Miscellaneous News

kentchang said:

Small historical footnote. The term 国语 was actually a committee effort to created a common tongue for China like Esperanto during the Republican era. Unfortunately, by trying to be inclusive of all the major dialects including Hakka, not even the linguists themselves can master the resulting Frankenstein'ish pronounciations let along the 90+% illiterate population. They gave up and after the Northern Expedition, the Luanping/Beijing dialect was adopted as noted. Twenty years later, after the Civil War, The commies retained the same and took what the Soviets did, changed a few things (e.g. replacing double-letters with single letters like Q and X), and called it Pinyin. Some linguists (maybe the children of the original group) wanted to replace Chinese written characters with Pinyin romanizations to ease the learning for the 90+% illiterate population (not much social progress between 1910 and 1950). Thank god they didn't succeed but they settled on Simplified characters. The Koreans succeeded in coming up with a completely phonetic language but they still retained Chinese character-based names.

I wish China will go back to the Traditional character set eventually. With illiteracy eradicated and assistive technologies like keyboards and speech recognition, character complexity is no longer an issue. The traditional character for 'LOVE' embeds a HEART character. The commies removed the HEART. Inexcusable and unforgivable.


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The simplified character for "love" replaces the "heart" with "friendship" instead. If you ask me that's a stroke of genius. They managed to achieve three goals at once: decrease the stroke count, maintain the overall shape of the character and still retain the semantic component of the character despite substitution by reusing half of the traditional character's strokes to form the "friendship".

I would also note that simplification was an initiative that began under KMT prior to 1949. CPC continued it once PRC was formed yet at the same time KMT abandoned the idea and reversed their own progress after retreating to Taiwan just so they could be different from the mainland.

Thankfully simplified character is in fact starting to catch on in Taiwan's youth due to pop media channels like 小红书, much to DPP's annoyance.

B.I.B. said:

If the dollar used for trade settlement is not against WTO rules then China needs to persuade other countries she buys iron ore from to take at the very least RMB for payment/part payment. At the appropriate time, she can make the same demand of the Aussies ore, wine barley, etc. If the Aussies don't agree then walk away. I don't know if the Aussies have a case to take to the WTO.

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The use of the US Dollar to settle international trade, is not mandatory.

This is rooted in history, where the biggest and most economically successful country had the most influence, including trade. That country's currency becomes the key currency of the world, where everyone uses to make life easier.

Several European countries had that role with their currency being the key currency over the centuries. Usually the key currency rose and fell along with that nation's empire. At the end, often there is a debasement of the currency, they print money to pay debts, (sounds familiar).

When the Chinese say to the Saudis, we buy your oil in RMB, then in turn you buy our Huawei cell phones made in China, with the same RMB we just gave you, that is nothing new or unique.

This is the exact relationship between the Saudis and the Americans. In the 1970's America was the world's biggest oil importer and by far the largest and most advanced economy in the world. It was unimaginable how advanced the Americans were, compared to everyone else.

The Americans needed oil. They paid for the oil to the Saudis who were the biggest producers. Now the Saudis have all these US Dollars. Eventually these dollars would be referred to as "Petro-dollars", because being the key currency, the price of oil is quoted in dollars. The Saudis accumulated all these dollars, too much to spend. So the Americans and Saudis agreed that Saudi Arabia would buy all these American armaments, an arrangement that continues to today, and that Saudi Arabia would buy US debt as in US Treasury bonds.

What is going on today with the use of the currencies in trade, is nothing new, it is the same old game. The Chinese are a new and competent player, and they really good at this. They are not doing anything radical for wanting others to use the RMB to settle trade.

What the Chinese are doing that is really radical, is the DCEP. They go slow, because no one knows what this can do the current system. The current system with the key current, still require banks.

An electronic currency based on blockchain, which I believe is an anonymous distributed network, needs no banks for settlement.

Well, like, eh, it is rather complicated at this stage of this post.

We have to have some understanding of what happened in the past, and how we are developing in the moment, and then this new idea of an electronic currency, based on a new tech blockchain, suddenly appears and what does that mean?

No one knows.

At this point, I feel it gets even more complicated, so rather not continue the rant, lol.

If Saudis switched from USD to RMB today, all the western MSM would be doing 24/7 hit pieces about their human rights record tomorrow with regime change the day after.

horse said:

The use of the US Dollar to settle international trade, is not mandatory.

This is rooted in history, where the biggest and most economically successful country had the most influence, including trade. That country's currency becomes the key currency of the world, where everyone uses to make life easier.

Several European countries had that role with their currency being the key currency over the centuries. Usually the key currency rose and fell along with that nation's empire. At the end, often there is a debasement of the currency, they print money to pay debts, (sounds familiar).

When the Chinese say to the Saudis, we buy your oil in RMB, then in turn you buy our Huawei cell phones made in China, with the same RMB we just gave you, that is nothing new or unique.

This is the exact relationship between the Saudis and the Americans. In the 1970's America was the world's biggest oil importer and by far the largest and most advanced economy in the world. It was unimaginable how advanced the Americans were, compared to everyone else.

The Americans needed oil. They paid for the oil to the Saudis who were the biggest producers. Now the Saudis have all these US Dollars. Eventually these dollars would be referred to as "Petro-dollars", because being the key currency, the price of oil is quoted in dollars. The Saudis accumulated all these dollars, too much to spend. So the Americans and Saudis agreed that Saudi Arabia would buy all these American armaments, an arrangement that continues to today, and that Saudi Arabia would buy US debt as in US Treasury bonds.

What is going on today with the use of the currencies in trade, is nothing new, it is the same old game. The Chinese are a new and competent player, and they really good at this. They are not doing anything radical for wanting others to use the RMB to settle trade.

What the Chinese are doing that is really radical, is the DCEP. They go slow, because no one knows what this can do the current system. The current system with the key current, still require banks.

An electronic currency based on blockchain, which I believe is an anonymous distributed network, needs no banks for settlement.

Well, like, eh, it is rather complicated at this stage of this post.

We have to have some understanding of what happened in the past, and how we are developing in the moment, and then this new idea of an electronic currency, based on a new tech blockchain, suddenly appears and what does that mean?

No one knows.

At this point, I feel it gets even more complicated, so rather not continue the rant, lol.

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What is happening to China's version of the oil selling and future purchases vechile like Brent Sea Crude. Ive forgotten its official name One doest hear much talk about it these days.

kentchang said:

I wish China will go back to the Traditional character set eventually. With illiteracy eradicated and assistive technologies like keyboards and speech recognition, character complexity is no longer an issue. The traditional character for 'LOVE' embeds a HEART character. The commies removed the HEART. Inexcusable and unforgivable.


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That's utterly ridiculous.



Do you know what the above is? It's the calligraphy of Su Dongpo, written some 1000 years ago. Look at the character for 爱, do you see a heart in there?

Simplified characters come from the cursive script, which has been in use since the Han dynasty some 2000 years ago. I suggest you do some learning about the history of Chinese script before spouting nonsense!

B.I.B. said:

What is happening to China's version of the oil selling and future purchases vechile like Brent Sea Crude. Ive forgotten its official name One doest hear much talk about it these days.

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There was a story on it the other day. That futures contract is doing well for a new contract.

China oil futures hit record levels​

Beijing eyes Rmb-denominated markets that seek to challenge dollar’s dominance

Thomas Hale in Hong Kong January 31 2021

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Activity in China’s oil futures market has risen to record levels as the country seeks to develop the role of its currency in a trade dominated by the US dollar.

Open interest in oil futures on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE), a measure of the total number of contracts outstanding, leapt to a daily average of 118,249 in 2020 — four times higher than in 2019. Trading volumes climbed more than 20 per cent year on year.

A rise in trading and positions in the contracts, which were launched in 2018, forms part of a longer-term push by Beijing to establish renminbi-denominated markets that ultimately seek to challenge the dollar’s dominance.

China is the world’s largest importer of crude oil — a role that has intensified thanks to the country’s swift economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis. Last year it imported a record 542m tonnes of crude oil, up 7 per cent from 2019.

But its oil futures market, which is vital for allowing investors to hedge against or speculate on price movements, is still dwarfed by dollar-denominated international benchmarks.

Renminbi oil futures traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange launched in 2018, followed by contracts for copper in November last year that sought to rival London’s dominance in metals trading.

The establishment of its own commodities contracts has been a slow-burn priority in China for the past decade, but has gathered pace alongside financial market liberalisation policies pursued last year as foreign capital rushed to the country in the midst of the pandemic.

Last year, overseas purchases of Chinese bonds and stocks through Hong Kong programmes amounted to about Rmb1tn. In November, China increased foreign investor access to futures markets on the mainland, as part of reforms to its tightly controlled financial system.

Michal Meidan and Adi Imsirovic at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies noted in a recent paper that the INE contract was still “far from being a benchmark”.

But they added that a near collapse in global oil markets last year had boosted the Chinese market’s appeal as increases in storage capacity encouraged established foreign traders to deliver more into China.

“As liberalisation of the Chinese energy market continues, delivered oil market in China will grow in importance and the role of the INE contract will increase with it,” they wrote.

Tom Reed, vice-president at Argus Media, said that some international hedge funds were exploring participating in the Chinese oil futures market. He suggested that the increase in activity was likely to be driven primarily by speculation, including by the country’s retail traders.

“It’s a financial market, but not in the sense that Brent is,” he said. “It’s somewhere for people to put their money and try to make profits from short-term [movements]”.

solarz said:

Korean script is phonetic, so it's like pinyin, except they use their own alphabet instead of the roman one.

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Temstar said:

I asked my Korean friend about their script (hangul) before and he told me the lines, squares and circles are actually a phonetic lettering system similar to hiragana/katakana/pinyin, once you understand the system you immediately know how to pronounce it as soon as you see it, even if you don't know what a particular word means.

In theory we could replace hanzi with pinyin, but of course the speed you'll be able to read an all-pinyin Chinese text would be vastly slower than hanzi (to the degree that it would be unusable) because hanzi itself encodes important contextual information. Basically the problem is to map all possible human thoughts to a fairly limited range of sounds a human mouth can make. Other common languages solve this by simply making words longer and longer, while Chinese solve this by having four tones, homophones and when all else fails then multiple characters per concept. It's hard to learn because the text is very information dense. If you look up UN documents the Chinese version of a given document always has the least number of pages.

Because of its density (one could say, richness), Chinese makes excellent medium for word games.

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Thanks guys. It's like being given the Rosetta Stone

@solarz
Some time ago you were musing on how to teach your children Chinese. I do not know how to post private photoes or video clips otherwise I would have done so at the time as a response The whole scene sort of appealed to me. I was sitting in my car outside a large Chinese supermarket and the grandfather was getting his 7-8ish year old grandson to read out all the specials the store had written on the window and then moving on to the large advertisements placed by various local Chinese business.
You can get your dad or mum to do the same thing.

SilentObserver said:

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South China Sea: challenge to Beijing as French nuclear submarine patrols contested waterway​

• Defence minister says France has exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific that it intends to protect
• Manoeuvre by submarine and support ship is proof French navy can deploy with allies for long periods far from home, Florence Parly says

A French submarine carried out a patrol through the

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as part of efforts by

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to challenge Beijing’s sweeping claims in the disputed waters.

France’s defence minister Florence Parly tweeted late on Monday that the French nuclear attack submarine Émeraude and naval support ship Seine sailed through the contentious waters to “affirm that international law is the only rule that is valid, whatever the sea where we sail”.

“This extraordinary patrol just completed its passage in the South China Sea,” she wrote. “This is striking proof of the capacity of our French navy to deploy far away and for a long time, together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners.”

Parly added that France had exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific region, and intended to

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there.

France has carried out several freedom of navigation operations in the energy-rich South China Sea in the past, joining countries such as Britain and the United States in pushing back against China’s growing dominance in and militarisation of the region. Beijing has overlapping territorial claims in the waters with several neighbours, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

In September last year, France, Germany and Britain issued a joint statement to the United Nations in favour of the

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against most of Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea. The three countries said Beijing’s claims to “historic rights” in the waters did not comply with international law.

Parly said at the

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in June 2019 that Paris would continue to sail in the South China Sea more than twice a year and urged other like-minded countries to follow to maintain open access in the waters.

Beijing has long protested against the presence of foreign warships near the South China Sea, and claimed that France recognised China’s sovereignty in the waters, including over the Spratly Islands. The islands, which China calls the Nansha Islands, were once occupied by France.

The Chinese foreign ministry and defence ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on France’s latest operation.

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What EEZ does they have in that part of the sea? Or they meant to say that they are 'protecting' other countries EEZ?

"Defence minister says France has exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific that it intends to protect.'

Ndla2 said:

What EEZ does they have in that part of the sea? Or they meant to say that they are 'protecting' other countries EEZ?

"Defence minister says France has exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific that it intends to protect.'

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You see they like to think they still own French Indochina.