It's worth adding - because almost no-one seems to know this - that Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung were racing to start a war in 1950. Stalin had given them both the go-ahead to invade the remaining parts of their countries (ie Taiwan and South Korea respectively). Because Kim got there first (indeed, he attacked ahead of the date that the Russians were intending), and the US reaction was as strong as it was, an agreed Russian export of landing craft to the PRC was cancelled, resulting in the invasion of Taiwan having to be postponed.
If Kim had held off and the two invasions had happened simultaneously, or Taiwan had been first, who knows how different the last 70 years would have been.
Also, the Americans were up to something: Truman was secretly trying to get the USSR or one of its puppets to start a war so he had an excuse to raise US military spending; they'd dropped it by too much at the end of WWII and he couldn't politically justify raising it for the Cold War, which seemed, after the Berlin Airlift and the Greek Civil War had ended to be fizzling out in 1949-50. This only came out when the official papers did seventy years after the events, ie in 2020 - right in the middle of the pandemic so you really had to be paying attention to notice!
Oh yes! This was actually briefly covered in Diplomacy in Modern China, a history professor's lecture that I translated. Didn't know about the Truman side of things though!
> Most Chinese people are completely unaware of the naval battles in the Pacific theatre, and are only vaguely aware of the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Wait, seriously? America is the first and only country to ever use atomic weapons against enemies, and not just enemies but enemy civilians. How is this not a basic element of propaganda? Except I shouldn't even call it "propaganda" because it's true!
Well no, I mean, people know it happened--that's a little too important to world history to not teach. But it's often taught in a very disconnected way. Like, you have the WWII unit, where you only talk about the Chinese resistant more or less. And then later on, you'll have an American unit, where you'll learn they nuked the Japanese. But when, where, how many people died, and whether it was related to the war ending isn't connected to each other at all.
So in people's minds, the events of "Japan got nuked" and "Japan surrendered" are very disconnected. And when it comes to the reason for a Japanese surrender, nukes aren't listed as the reason why, but instead that they were experiencing a economic collapse due to losing Manchuria. The reason they were losing Manchuria isn't really clarified either, so it sounds like the Chinese resistance is the primary reason that Japan surrendered.
A point of correction: Chiang Kai-Shek can't be Wade-Giles because Wade-Giles romanizes Putonghua, which doesn't have nonnasal final consonants, as you are no doubt aware. It's aome other romanization, but I can't tell what it is.
I would argue that character simplification is middle-of-the-pack for CCP policies, but considering that I think good CCP policies are few and far between, that means it's just a bad idea. I've ranted about this too many times already so here's an edited version of my latest:
The simplification as done in Mainland China is crap. It favors simplification of characters rather than the simplification of script. Instead the script is complicated. The following example is an extreme, but it illustrates the point well in my mind:
While most examples are not as extreme as the last one, with only one or two characters that are completely graphically unrelated merged into the phonetic series, the sheer number of series with newly introduced exceptions is astonishing. The character simplification project also merges some characters: 后 < 后 "queen"、後 "behind, after, afterwards", and inexplicably leaves some characters from phonetic series un- or inconsistently simplified: 襄、让 < 讓、镶 < 鑲、酿 < 釀、攘
Lastly, the characters are simplified with a bias towards Mandarinic languages, and even then only as a byproduct of their similarity to Standarin (Standard Mandarin, Putonghua), no doubt due to the CCP's linguistically genocidal agenda. To this day, there are banners with the slogan "Speak the Common Tongue [Standarin]; Be a civilized person."
/endrant
What a proper script simplification should not be is just hacking away at strokes and reducing their number. That's just the simplification of characters. The simplification of a *script* involves smoothing out irregularities, introducing new regularities so that the system *as a whole* becomes *a system*, i.e. becomes systematic, such that it is easier to remember. Right now, the simplified charactets do not achieve this standard, and thus should be considered a bad script reform.
To be fair, it's not like English is super consistent either, and simplified Chinese is just so much easier to work with T_T. I want to cut my hands off every time I have to write out complicated characters TT_TT
And I was impressed with the simplification because, I don't know if this is literally just me, but I never actually learned traditional Chinese at any point, but at 6-7 years old, I was able to just pick up a book written in traditional Chinese and keep reading. I could tell from context clues what the characters meant, even when they were different from their simplified versions. I thought that was impressive, to leave most characters recognisable enough that you don't need to re-learn literacy in Traditional Chinese.
Yeah, English is terrible too! I think most of is share the experience with picking up a book with the other set of characters and being able to read through them, but the weird ones are always inexplicable: Why does 买 look more like 實 than 買?
It's worth adding - because almost no-one seems to know this - that Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung were racing to start a war in 1950. Stalin had given them both the go-ahead to invade the remaining parts of their countries (ie Taiwan and South Korea respectively). Because Kim got there first (indeed, he attacked ahead of the date that the Russians were intending), and the US reaction was as strong as it was, an agreed Russian export of landing craft to the PRC was cancelled, resulting in the invasion of Taiwan having to be postponed.
If Kim had held off and the two invasions had happened simultaneously, or Taiwan had been first, who knows how different the last 70 years would have been.
Also, the Americans were up to something: Truman was secretly trying to get the USSR or one of its puppets to start a war so he had an excuse to raise US military spending; they'd dropped it by too much at the end of WWII and he couldn't politically justify raising it for the Cold War, which seemed, after the Berlin Airlift and the Greek Civil War had ended to be fizzling out in 1949-50. This only came out when the official papers did seventy years after the events, ie in 2020 - right in the middle of the pandemic so you really had to be paying attention to notice!
Oh yes! This was actually briefly covered in Diplomacy in Modern China, a history professor's lecture that I translated. Didn't know about the Truman side of things though!
> Most Chinese people are completely unaware of the naval battles in the Pacific theatre, and are only vaguely aware of the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Wait, seriously? America is the first and only country to ever use atomic weapons against enemies, and not just enemies but enemy civilians. How is this not a basic element of propaganda? Except I shouldn't even call it "propaganda" because it's true!
Well no, I mean, people know it happened--that's a little too important to world history to not teach. But it's often taught in a very disconnected way. Like, you have the WWII unit, where you only talk about the Chinese resistant more or less. And then later on, you'll have an American unit, where you'll learn they nuked the Japanese. But when, where, how many people died, and whether it was related to the war ending isn't connected to each other at all.
So in people's minds, the events of "Japan got nuked" and "Japan surrendered" are very disconnected. And when it comes to the reason for a Japanese surrender, nukes aren't listed as the reason why, but instead that they were experiencing a economic collapse due to losing Manchuria. The reason they were losing Manchuria isn't really clarified either, so it sounds like the Chinese resistance is the primary reason that Japan surrendered.
This is brilliant and delightful and fascinating: thank you!
Aww~ That is so sweet~ thank you for reading <3
A point of correction: Chiang Kai-Shek can't be Wade-Giles because Wade-Giles romanizes Putonghua, which doesn't have nonnasal final consonants, as you are no doubt aware. It's aome other romanization, but I can't tell what it is.
I would argue that character simplification is middle-of-the-pack for CCP policies, but considering that I think good CCP policies are few and far between, that means it's just a bad idea. I've ranted about this too many times already so here's an edited version of my latest:
The simplification as done in Mainland China is crap. It favors simplification of characters rather than the simplification of script. Instead the script is complicated. The following example is an extreme, but it illustrates the point well in my mind:
又 < 又 (unchanged) "also, again"; 汉 < 漢 "Sino-, Han"; 劝 < 勸 "warn"; 鳮 < 雞 "chicken"
Standarin: yòu /jou/; hàn /xan/, quàn /tɕʰɥɛn/, jī /tɕi/
Cantonese: jau⁶ /jɐu/; hon³ /hɔːn/; hyun³ /hyːn/; gai¹ /kɐi/
Hakka: yìu /jiu/; hòn /hɔn/; kièn /kʰjen/; gái /kai/
Taiwanese: iū /iu/; hàn /han/; khǹg /kʰŋ̍/; koe /kwe/
Shanghainese: ³ghieu /ɦiɤ/; ²hoe /hø/; ²chioe /tɕʰɥø/; ¹ci /tɕi/
While most examples are not as extreme as the last one, with only one or two characters that are completely graphically unrelated merged into the phonetic series, the sheer number of series with newly introduced exceptions is astonishing. The character simplification project also merges some characters: 后 < 后 "queen"、後 "behind, after, afterwards", and inexplicably leaves some characters from phonetic series un- or inconsistently simplified: 襄、让 < 讓、镶 < 鑲、酿 < 釀、攘
Lastly, the characters are simplified with a bias towards Mandarinic languages, and even then only as a byproduct of their similarity to Standarin (Standard Mandarin, Putonghua), no doubt due to the CCP's linguistically genocidal agenda. To this day, there are banners with the slogan "Speak the Common Tongue [Standarin]; Be a civilized person."
/endrant
What a proper script simplification should not be is just hacking away at strokes and reducing their number. That's just the simplification of characters. The simplification of a *script* involves smoothing out irregularities, introducing new regularities so that the system *as a whole* becomes *a system*, i.e. becomes systematic, such that it is easier to remember. Right now, the simplified charactets do not achieve this standard, and thus should be considered a bad script reform.
To be fair, it's not like English is super consistent either, and simplified Chinese is just so much easier to work with T_T. I want to cut my hands off every time I have to write out complicated characters TT_TT
And I was impressed with the simplification because, I don't know if this is literally just me, but I never actually learned traditional Chinese at any point, but at 6-7 years old, I was able to just pick up a book written in traditional Chinese and keep reading. I could tell from context clues what the characters meant, even when they were different from their simplified versions. I thought that was impressive, to leave most characters recognisable enough that you don't need to re-learn literacy in Traditional Chinese.
Yeah, English is terrible too! I think most of is share the experience with picking up a book with the other set of characters and being able to read through them, but the weird ones are always inexplicable: Why does 买 look more like 實 than 買?