Last time I was in Beijing, late-teen school girls in two's and three's would approach me on a major shopping street (Wangfujing, if X is reading), ask if I was an American, and then ask if they could practice some English phrases with me. I'd go through the exercise, then ask them why they were learning English. To a girl, they replied that they wanted to work for 'big American company'.

This is why Boxerism, Nipism, Leninism, Islamacism and all the rest always play dirty. If they play fair, they lose big time.

Everything's fair if you win.

the fact that a given idea/ideology recognizes that it can't survive against competing ideas/ideologies tells us that even its most loyal adherents don't believe in it. but i do agree that winning counts for everything, when the stakes are high enough.

Ah, but there it is. The dirtier they play, the more they lose. Their pathologies are ultimately weaknesses. "Contradictions," some people call this.

Yes, that's what King George thought.

Let's bring her here. She can follow oj around reading out loud from Ulysses.

The fascinating thing about the Chinese family of languages is that while all literate Chinese understand written Chinese characters in the same way, the major spoken forms of Chinese are basically mutually incomprehensible. In other words, they really are different languages in much the way that Spanish, French, Portugese, and Italian belong to the Romance family of languages but remain distinct languages.

Thus, while those who speak one of the various forms of Mandarin Chinese as a mother tongue make up by far the numerical majority of Chinese speakers, there are still hundreds of millions of speakers of such Chinese languages as Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), Hakka (the language spoken by many of the leaders of the massive Taiping Rebellion that cost some 30 million lives 150 years ago), and Min (spoken primarily in Taiwan and Fujian).

The decision of Chinese governments, whether in Communist China or KMT Taiwan, to impose Mandarin Chinese as the "national language" was a political one, with all of the potential problems that can develop from the effort of one linguistic group to force the other groups to conform.

Remember that China is not the United States, where in the long term immigrants and immigrant groups accept and learn English as their primary lanugage, and understand this opens the way to untold opportunities of advancement and to being able to exercise the rights of equal citizenship in a free society. In the Chinese world, the areas where non-Mandarin Chinese languages are spoken are as large as the biggest European states and have separate linguistic histories and cultural traditions that are as long and as rich. In Communist China and KMT Taiwan, the imposition of Mandarin Chinese was used as a tool of political domination.

Where am I going with this?

In India, English serves as a politically neutral and uniting force, and facilitates communication between native speakers of the country's multitude of languages. Moreover, that many millions of upper-class Indians can speak English with each other and with the outside world will be an incredible asset in India's coming emergence as an economic superpower.

It might or might not happen in China on the same scale. But the widespread and growing popularity of English as a second or thrd language in the Chinese world - Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China - among its best educated people could give future leaders of a democratic China an unexpected gift that will allow them to discard the linguistic imperialism of the past and to be able to integrate even more effectively into a global economy that will give them a prosperity unheard of in all of Chinese history.

X:

Conversely, given the at least linguistic divides, why do people think of China as a necessarily unified whole?

oj:

My experience with mostly Cantonese speakers (from southern China) is that they still consider themselves "Chinese". X's list of different dialects from different regions of the country encompasses people who are ethnically "Han Chinese". I suppose in that respect they are unified. But there are a lot of other ethnicities, particularly in the south, south central, and south west provinces of China, that I imagine feel very little simpatico with the ruling class (which I think is all ethnically Han).

Fred, you're correct that the speakers of the different Chinese languages currently think of themselves as belonging to the same ethnicity called the Han. But ethnicity is a tricky thing. Nothing is forever.

Ethnic groups disappear. At one point several centuries ago, New England Yankees probably were an ethnic group. But they don't exist anymore. Neither do the Roman people, even though they thrived for centuries.

Sometimes, ethnic groups come together to form larger identities. The Han Chinese are a perfect example of this, having been forged from many different tribal and linguistic groups over many centuries.

Ethnic groups also break up. In the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution in China, there was a brief moment when separatist movements emerged, with many provinces claiming separate political identities. Given enough time and the right political conditions, those provincial identities could well have been transformed into ethnic loyalties. As I've mentioned before, in his early youth, even Mao himself was a fierce proponent of Hunanese nationhood and identity! In the end, nothing came of those sentiments. But the historical possibility was shown to exist, even if only briefly, which revealed that an overarching Han identity was as open to change as much as any other ethnic group.

That's why all Chinese governments in modern times have insisted Mandarin Chinese be the "national language" and have used political power to enforce this insistence. That's why the Communist government on the mainland has always denounced "localism." That's also why the KMT in Taiwan tried to relegate the Taiwanese form of the Min language to third-class status. Finally, that's also why the mainland Chinese are terrified of the idea of an independent Taiwan. Deep down inside, Chinese governments understand that there are no laws of history that say, "All speakers of Chinese languages belong to the same ethnic group forever." Yes, life is interesting.

Fascinating post and string, thank you all. I've read that both Sun Yat-sen and Mao both saw the need to achieve Chinese unification. Implicit here is their recognition that China was not a whole but had to be made one. Can it be said that this is no longer a problem needing a solution?

Rather, it might no longer be considered soluble. Unification has failed everywhere