no longer different Romanization systems to contend with. However, the basic point that Chinese is especially difficult, in a different category from "normal" languages, will strike many foreigners learning the language as credible.

But is this true? The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department once classified all the world's major national languages (88 of them) into three categories according to their difficulty for an English speaker. Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Arabic and the various forms of Chinese were the only languages to fall into Category III, the one for the hardest languages which necessitate on average 2200 class hours to be learnt (I haven't even reached 1000 in Chinese). Even many other non-Indo European languages (thus entirely unrelated to English) such as Tamil, Armenian, Thai and Vietnamese fall into Category II ( languages necessitating 1100 class hours).

According to this well-known classification, it would seem like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Mongolian, are indeed particularly difficult. But is Chinese the hardest of all? My impression is that the Chinese writing system is objectively harder and more impractical than other writing systems. There is no other language in which you have to learn a few thousand characters by heart in order to read fluently (except Japanese, but it is the same system). The Chinese take more years than anyone else to learn to read and write, and writing by hand remains difficult even for Chinese adults at times. There is also a big gap between the written and spoken languages, with many characters which are only ever used in writing, even for the most basic concepts (for instance 此，meaning "this", which is not normally used in speech).

When it comes to speaking though, the issue is more debatable. As it is often pointed out, Chinese grammar is relatively simple, not possessing any cases, declentions, or gender and singular/plural variations, which is a big advantage in comparison to European languages. The tonal system is indeed a big hurdle, but it is shared by some other languages (notably Vietnamese and Thai). A few people at least do seem to be able to pick up the tones naturally just by speaking to the Chinese, something which cuts down a lot of the learning work.

The combination of the tones and the characters is pretty daunting for most foreign learners, but other languages have their complications too. Japanese and Korean have difficult grammars and a complicated system of different levels of speech according to the status of the person you are speaking to, which foreigners do need to master in order to function in Japan and Korea. Japanese also uses a combination of Chinese characters and two different phonetic alphabets. Foreigners who learn Japanese also like to claim that it is the hardest language in the world to learn.

Arabic doesn't often get compared with the East Asian languages, since it is unusual for someone to learn both, but it is also recognized as extremely hard to learn. Personally I did give it a shot in the past, without getting terribly far. The alphabet is relatively simple, but the grammar is extremely complex, and the language is full of commonly used sounds which most non-Arabs can neither hear nor reproduce. A further huge complication is that "modern standard Arabic" or fusha, the official language of the Arab world, is literally not spoken anywhere at all, and it is a necessity to learn the local dialect to live in an Arab country. Looking back, I don't feel Arabic was any easier than Chinese for me to get my head round.

The truth is that while some languages may be objectively harder than others (on the other end of the scale, Malay and Swahili are known for being objectively easy), I would assume that most of the difference simply depends on the distance of the language learnt from your own one. The less closely related it is, the harder it is to learn. European languages, with their super-long words and their strange grammas in which every word is either masculine or feminine, are basically just as hard for the Chinese to learn as Chinese is for a European (at least when it comes to speaking. The characters might make Chinese objectively harder to read and write).
Chinese is hard, but not unreachable, and the fact that Chinese minorities whose mother tongue is not Chinese still manage to learn it reasonably well through school proves the point.

Chinese as an international language

On a related note, it has by now become commonplace to hear the prediction that "Chinese will be the international language of the future", especially coming from foreigners learning Chinese.
The reasoning is that since China will one day be the world's foremost superpower, it's language will also rise to a comparable status. Setting aside the issue of whether China really is on track for superpower status, is it really possible to imagine a language like Chinese rise to become an international lingua franca?

On the one hand it is true that when a language has the prestige of having a great power behind it, you find that people suddenly can learn it no matter how difficult it may be. The myth that English is easy to learn is in fact just that, a myth. Unsurprisingly, this myth is not very widespread in China, where people find the language incredibly hard to achieve fluency in. English does have some easy sides for sure. In particular, it's grammar is far easier than most other European languages' ones, although the Chinese would take that for granted. On the other hand, English spelling is a nightmare of un-phonetic, illogical spellings which give little clue to pronunciation (think "four" and "forty"), and in fact British children take longer to learn to read and write than any other European children. Even well educated English speaking adults sometimes make spelling mistakes, something almost unthinkable in Spanish or Italian, which reminds me of how Chinese people sometimes forget how to write characters.

English pronunciation is also quite hard in comparison to most languages, with a wealth of unclear, barely differentiated vowel sounds and words which sound almost the same, but not quite. English also has a huge vocabulary, far wider than most languages, and often uses words with different Latin or Germanic roots for similar concepts (think "tooth" and "dentist" rather than the more logical "toothist"). All this is of course barely acknowledged in English speaking countries and in the few North European countries where, because of cultural and linguistic similarities, most people have aquired good English.

In spite of these shortcomings, English has reached the status of international working language because of the power of the British Empire and more crucially, the United States. In so doing it has displaced French, another language with tricky pronunciation and spelling. And somehow, even in China or Japan people who really need English do somehow manage to learn it, at a huge expenditure of time and money. If a language like that can make it, surely there is a chance even for Chinese? Or does the Chinese writing system make it unthinkable that Chinese could reach such a status, in spite of the presumed power China will enjoy in the future?

My feeling is that it is unlikely that Chinese will ever be able to displace English, partly because English is much easier for anyone who speaks a European language (a large chunk of the world outside of Asia), partly because English is already so entrenched in so many countries, and partly because I doubt China will ever enjoy the sort of power which the US enjoyed from the Second World War until recently.
Having said that, it is really hard to say with these things. In the coming years, it will certainly become more common for members of the elite in other countries to have learnt Chinese, and especially in other Asian countries it might start trickling down to the masses too. We will just have to wait and see.

Sign the petition for the young Saudi blogger accused of apostasy

I have just heard about a really absurd and frightnening story, and I can do nothing else but try and spread it.

Hamza Kashgari, a 23 year old Saudi writer and blogger, has just had to flee his country, and he is in serious danger of being sent back there and risking his life. The reason? Last week, the day of the prophet Muhammad's birthday (a Muslim celebration, although it's observance is frowned upon by the strict version of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia), the young man wrote some posts on twitter for the occasion.

Here are some of his tweets, directed to the prophet of Islam:

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you”.

“On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more”.

“On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more”.

Nothing that terrible, you would think. But instead, within a day he received over 30,000 replies on twitter, many of them by enraged Saudis accusing him of apostasy and demanding his death. The young man quickly understood he had gone too far, deleted the tweet and published a long apology in which he begged for forgiveness. But it was too late. The Saudi Ministry of Information immediately banned his column on a local paper, while important clerics demanded he be put on trial for apostasy, a crime punishable by death in the kingdom (see this video of a cleric demanding that he be put on trial. It really gives you an insight into the sort of idiots he is up against). Meanwhile, a facebook group calling for his execution inevitably sprung up, and it already counts over 14,000 members. Poor Hamza managed to board a plane bound for Malaysia hours before the government demanded his arrest for "crossing red lines and denigrating religious beliefs in God and His Prophet".

The blogger was detained on arrival in Malaysia (also officially a Muslim country), and there are serious worries that he may be extradited back to his homeland, where he could really lose his head. In the best of cases, he will never be able to go back to his country again. And all because of a tweet.

This is a story which may seem amazing, but not so in Saudi Arabia, probably the most religiously intollerant, extreme and puritan country on earth, where many people have a mentality on such matters which reminds you of thirteenth century Europe.

However, things are clearly changing even there. Here is what Hamza declared after fleeing his country: “I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom. I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights—freedom of expression and thought—so nothing was done in vain”. “I believe I’m just a scapegoat for a larger conflict. There are a lot of people like me in Saudi Arabia who are fighting for their rights.”

There is an online petition for Hamza Kashgari not to be deported back to his country. Don't hesitate to sign.

Holiday in Manchuria

I have just got back from my annual Spring Festival Travels. This time I spent the break staying with a colleague's friend in a small town called Nanpiao (南票), in North-East China's Liaoning Province.

I had never been to China North-East before (the area which used to be known as Manchuria), and I had never imagined I would go there in the winter, since the region is famous for being outlandishly cold most of the year. The first few days after I arrived were indeed bitterly freezing, with temperatures below -15. Although I did come equipped with much heavy clothing, I couldn't help feeling cold after more than a few minutes outside. What surprised me was the locals' ability to go out with no hat, scarf or gloves and surprisingly light coats at such freezing temperatures. I suppose it is all down to habit. In my last few days in Nanpiao temperatures got much higher, even reaching peaks of -5, which felt like a nice spring day by local standards. It never snowed while I was there either, which at least would have been pretty.

The house where I stayed was far more comfortable than the modest peasant abodes where I have spent some of my previous spring festivals. Although the family I stayed with were not exactly rich, I think they were realtively well off by local standards, with a nice little flat on the outskirts of the town. The town itself was tiny, and it could be crossed on foot in about ten minutes.

I had already heard that the Chinese from the North-East are famous for being heavy drinkers and have a reputation for being big, tough and not to be messed with, at least by Chinese standards. All of this was more or less confirmed by what little I saw during my week long stay. My local friend invited me to a get-together with all his old classmates on my last evening in town. Of course they all drank bai jiu like mad, which didn't surprise me, but what was rather striking is that even many of the girls were drinking and even doing the "gan bei" thing, which in China is less usual. After the meal we all went to a KTV (karaoke) place and sang the night away. I was taken to KTV about three times during my stay, since it is pretty much the only thing the town has to do in the evenings.

The family I stayed with were nice enough. My friend's father used to be some kind of manager in construction sites, but he lost a leg in an accident and now has a prosthetic limb. He was friendly and eager to chat with me, but unfortunately I found it very hard to communicate with him, because his Chinese was quite unstandard. North-Eastern dialects of Chinese are considered to be quite similar to Putonghua, but the local dialect was still different enough for me not to be able to catch much. Although my friend's father did try to speak to me in Putonghua, he would still constantly use local expressions and ways of saying, which were enough to put most of what he said beyond my comprehension, even when he spoke slowly. I found that I could communicate much better with my local friend and people of his generation, since they seem able to switch to proper standard Chinese much more easily.

Anyway, down below you can see a photo of a local street, and me socializing with my friend's friends in the KTV parlour.

How to be as successful as a Jew

One of the most curious and revelatory things about China which my newly acquired ability to read Chinese has allowed me to discover are the Chinese self-help books concerning the Jews.

Wonder into any large bookshop in Beijing (and I guess anywhere else in China), and you can find books in Chinese with titles like: "Discover the secrets of the Jews", "Jewish business wisdom" and "How to be as successful as a Jew". On the back cover you will usually find phrases like: "the Jews are the cleverest, richest and most successful people in the world. Learn the secrets of their success". Books with similar titles would be considered at best very dubious, and at worst downright antisemitic, anywhere in the Western world. But the fact is that here in China, such books can be seen as a sort of distorted compliment to the Jews.

In China most people have never met a Jew, but there is one extremely common stereotype about them: they are very intelligent. The huge number of succesful Jews in every field, from Einstein to Freud, is considered proof enough. Whenever I have told a Chinese person that my mother's family is Jewish, I have almost always been told: "oh, you must be very clever then." (the Chinese, not having our Western notions of political correctness, are quite happy to assume that every single Jew must be intelligent, with no exceptions). The stereotype that Jews are wealthy also exists, but it is not seen as something to be envied or hated, but rather just another proof of the Jews' abilities and intelligence. All the negative stereotypes of the Jews as stingy and clannish which infest Western culture simply haven't made their way here, thank goodness.

In today's extremely competitive and materialistic Chinese society, success in work is an obsession for many, and this coupled with the belief that Jews are inherently successful and smart can produce some curious results: a Chinese girl I once knew had actually read the Talmud (in Chinese of course), because she had heard that reading it could help you to achieve success in life (if the Jews are so succesful there must be a reason after all).
I must say that I can't help but feel ambiguous about these Jewish-themed business success guides in Chinese bookshops. I know there isn't any hostility towards the Jews behind them, but I can't help wondering if it is a good thing to encourage the stereotype of Jewish wealth and success in business which has brought the Jews so much misfortune elsewhere.

(Below, the cover of a Chinese book entitled "the Business Acumen of the Jews")

Berlusconi's secret society

Berlusconi has resigned as Italy’s Prime Minister. It is too early to know whether we have finally seen the back of him in Italian politics, but given his age (75) it does seem likely that Italy will never be governed by him again.

The man has been the dominant figure in Italian politics for 17 years, from his sudden entry into politics in 1994 until today. He won the elections three times (in 1994, 2001 and 2008) and lost them twice (1996 and 2006), and the government he formed in 2001 was the only one in the history of the Italian Republic to survive until the end of its term.

I think it is hard for people who can’t speak italian and aren’t well acquainted with the country to understand just how corrupt and indecent the man and his cronies are. Any one of the scandals surrounding him, from his trials for corruption to his sex with underage girls, his relationship with convicted mafia bosses, his obscene and offensive puns and pranks, his blatant conflict of interests and his laws tailor-made to save him from prosecution, would have been enough on their own to cause his resignation in most western countries. His continuing hold on Italy has done great damage to the country’s international reputation, especially in these last few years. At the same time his ownership of Italy’s most popular private television channels, which hold a great influence over the less educated sectors of the population, helps to ensure that most of his voters aren’t even aware what the world thinks of their prime minister. One scandal above all others seems to me to be worth mentioning, especially since it is virtually unknown outside of Italy, and even within Italy it has been all but forgotten by most people.

In the early eighties Berlusconi was a member of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge, alongside numerous other members of the italian elite. This is not some conspiracy theory, but a fact which was certified by a police investigation at the time. The P2 lodge (the name stands for Propaganda 2) was a freemason lodge headed by Licio Gelli, a shady Italian businessman who started off as a liaison officer between the Italian and German fascist regimes during the Second World War, and chose to participate in Mussolini’s puppet state, the “Republic of Salo’”, after the Nazis invaded Italy. After the war he went on being a convinced fascist, joining a small party on the extreme right, and in 1966 he took on the leadership of the P2, a lodge which fell under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy, the official Italian Freemason organization. Slowly, Gelli set about using his powerful connections to bring as many politicians, industrialists, and military leaders as possible into the lodge, and turning it into a vehicle for his vehemently right wing ideas. The Freemasons expelled or suspended the P2 lodge in 1974 (it has never been quite clear), after finding out what Gelli was up to, but the lodge went on existing illegally, violating Italian laws against the constitution of secret societies.

The existence of the lodge came to light in 1981, during a police investigation into the collapse of Michele Sindona’s financial empire. A list of members was found in Gelli’s home, and the names included a host of important politicians and businessmen, the heads of all three of Italy’s secret services and the son of the last deposed king of Italy. They also included Berlusconi. Later on, a couple of documents were found hidden in the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli’s daughter in Rome airport. One of the documents, ironically entitled “Plan for a democratic rebirth”, is generally seen as the P2’s political program. The document clearly stated the aim of turning Italy into an authoritarian right-wing state so as to curtail the influence of the Communist Party and the trade unions. This was to be done by placing P2 members in key positions in the country's institutions and engaging in widespread political corruption. These were no empty threats. Gelli himself had taken part in the failed coup organized by the former fascist general Junio Valerio Borghese in 1970, whose aim was to set up an authoritarian right wing dictatorship. He was on excellent terms with the leaders of Argentina’s military regime. And Italy’s neighbor Greece had become a fascist dictatorship as a result of a right wing military coup a few years earlier.

Berlusconi has never denied being part of this shadowy secret organization dedicated to subverting democracy, but when asked about it he has simply given evasive answers, saying that he didn’t really know what he was getting into. Of course, you would never hear the issue mentioned at all on Berlusconi’s TV channels. As a matter of fact, you would hardly ever hear about it on the state channels or on independent newspapers either. Quite simply, it has become one of the outrageous facts about Berlusconi’s past which are well known and documented, but do not seem to have any impact on his popularity with the half of the Italian population which has supported him for years.

Simplified vs. traditional Chinese characters

Today I would like to share some thoughts with you about the simplification of the Chinese characters. It is well known that the characters now used in Mainland China were simplified in the middle of the twentieth century, so as to make literacy more accessible to the masses. The vast majority of people learning Chinese throughout the world, and all those who learn it within the People’s Republic of China, will be familiar with the simplified characters.

For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, I will give some background: various Chinese intellectuals started suggesting that the Chinese writing system should be simplified towards the beginning of the twentieth Century, especially after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when traditional Chinese culture was challenged by modernizers. There was an attempt by the Guomindang government to simplify the characters already in 1935, something which makes the current die-hard opposition to the simplified characters in Taiwan all the more curious.

After the revolution, the characters were simplified in two rounds, one in 1956 and one in 1964. The simplification involved reducing the number of strokes and the complexity of the characters. Many of the simplified forms had already been used in handwriting for years. A few characters which had the same pronunciation and meaning were merged. Many characters were also left entirely the same. There was a second round of simplification in 1977, just after the Cultural Revolution, but due to widespread opposition and confusion the reform was abolished in 1986. A few of the simplifications introduced in 1977 can still sometimes be seen I handwritten signs, for instance仃for 停 and歺for 餐 (I can see why people like that one).

While the People’s Republic of China and Singapore officially use the simplified characters, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau continue to use the traditional ones. In some cases, the traditional characters can be extremely more complicated than the simplified ones. Take 个，the most basic Chinese character, whose traditional form is個. Or 与, which becomes與.

I have personally never studied the traditional characters, and although I find I can guess some of the most basic ones, I am basically unable to read them. Here in Mainland China, traditional characters are usually only found in ceremonial circumstances or in logos, although most people seem to know them to some degree. The only time I find not knowing them a problem is when I go to karaoke parlors, since most of the karaoke machines have subtexts in traditional characters, because they are produced in Taiwan.

When I studied Chinese in Qinghua I used to sit next to a student from Hong Kong. He was dead against the simplified characters, and tried various times to convince how they are ugly, illogical and actually more difficult to learn than the traditional forms. A hostile attitude towards simplified characters is apparently widespread amongst the Chinese outside the Mainland and especially in Taiwan. In Taiwan people are basically convinced that the simplification of the characters was part of an evil Communist ploy to destroy traditional Chinese culture, and that they are the defenders of Chinese tradition because they stick to the old writing form. This is in spite of the fact that it was by no means only members of the CCP who initially wanted Chinese writing to be simplified.

I have been surprised however to notice that even quite a few Chinese Mainlanders, when asked, will lament the disappearance of the traditional characters and even advocate their return. I have heard many people argue that the traditional characters are preferable because they “contain Chinese traditional culture”, and that they are actually easier because you can guess the meaning just by looking at the character.

Although I realize that since I am not Chinese and I don’t know the traditional characters, most Chinese people would not take my opinions on the issue very seriously, I am still going to share my thoughts on the matter. Even though I am not literate in the traditional characters, I find the idea they are easier because they allow you to guess their meaning rather improbable. Although a few of the traditional characters may have a rather obvious relationship between their shape and their meaning which is lost in the simplified form, this is not such a common occurrence. In any case, the traditional characters have got to be much harder to learn to write by hand and to differentiate, and in a country where it takes children until high school to learn to read and write, this has to be an important point.

It may be because I am not used to it, but when I see a website written in traditional characters I can’t even make many of them out without enlarging the font size, because they are so full of strokes. Although this can also happen with a few particularly complex simplified characters, it is much rarer. The traditional characters seem to me to be impractically complicated for a modern society to use (although the Taiwanese seem to manage somehow). Then again, isn’t that true for the entire Chinese writing system? It is impractically complex, but the Chinese manage one way or another. In the past there were proposals to just overhaul the entire character system and only use pinyin. However, they never gained much popularity.

There is the argument that Chinese could not practically be written solely in pinyin, because the language is so full of homophones that in some cases the meaning is ambiguous if you use a phonetic script. If this is so, it means that the characters have to be kept, but simplifying them seems to me to be a reasonable move. The fact that after World War II the Japanese also simplified the Chinese characters which they use suggests that it is a natural step towards creating a modern society where the writing system has to be accessible to the masses. It is true that modifying the characters could be viewed as a cultural loss, but then again Chinese characters and all other writing systems have changed throughout history, and it is right that they should keep on changing.

And as a final point, poor foreigners in China like me already struggle enough to learn Chinese as it is. With the traditional characters the difficulty would be even greater. This is not such an irrelevant point. As more and more foreigners flock to China, and more and more people around the world take an interest in learning Chinese, it is important that the writing system be easy enough for them to at least have a chance of becoming functional in it.

On the girl run over in China

Most of you will probably have heard about the horrible case of the two year old girl who was run over by a van in Foshan, Guangdong province, and was ignored by 18 passers-by until finally a 57 year old rag collector picked her up and tried to find her parents.

The story has received lots of attention within China as well as worlwide. The incident has produced much soul searching and revulsion. There is an assumption that some recent high-profile cases in which people who tried to help someone who had had an accident were later blamed and sued by the person they wanted to help have discouraged people from assisting strangers. There is now discussion of changing the law to protect and reward those who offer assistance to strangers. The government has also promised a big reward for the woman who finally tried to help the little girl.

And of course, just a few days after the event the Chinese press has conveniently come up with a different story about how in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, a 22 year old girl who was hit by a car was immediately helped by by passers-by and the workers from a nearby construction site, who came, lifted the car up from on top of her and called the emergency services.

Websites directed mainly at expats in China, for instance chinasmack, shanghaiist and echinacities, have all run articles about the incident. And of course, if you look at the comments under the articles, you will find the usual outpouring of expat prejudice and hostility towards China and the Chinese, mixed with some (rare) intelligent comments. For many of the commenters, this episode shows how the Chinese and their culture are indeed basically flawed, how they only care about money, how they have no morals or compassion, how this country is basically a hell-hole etc....

The fact that the incident has precipitated a lot of public disgust and condemnation within China would already seem to disprove this vision of things. Not to mention the fact that in the end it was a poor rag collector who did try to intervene.

Another important fact to remember is that this sort of thing can happen anywhere. For instance, in 2010 there was a case in New York in which a Guatemalan homeless man was stabbed while trying to save a woman from an attacker with a knife, and he then bled to death on the pavement as dozens of people walked by and did not help or call for an ambulance. One person even stopped to take a photo. Just as in the case of the girl in China, it was all captured by a surveillance camera. Clearly heartlessness towards strangers in big cities is not limited to China.

My assumption is that what stopped those passers-by from intervening was a mixture of fear of being blamed themselves and getting into trouble, and the idea that someone competent would surely deal with it anyway and that they might as well mind their own business. One of the passers-by who ignored the girl has spoken out, according to a report by China Daily. Here is the excerpt from the article:

Many of the 18 people who passed by the girl at the accident scene and did not help denied that they saw the girl or were aware of the situation.

One of them, a mother of a five-year-old girl, said she felt "regretful, compassionate, painful at heart and guilty," for seeing Yue Yue but not helping her.

"I thought she had fallen down from playing and didn't know she was run over by vehicles until her mother came in tears.

"She was bleeding from the mouth and nose and crying faintly. I was scared and my daughter was scared to cry. So we left in a hurry," said the woman surnamed Lin, cited by Guangzhou Daily.

"I wanted to lift her, but there was so much blood. I was scared. If someone was helping at that time, I would have done the same."