Comment by XorNot
15 hours ago
The point is you'll be doing business in high technology with China, not America. Helps to speak the language when you negotiate.
15 hours ago
The point is you'll be doing business in high technology with China, not America. Helps to speak the language when you negotiate.
I find this quite true in my field. Recently I attended the biggest conference in computer vision (CVPR), and almost half the time I was there, I heard Chinese instead of English. Most people I met joked that we should learn Mandarin if we want to continue doing AI research now.
America isn’t the only place that speaks English. It’s the global standard language. When a Japanese and a Chinese person negotiate they are already using English.
That is a wild claim
> That is a wild claim
It is not.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
Which part?
6 replies →
I disagree with that.
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
Assuming that's true... if the largest silo is China I can imagine plenty of people wanting to "defect" to China for their own advancement. But you'll have to speak Chinese.
Most countries and transnational organizations continue to use English as the primary lingua franca, even despite China becoming a major R&D hub.
The EU continues to use English as the lingua franca for scientific communication due to the diversity within the EU.
On the India side, research done as part of the pact with Japan [0], Taiwan [1], South Korea [2], the EU [3], and the US [4] is done in English.
And on the Vietnam side (based on my SO's experience), all of her ASEAN-Japan and ASEAN-SK collaboration was done in English as well.
[0] - https://www.jst.go.jp/inter/english/project/country/india.ht...
[1] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[2] - https://www.ikst.res.in/ikst-en/index.do
[3] - https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-resear...
[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/the-us-india-...