Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
...it's not possible to run a repressive and economically dynamic country at the same time.
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I used to think this was a truism, but I don't think the evidence supports it anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
There needs to be a way for successful companies and ideas to grow and bad ones to die, and having a strong man in charge of a patronage system is at odds with that.
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But China is Communist in name only. It's fully capitalist, with competing companies and everything. It's got all of the tangibles and intangibles you need to grow companies as big as you like and come up with all of the innovations you could ever wish for, it's just that you can't ever say anything bad about the government or that anything in China is inferior to what they have in other countries.
We think it's hard to juggle this, but it's not. You can easily find the capital to employ geniuses to invent a better mousetrap while keeping your mouth shut about contentious political issues. People do it all the time. The engineers working on Apollo 11 weren't marching in the streets for black rights or against the Vietnam War. Just as many innovative inventions and amazing breakthroughs have come from Europe as have been produced in the US where the huddled masses yearn to breathe free (admittedly most of Europe isn't all that "unfree").
One thing we Chinese-to-English translators know is that we often encounter terms in Chinese without long-established English equivalents due to the decline in manufacturing in North America and the rise in scientific and medical research in China. English is still the default language of, well,
everything, but my guess is that over the next couple decades Chinese will probably overtake Japanese as the most important Asian language for science and technology (is Japanese currently second to English for this, or is German more important than Japanese? Dunno...)