PEN America protests Hong Kong’s criminalization of book-selling.
From China File, some brief analysis of XI Jinping’s visit to Putin.
Jamestown Foundation’s Willy Lo-lop Lam asks (rhetorically) whether Xi Jinping Thought can lead the way to the end of politics in China and Marx’s envisioned communist utopia.
A Guardian story on a UK lawmakers’ visit to Taiwan deserves credit for three things. First, the succinct summary of the China-Taiwan situation…
China’s Communist party government claims Taiwan as a province, which it intends to annex, by force if necessary. Taiwan’s democratically elected government and the vast majority of its people reject the prospect of Chinese rule.
Second, referring to Beijing’s response to UK military sales to Taiwan (‘a serious violation of the one-China principle’), the accurate but all-too-rare summary…
The one-China principle is a domestic Chinese edict which encompasses its claim over Taiwan. Other governments maintain their own one-China policies, which dictate the varying levels of recognition given to China’s principle
And third, the paper ignores Beijing’s inevitable ‘anger’ over the parliamentarians’ trip.
Finally, Andrew Batson looks at the lack of separate ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’ pronouns in spoken Chinese.
Mr. Batson ignores that most personal names in Chinese are gender specific, but still I do agree that there’s no need for gender specific versions of the third person pronoun (or the animal ones either)- but then, I’d also be fine with doing away with the character writing system altogether and using something phonetic.
OT but has the transport s0-called minister ever looked at a map? Cross-harbour tunnel via Lantau…
New artificial islands to be built near Lantau could allow Hong Kong to construct its fourth cross-harbour tunnel without going through congested urban areas, the city’s transport minister said
You say “…most personal names in Chinese are gender specific”
And in what language are most personal names NOT gender specific?
@@justsayin – fair play, that would be the case most of the time. My points here were that
1. It is tenuous to say ‘It is possible to have an extended conversation in Chinese about a person who is not present without ever specifying whether that person is male or female, and indeed for the participants in that conversation to not actually know that person’s gender.’ – because the person’s gender is likely implied in the person’s name (For example, when we are talking about someone called ‘Regina’, we know the gender is ‘broom head’ without me having to specify it, etc.)
2. China did not all of a sudden become a gender-unbalanced society with the addition of the written male/female pronoun and will not become the reverse if they were abolished and it’s blithe to say otherwise
FWIW I’d be all for introducing the usage of something like Japanese ‘san’ globally, which is gender-neutral