QI GE
CHENGDU, Sep. 24
China experimented last week with a campaign urging citizens in 108 cities to take the bus and leave their cars at home. City leaders set the example by riding buses or bicycles, or walking to work, for the whole week. In addition, each city was to come up with at least one "green traffic measure" intended to improve transportation conditions.
These "car-free days" were aimed at raising public awareness of the need to protect the environment, improve traffic congestion and save energy. However, it appears that the officials' good intentions were not appreciated by the public, as the Internet was rife with complaints throughout the week.
A common complaint on major Web sites was that there are far too many official cars on the streets, placing a real drain on state resources. If the number of cars used by officials is not cut down, car-free days will be only a show, with little effect on saving energy or improving the transportation situation, the netizens said.
Similar experiments with car-free days in Western countries have brought similar waves of complaint from citizens who feel they are inconvenienced by the exercise. According to a report in the "Economic Daily" of Paris, 99 French cities carried out a campaign to reduce the use of cars in 2002; in 2003 the number dropped to 72, and in 2005 the number was only 50. Berlin, the capital of Germany, and Rome, the capital of Italy, as well as other major European cities abandoned their car-free campaigns a few years ago in the face of public complaints that they caused a lot of trouble and accomplished nothing.
The complaints of the Chinese public are different from those in other countries, however. Many Chinese think that the key to improving transportation in cities is to reform the use of cars among Communist Party and government officials. If officials' cars could be reduced by half, the effort to deal with congestion, pollution and energy would be made easier, they say. There would also be less corruption if public money were not to be spent on cars.
Some netizens made fun of a Sept. 16 news report published in a number of local media saying that "officials were taking the lead in making good use of buses and bicycles to go to work." The netizens argued that many ordinary people living in cities were taking buses or bicycles to work all the time -- demonstrating that the public is in fact taking the lead in this no-car campaign. The number of private cars is still limited, they point out, while the number of official cars is burgeoning.
According to reports in the state-run media, the number of officials' cars in China has reached 3.5 million. Each year, public expenditure on cars is as high as 300 billion yuan (US$40 billion), which is higher than the military budget and higher than the total budget for education and medical care. Last year the media reported that the number of cars belonging to local governments grows by 20 percent each year. Last year Xinhua News Agency reported that Beijing had at least 490,000 official cars.
The national television station, CCTV, once reported that cars occupied by officials in Beijing took up 80 percent of the road space. The current high cost of gas, various road tolls and traffic fines mean that many families are careful in using their private cars. But since all these expenses are covered by the government in the case of officials, they need not be concerned about these costs.
In many countries, the management of official cars is extremely strict. In the United States, for example, there are strict rules governing the purchase of government cars, and mandatory reports on their use. For security reasons, the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense and a few other top officials are authorized to use official cars. Other high-level officials -- including government department heads, congressmen, governors and mayors -- drive their own private cars to work. Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of New York City, reportedly takes the metro to work every day.
South Korea was able to greatly reduce traffic congestion by introducing reforms on the use of official cars. In Finland, only the prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, minister of the interior and minister of defense are provided with official cars and drivers.
By comparison, in China there are 3.5 million official cars at an annual cost of 300 billion yuan. This is a heavy burden on a country that is not very wealthy. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are the exception; behind the scenes of prosperity in these cities are hundreds of millions of farmers living in poverty. The workers and unemployed people in the poor areas represent the "real" China. Imagine how many people could be raised out of poverty with 300 billion yuan.
This careless use of public funds for cars is a kind of hidden corruption. It reveals a selfish, indifferent and irresponsible attitude on the part of Chinese bureaucrats, no matter how enthusiastically they participate in weeklong car-free campaigns.
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(Qi Ge is the pen name of a freelance writer based in Chengdu, Sichuan province. This article is translated and edited from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online. The original may be found at www.ncn.org. ©Copyright Qi Ge.)
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Chinese may replace English in this century
from: http://tanklao.spaces.live.com
By Tank Lao (Tingkai Liu) at Institute of Hydrobiology, CAS
Chinese has been widely used in East Asia for thousands of years. It was supposed to be the leading global language, but an accident happened. English quite by chance took its place. Will Chinese seize the place? The answer is definitely YES! Because Chinese has so many advantages over European languages including English that I would like to say Chinese is superior to them.
Chinese, especially Chinese characters, is more stable than European languages. An average student of higher schools in China can easily read the books, say Lunyu, Laozi et al, that were written 2000 years ago But a Ph D of native England can hardly read the books their ancestor wrote 500 years ago. In China a pupil of primary school can easily read The Romance of Three Kingdoms which was written more than 600 years ago. Because Chinese is a ideographic language in which the characters are generally true to their ideas while European languages including English are phonetic languages in which the words should be principally true to their pronunciations. For hundreds of years the pronunciation changed, as a result words of English changed; but characters of Chinese remained almost the same. In the next five hundred years, God alone knows what English will become. But Chinese, I predict confidently, will not change so much, especially its writing.
Chinese is more compatible especially the writing Chinese. Some experts in the ISO (international standard organization) classify Chinese as a language family which contains Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Minnan Chinese, Wu Chinese et al. In the speaking sense it's definitely right, but in writing sense it's absolutely wrong. We should admit that that the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than that between English and German. But that is just in speaking. In writing they are almost the same. No matter what kind of Chinese you speak, you can easily communicate with others by writing, because all kinds of Chinese are compatible in the way of using Chinese characters. So Chinese should be identified as one language. But English is different. Although English is considered as one language, An American is quite hard to understand Indian English and African English. Within just 100 years of changing, Americans have difficulties to understand Indian English and African English. In another 100 years Indian English may be identified as an independent language, not English any more. So may African English, Singaporean English, and even Chinese English. But different kinds of Chinese, which underwent thousands of years of changing, are still well compatible. People in the UK have a pride of their language. "English - A global language; English - A global language!" Everyday everywhere they say this. But this is a false pride. Indians speak and write in English, but in their own English, not the global one. So do Chinese, Singaporeans and Africans.
Written Chinese is more informative. Chinese characters carry far more information than any other language. In the five official languages of the United Nation, Chinese is the most informative. According to the report by Benjamin K. Tsou in the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong, the Entropy of Alphabets or Characters is Chinese 9.65 bits, followed by Russian 4.35 bits, then English 4.03 bits, Spanish 4.01 bits and French 3.98 bits. We can put it in another way to understand the report like this: if we use 100 pieces of paper to write a novel in English, it needs only 42 in Chinese, which is nearly 60 percent less than English. If the US uses Chinese as its office language, it will save at least half of its forest that is used to produce paper. So do computer disk and anything that is related to writing. The United States is always trying to save resources and protect the environment. One of the best ways, I suggest here, is to let Chinese become the official language, because Chinese is more informative and will save a lot of resources.
Chinese runs faster. Take memorizing times table for an example. English students take 1.5 times longer to read the table than Chinese student do, and correspondingly take 1.5 times longer to memorize it, according to the essay Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics by Yuen-Ren Chao, a Chinese American linguist. It was also found that reading Chinese is also much faster than reading English, because Chinese is an ideographic language that is very suitable for silent reading. When a Chinese student reads three books, an American student may read just read one. No wander why Chinese students of high schools get more Olympic prizes in science. When these students become a Ph. Ds, they use mainly English in their research, so their speed has been slow down greatly. If Chinese scientists translate all the scientific papers into Chinese and publish all their papers in Chinese, I believe that China will surpass the US in science very soon, because Chinese is a language that runs much faster than English. There was a case to prove it. It took US more one thousand times to invent the nuclear bomb, but it took only about 50 times for China to finish the same work independently.
Chinese is more vigorous in front of the challenge what is called the information explosion. Everyday lots of English words or terms are coined. There is going to be a vocabulary explosion of English, which really become a big challenge. Lots of new words or terms are created in Chinese as well. But this does not become a problem, because a Chinese new word typically composes of two or three characters which imply its meaning. A Chinese person can easily understand a new word which he/she has never seen. Let's take a look at the new words that the two languages have coined in the past few decades. China didn't have wine until the westerner brought it to China. In Chinese “wine” is translated as putaojiu（葡萄酒） in which putao means grape and jiu means a kind of beverage which contains alcohol. Every Chinese speaker can easily understand the meaning of putaojiu without any explanation or looking up a dictionary. Baijiu(白酒), translated to English in terms of Mandarin Pinyin, is also a kind of beverage. But it is really hard for an average English speaker to understand what baijiu is without looking it up a dictionary or getting some explanations. In the field of sciences, new term are created everyday. In English one new term in many cases means one new word. In Chinese a new term mean a combination of two or three or more characters to make a new sense. One can easily memorize the new term because the characters of the new term imply its meaning. For example, microcystin is a biological term. An average English speaker may have little idea about it, although they know that “micro” means small. Its equivalent term in Chinese is weinangzaodusu(微囊藻毒素) in which wei means tiny, nang means package, zao means algae, du means poisson, and su mean a kind of chemical. So an average Chinese speaker will perceive the term as a kind of poisonous chemical produced by a kind of algae the form of which is like a tiny package. This information is absolutely enough for every average speaker. Most of scientific terms in Chinese can be understood in this way by the average readers and speakers. For another example. I pick up 25 words or terms that are very basic in each of their fields as following (English followed by characters and Mandarin pinyin):
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tampon 棉球 mianqiu,
flask 烧瓶 shaoping,
exarticulation 脱臼 tuojiu,
nephrolith 肾结石 shenjieshi,
schizophrenia 精神分裂症 jingshenfenliezheng,
senile dementia 老年痴呆症 laonianchidaizheng,
cuboid 长方体 changfangti,
rhombicosidodecahedron 二十面体 ershimianti,
saleratus 小苏打 xiaosuda,
selenium 硒 xi,
theostat 变阻器 bianzuqi,
manostat 稳压器 wenyaqi,
sturgeon 鲟鱼 xunyu,
pheasant 野鸡 yeji,
drone 雄蜂 xiongfeng,
ozonosphere 臭氧层 chouyangceng,
troposphere 对流层 duiliuceng,
monsoon 季风 jifeng,
flute 长笛 changdi,
granite 花岗岩 huagangyan,
mutatis mutandis 作必要的变化 zuobiyaodebianhua,
epistemology 认识论 renshilun,
metaphysics 形而上学 xing'ershangxue,
bourgeoisie 中产阶级 zhongchanjieji,
proletaria 无产阶级 wuchanjieji.
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If you take these 25 words or terms (that are from fields of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, musicology, geology, meteorology, philosophy and politics) to have a test, I can bet that an average reader of English can hardly understand five of them and that an average reader of Chinese can hardly miss five of them. Obviously Chinese has more vigor to deal with the new terms of sciences. It will be only Chinese, I predict confidently, that can undertake the big challenge of information explosion we meet today.
Chinese is far simpler than English. Chinese is always considered to be the hardest language in the world. This is just because people including Chinese themselves have prejudice against Chinese language. Just on the contrast, Chinese is one of the simplest languages in world. I was told that “spoken Chinese is very simple” by lots of foreigners who are Canadian, Indian Canadian, Australians (one of them speak Chinese very well), Vietnamese Australian, American, Chinese American (who was sold to an American family when he was born), Croatian (one of my present coworkers who can speak very well and think in Chinese way), Indian (whose mother tongue is Tamil) Cameroonian (who speak one of African native language as mother tongue, French as official language, and English as third language), and foreigners who can speak both English and Chinese (but neither is their mother tongue) from Korean, Japan, Bombay, Vietnam and Malaysia. As a matter of fact the simplicity lies not only in spoken Chinese but written Chinese as well. Some Chinese learners have experienced the simplicity of written Chinese. If we let 5-years-old children whose mother tongue is neither Chinese nor English begin to learn Chinese and English at the same time, I believe that they will master Chinese before English. Chinese has no grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers), only a few articles (ie. equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender*, although it do have some helper characters that accomplish the same function of English grammar, which are not the equivalents of English grammar in my opinion. More and more westerner who learn Chinese realize that Chinese, at least spoken Chinese, in fact is very simple. Chinese characters are quite logical. So do the words and phrases. Once you learn it you will love it.
To sum it up, Chinese has the advantage of stability, compatibility, informativeness, speed, vigor, and simplicity over English, and will probably replace English in this century. It's time for us to take action to reconsider Chinese now. It's time for every country to teach Chinese now. Any country that moves slow in this action will certainly fall behind.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Abraham Smallwood and Ke Wang, my English teachers in my courses of Ph D, for correcting the grammatical mistakes and giving me some very valuable advice in this article. This article is my homework of English course.
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