Actually, there were already some anti-Chinese situaitions inside Russia. But interestingly, in the south eastern part of Russia where most Chinese labours are, many Russians actually welcome Chinese labours for helping them making use of their land (e.g. farm). Because otherwise, their land will be totally sitting there without much being used (i.e. not bringing themselves income neither). It's not really like colonization as most Chinese there are labours and doesn't have real ownership. And they're not really fighting with local Russians for jobs neither.
As of Mexican "immigration" to USA, they're taking very low wages job. Though that might be fighting for jobs with "some" Americans, they are leaving a lot of wealth in American owner or customer pockets also. And again, many are "in the dark", having no ownership nor right, I'm not sure if you can call that colonization.
At the end, I still need to say it all goes back to the formation of the communist party. The way it's formed and structured created different power groups within the system. This generation of central government have finally reasonably successfully removed army power within the top organization of central government. But they're still fighting different power groups. The June 4 event was a classic example of power fight. The liberal group of the communist party (in power at the time, in favour of the students) failed to make the young student leaders back down before USSR leader come (that's the bottomline inside the party) even after offering them to sit down and discuss afterwards. (Most students decided to back down, but few/several leaders refused.)
Now, that event was a fight between the conservatives and liberal group within communist party. And the student's refusal to settle gave a big hit on the liberal group, and put the conservative group back in power. To date, there're still some big power groups. And doing things not carefully can destroy your "generation of leaders". Which post a difficulty of overpower the local powers. While the central government always try to get real data from provinces, the provinces decorate and promote the already fake data given by cities. So not only normal people, the central governmnet have problme getting data also.
Communist party was a military organization, and military still play a big role until the most recent time. Any careless move can bring the country extreme instability. Not a problme as simple as you think. For one thing, you don't want the military to get back into power.
Though I read a lot of novels on computer, those are all "just another novel" and won't be read more than once probably. For better books, I'd still buy a physical copy directly. Not only there's a "physical feeling of ownership" and that the "book design looks good on shelf". It's actually much easier on eyes compare to looking at screen.
Any time, if i can find a relatively clean physically copy of book (say, from library), I'll borrow it instead of reading on screen. Monitors are fine for "instant information" (e.g. slash dot) or doing research about common stuff (e.g. how to fix your house's root, or CS algorithm, etc.). But for more static readings (e.g. novels, history, bibiography, etc.), physical books rules.
Agreed.
I don't care if he's watching internet porn or not during any time.
I only care if he's doing his job well.
A politician spending all of his time working for his own benefit (or for his next election? hence doing "his job", or so it seems) might well be doing a worse and less useful job than a politician watching a bit of porn using tax payer funded systems.
I don't think it's a matter of self esteem, it's more like a generation difference that make those "news". And by the nature of "news usefulness", I personally see negative news are a lot more eyes catching than positive news, as those are the ones that might damage you or your family and neighbours or the society in some way. At the end, what's the point of reading positive news about "other people" anyway. It's another story if it's "positive news" about a "society/country" in general instead of certain youth group. When those are positive, there are "nothing to complaint about" and hence nothing really matters.
I know enough about my generation that those "negative news" are actually not "news" but "olds" that I've been seeing since I read newspaper or say, since university time. And since you're young, the people you encounter the most are people elder than you, so you are suppose to know their positives and negatives too. It's those younger ones that we in general are less involved deeply with, hence their culture is "news" to us.
---
I personally think it's less a matter about culture in terms of respecting elder people. Of course, its' part of culture. But it's also about the power and status of elderies. Today's corporation culture, they always try to boost profit. And the elder people with higher wage are always seen as the ones to chop off. One might not be chopped off the branch, but I think this kind of corporation culture have a relatively high effect on how cultures respect the elder people. Because it somewhat "hint" (right or not) the usefulness of a person, and their "place" in a family, which in turns also further affect ones view on people of certain age outside your family. If the corporations pay more respect to those elder people with experience, I'm pretty sure the society will change in this.
Sorry, I'm not too good in explaining stuff (without spending time to re-edit, lol), but i guess I have my points through.:)
Some Chinese wife is already mad when their husband/boyfriend are concentrating on playing with their ipad/smart-phone instead of them lol.
I'm pretty sure it's not just Chinese lol
About "ok Chinese cook", from what I read (and what I know in real life), strangely, many Chinese cook are in a "cook culture" of gambling, smoking, and drinking lots of wine. Gambling is one thing. Smoking and drinking seriously hurt their taste ability, and hence even some "used-to-be-good" Chinese cook who're in those culture eventually make food that're too salty etc. (it's more like Cantonese cook, or south-south-east Chinese cook). There're cases that, after being told that it's too salty, they still can't taste it right. It's because their taste is already damaged. Unfortunate, it is.
On the other hand, some very famous good cook who maintain a relatively healthy life style (ok, some do eat way too much, which is unhealthy, but that doesn't damage their taste), their taste is still extremely sensative when they're really old. Those people won't make food overly salty.
Personally though, I think silent update is good for minor updates for security and minor fixes. As long as the user know it's updated, it's all fine.
We who know the importance of updating (minor updates for security) wouldn't be a problem. But there are just all too many people outside who, when you ask them if they want an update, they'll refuse to. And then when they have security problem, they'll turn back to shout at Mozilla. I think silent update is good for both end.
The western medias always give heavy (or only) focus on China's military development that they somewhat mislead the western public to "feel" that they're the only one strengthening.
In current China's view, the western countries are not only surrounding them in a "C shape". The official military view is that the western countries, now setting a lot of "military points" inland in the old world, are now surrounding China in a "full moon" shape, hence totally surrounded.
Also India, who still have land dispute with mainland China. And the islands in south Asia sea, which were part of China since the dynasty of Ming, several hundred years ago, with all those south Asia country agreeing about that even after WWII, *until* resource was discovered around that area. And Russia, which is partner of mainland China in some way, while mistrusting each other in many ways.
The communist government is not interested in seeing themselves in a cold war with the west. But as a country, it is facing threats, or at least, feeling so.
For a *normal* computer user (new or not, but especially new ones), they rely on their friends who "know computer" or "know how to use a computer" to teach them or help them.
And for a normal user, what they need is most often browser, media players, input methods (for all language besides English), and probably a word processor.
Now, the important point. I'm not normal user, but I see enough normal user that they're just not willing to "try" things that is a little more complex than the simplist sotwares.
Browser - fine
Media player - fine
Media (mp3) tag editor - NOT fine. When editing non English text like Chinese or Japanese which has quite a few diff encoding, there is so far no really good editor that can do the job well. I've tried most if not all the most famous tag editors, none works well. In fact, this is one of the most important thing that force me to get back to Windows.
Input method - depends if your language have good and intuitive input program on Linux.
Word processing - No, Openoffice is not fine for general users. Yes, it's not that complex, but no, it's slower, it doesn't look as good, and users does not know it as good as they know Microsoft Word (although most does not know MSWord very well neither)
So basically, yes, the "OS" of Windows is not really easier than Ubuntu (or should I say, GNOME on Linux?). But application is a big problem still. If we really want to convince people to use Linux, ensure Linux has media tools (music player, media tag editor) that works as good as those best/most-common ones on Windows first.
OpenOffice is actually lesser a problem compare to the above one.
We're not general publics. We're people used to reading and understanding technical stuff.
No matter if you're math/cs/science/engineer, you're nowhere near general public.
Every time I see people talking about gay marrage, I see they talk about fairness in tax.
But you got to know WHY married couples get some tax benefit at first. It's because governments want to encourage people to get marry AND give birth.
Now, if you say, gay couples are adopting a child. You'll get your benefit of adopting child as normal couples.
But the reasoning of giving tax benefits to married couples is to decrease the financial stress of marriage and is actually targeted at *give birth*.
That depends on the dialect they're speaking.
Different dialects can have very different characteristics, and people with different dialects have different difficulties on pronouncing English.
I guess it's because for most families, money is really not so easy to earn. And prices of everything is rising in cities. And job market is not very good also. Most of these parents save up every bit of their money trying to support their child's education in the future.
Now, most of these kids who pay for these games probably get their money from parents, and the problem of "addition" to internet and internet games games are pretty serious. This can potentially harm their family's financial and their future education situation.
So personally, I think they do have enough reason behind that.
You got to know, finance situation of most companies in mainland China are much worse than in western countries. It's "just enough" for living and is very hard to support higher education already. It's sometimes hard to control the kids on parent's side. Then law like that can just stop a lot of problems caused by this.
I'm Chinese migrated to foreign country for years. I can tell you that I do, in fact forget some words when it gets down to writing because I don't write it. But it just take a little bit of thinking to get the memory back.
Now, if you write it or see it everyday, you shouldn't have the problem. If you're having problme, it's most likely that you're not seeing it everyday in real life but just on your book or computer screen. I find reading words from books/monitor every day give you less strong memory about the words than if you see them in real life.
Well, if you look at those words everyday, you'd know what those words are. Much like I look at some English words, be able to read them, but still have no idea what it means.
And Kanji is really not a pain to Chinese at all. The background of that "romanize Chinese" is the chaos era when all those Chinese people are crazy about revolution to "save China" and try to copy the whole western set of knowledge and culture over.
Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan easily proves that the problem is really about the lack of "education" for many farmers etc. It has nothing to do with Chinese itself. Chinese have many dialects that sound very different or even say things totally differently. Their sentence structure my be slightly different, and the term they use are different. The fact is that, if you romanize Chinese, but don't provide a good education system, people are still not going to understand those romanized writing at all.
The problem, is education.
Also, except the most original Chinese words, many Chinese words that were developed later on are based of a "side" and a "sound". Looking at the word, you can figure out most sound of word. Now Japanese have a problem in that because they don't say it the Chinese way. But they only have some 2000 frequently used Chinese words. If you're learning the language and use it everyday, see it everywhere, you don't need to memorize. It just gets into your mind and you'll remember.
Well, Chinese words have a much larger set than what's in the offical set of Traditional Chinese of Taiwan/HK or simplified Chinese of mainland China/Singapore/etc. In the traditional time, although there is offical set of words, there are usually more writing form of the same word that are used and recognized by scholars, and they are often used freely without a very strong constraint on "you must use the offical form", even in Chinese classics and classic history books. The offical form also changes depends on a balance in "which form is used more" and "what's more correct".
An example is, I know 3 different forms of how to write the word "fish" in Chinese. And 4 different ways to write the word "one". And I've seen all those in differnet classic books (in their original word form).
Now, a certain form of Chinese words get passed to Korea and China at different time, from different location, and from different people. And they have been using it for hundreds of years themselves. So you can call them Chinese writers, and scholars in Korea and Japan write their writings in classical Chinese for years. They ARE Chinese scholars and users. They know our words, and they know our literatures. So they have all the rights to Change word form as long as it's following the rules.
Personally, I'd say the way the Japanese simplified their words are much better than those simplified Chinese in terms of following the traditional rule. The original draft of simplified Chinese created by the Nationalist Party/Republic of China government was based on the Japanese simpilfied Chinese, adding in "scremble form" () and "smooth form" () of Chinese. and are written form and putting those as printed/standard word form breaks the rule of Chinese word.
So the China-Simplified-Chinese creaters actually break Chinese way more than the Japanese did. Unfortunately.
If you went to Japan before, you'd know they don't eat a lot of sushi...
It's relatively expensive stuff to eat for many people in Japan...
Noodle and rice, fry vegetable dishes etc., all those cooked on-land stuff are what they actually eat usually.
Chinese have a life expectancy of 60+ some 2000+ years ago anyway, and continuous to increase to above mid-80 during the last dynasty. Let alone the daoist practisers that often have a life expectency above 80 and some above 130's since more than a thousand years ago. It's industry revolution and modernization, and westernization of food that actually brings down life expectency and shoot up stress/sickness unfortunately.
I don't think the aboriginals etc. have life expectancy of only 40's though?
You're a bit twisting the meaning here if you think Confucius approves censorship. In fact, the translation is not all that correct.
The first paragraph you quote is simply saying "you should put the upright in power because people respect upright, not power".
The qustion part of your second quote is more like "How to cause people to reverence and loyal to their ruler, and be strive". Note that the last point is not about virtue, but striveness.
The answer part of your second quote is "Act solemnly, and they will respect you. Let them filial to their parent/anybody-above-them-in-family, and let them be kind to their kids, then they will be loyal to you. Let the competent and good to teach the once who are not (yet), and they will be strive."
There is nothing here to do with censorship. In fact, confucius lived in the free-est age in China when different kind of philosophy just started to flourish, trying to find a better way to rule good and end hundreds of years of endless war. And he is the one who bring all the knowledge that were held in the hand of nobles to the people. With just a small string of dry meat, he'll teach you all you can learn from him. His teaching style also encourage his students to discuss with him whatever they see or thought of in their journey around different countries in the then China. So basically, it's quite opposite to censorship.
Unlike the western world back then, China never really do any real censorship ( with a few exceptions). In the culture of Chinese, people may just pretend they can't see, or just talk as "entertainment" if you do something that is not "right" in our the culture but is not breaking the most important values "visibly" or "publicly" or in more formal situations.
For example, your comment about "writing sex gossip columns". China in most time in history not only has books with drawings about different "style" of sex positions. We also have private brothel and government opened once. Scholar etc. going to those places are considered not having good practise, but since it doesn't touch the most important stuff like filial to parents, people more "follow the rule" may just talk about it. But never see it as very serious. And in any period of time, there are always differnt schools of confucius taking different view among themselves or in favourite or against preious confucius scholars. They openly debate about differnet views etc. Later on, colleges are form at many places allowing schoolars to discuss and further learn or develope. At the time, colleges often represents schools of thought and they do have a relatively strong political power because traditionally, most government officals are selected through national wide exams and are often part of a certain school of confucius.
So in fact, censorship has no relationship to confusius. Chinese culture's degree of acceptance in diff things is very high as long as it doesn't touch family matters (e.g. filial) and country matter (e.g. loyalty). Otherwise, you wouldn't have buddism in China since there was actually a serious discussion among the top officers during the Dynasty of Tang because some practise of buddism is against some Chinese traditions. But they finally let it pass and decide it's up to the people to decide if they accept it or not.
Actually, you should think about it in another way.
While many Chinese inland or oversea dislike the sensorship and complain about it all the time. It is fully a differnt topic of them supporting the mainland government against Google or not. You need to know, when complaint/action against the government is from inside, it's one thing. When foreigners are doing that, the view is totally different.
On one hand, Google's view against censorship is right on for many Chinese. But the action it does to the mainland government remind Chinese how foreigners attack and take advantage of China some 60/hundred years ago. This brings up deep anger for many people.
Dealing with Chinese, you can only do it the soft way. Any action/talk that appears to be insulting/forceful will create negative results most likely, not only on government, but on Chinese people also.
You know, you're talking about two totally different things.
Hong Kong is a region that doesn'ts have "separation problem". They don't need to worry about it. On the other hand, Tibet does have terrorist organisation that tries to form its own country (though it's not gaining stream, but it exists).
Now, I don't mean I neccessary agree on the way they do things. But you really can't compare the two places.
Those few/several Hong Kong politicians are not fighting to preserve the region's autonomy nor anywhere near that. Those few person are fighting for "real-election" for the city's mayor in 2012 instead of the determined 2017 (which is writen in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, and is agreed upon by the mainland government). The exact situation is that Hong Kong does not have a law that allows *Referendum*, so they resign and claim that they'll use it as a *Referendum*, so if they get elect again, it means people support having "real-election" in 2012 instead of 2017. Their action, even Hong Kong's biggest democratic party (The Democratic Party, it is actually called) oppose. Mainland government, Hong Kong government, and the Hong Kong political parties that maintain close relationship to the Communist Party are pretty much just saying that it is technically legal to resign and re-elect, but using that as *Referendum* is just not respecting the Basic Law and is affecting the operation of the Legistrative Council of Hong Kong (which is like the parliment of the city). But they didn't say much more than that, and what they say have no power on affecting the election etc and are far from meddling Hong Kong government's operation.
Now on google's matter. They've a team in Taiwan already I think? I don't believe it matters so much even if they base themselves in Taiwan. Taiwan and HK have been a strategic place to land on when companies are eyesing mainland China anyway. And if they're really rebasing, Taiwan is actually much more reasonable than HK because it's still considered to be part of "Greater China Area" and I believe Taiwan business's reach in mainland is stronger than many of those from HK. TW also seem to have an edge in software/web-business also. I don't think any Chinese including the mainland government will see anything wrong with that.
This, however, is just redirecting. Then of course, you'd redirect to somewhere within the same political power.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there were already some anti-Chinese situaitions inside Russia. But interestingly, in the south eastern part of Russia where most Chinese labours are, many Russians actually welcome Chinese labours for helping them making use of their land (e.g. farm). Because otherwise, their land will be totally sitting there without much being used (i.e. not bringing themselves income neither). It's not really like colonization as most Chinese there are labours and doesn't have real ownership. And they're not really fighting with local Russians for jobs neither.
As of Mexican "immigration" to USA, they're taking very low wages job. Though that might be fighting for jobs with "some" Americans, they are leaving a lot of wealth in American owner or customer pockets also. And again, many are "in the dark", having no ownership nor right, I'm not sure if you can call that colonization.
At the end, I still need to say it all goes back to the formation of the communist party. The way it's formed and structured created different power groups within the system. This generation of central government have finally reasonably successfully removed army power within the top organization of central government. But they're still fighting different power groups. The June 4 event was a classic example of power fight. The liberal group of the communist party (in power at the time, in favour of the students) failed to make the young student leaders back down before USSR leader come (that's the bottomline inside the party) even after offering them to sit down and discuss afterwards. (Most students decided to back down, but few/several leaders refused.)
Now, that event was a fight between the conservatives and liberal group within communist party. And the student's refusal to settle gave a big hit on the liberal group, and put the conservative group back in power. To date, there're still some big power groups. And doing things not carefully can destroy your "generation of leaders". Which post a difficulty of overpower the local powers. While the central government always try to get real data from provinces, the provinces decorate and promote the already fake data given by cities. So not only normal people, the central governmnet have problme getting data also.
Communist party was a military organization, and military still play a big role until the most recent time. Any careless move can bring the country extreme instability. Not a problme as simple as you think. For one thing, you don't want the military to get back into power.
I totally agree.
Though I read a lot of novels on computer, those are all "just another novel" and won't be read more than once probably. For better books, I'd still buy a physical copy directly. Not only there's a "physical feeling of ownership" and that the "book design looks good on shelf". It's actually much easier on eyes compare to looking at screen.
Any time, if i can find a relatively clean physically copy of book (say, from library), I'll borrow it instead of reading on screen. Monitors are fine for "instant information" (e.g. slash dot) or doing research about common stuff (e.g. how to fix your house's root, or CS algorithm, etc.). But for more static readings (e.g. novels, history, bibiography, etc.), physical books rules.
Agreed. I don't care if he's watching internet porn or not during any time. I only care if he's doing his job well. A politician spending all of his time working for his own benefit (or for his next election? hence doing "his job", or so it seems) might well be doing a worse and less useful job than a politician watching a bit of porn using tax payer funded systems.
I don't think it's a matter of self esteem, it's more like a generation difference that make those "news". And by the nature of "news usefulness", I personally see negative news are a lot more eyes catching than positive news, as those are the ones that might damage you or your family and neighbours or the society in some way. At the end, what's the point of reading positive news about "other people" anyway. It's another story if it's "positive news" about a "society/country" in general instead of certain youth group. When those are positive, there are "nothing to complaint about" and hence nothing really matters.
:)
I know enough about my generation that those "negative news" are actually not "news" but "olds" that I've been seeing since I read newspaper or say, since university time. And since you're young, the people you encounter the most are people elder than you, so you are suppose to know their positives and negatives too. It's those younger ones that we in general are less involved deeply with, hence their culture is "news" to us.
--- I personally think it's less a matter about culture in terms of respecting elder people. Of course, its' part of culture. But it's also about the power and status of elderies. Today's corporation culture, they always try to boost profit. And the elder people with higher wage are always seen as the ones to chop off. One might not be chopped off the branch, but I think this kind of corporation culture have a relatively high effect on how cultures respect the elder people. Because it somewhat "hint" (right or not) the usefulness of a person, and their "place" in a family, which in turns also further affect ones view on people of certain age outside your family. If the corporations pay more respect to those elder people with experience, I'm pretty sure the society will change in this.
Sorry, I'm not too good in explaining stuff (without spending time to re-edit, lol), but i guess I have my points through.
Some Chinese wife is already mad when their husband/boyfriend are concentrating on playing with their ipad/smart-phone instead of them lol. I'm pretty sure it's not just Chinese lol
About "ok Chinese cook", from what I read (and what I know in real life), strangely, many Chinese cook are in a "cook culture" of gambling, smoking, and drinking lots of wine. Gambling is one thing. Smoking and drinking seriously hurt their taste ability, and hence even some "used-to-be-good" Chinese cook who're in those culture eventually make food that're too salty etc. (it's more like Cantonese cook, or south-south-east Chinese cook). There're cases that, after being told that it's too salty, they still can't taste it right. It's because their taste is already damaged. Unfortunate, it is.
On the other hand, some very famous good cook who maintain a relatively healthy life style (ok, some do eat way too much, which is unhealthy, but that doesn't damage their taste), their taste is still extremely sensative when they're really old. Those people won't make food overly salty.
When discussing about Chrome vs Firefox vs etc. etc., people always forget Google's actual business is in search and web apps, but not browser.
Personally though, I think silent update is good for minor updates for security and minor fixes. As long as the user know it's updated, it's all fine.
We who know the importance of updating (minor updates for security) wouldn't be a problem. But there are just all too many people outside who, when you ask them if they want an update, they'll refuse to. And then when they have security problem, they'll turn back to shout at Mozilla. I think silent update is good for both end.
It's not like you who care can't turn it off.
The western medias always give heavy (or only) focus on China's military development that they somewhat mislead the western public to "feel" that they're the only one strengthening.
In current China's view, the western countries are not only surrounding them in a "C shape". The official military view is that the western countries, now setting a lot of "military points" inland in the old world, are now surrounding China in a "full moon" shape, hence totally surrounded.
Also India, who still have land dispute with mainland China. And the islands in south Asia sea, which were part of China since the dynasty of Ming, several hundred years ago, with all those south Asia country agreeing about that even after WWII, *until* resource was discovered around that area. And Russia, which is partner of mainland China in some way, while mistrusting each other in many ways.
The communist government is not interested in seeing themselves in a cold war with the west. But as a country, it is facing threats, or at least, feeling so.
For a *normal* computer user (new or not, but especially new ones), they rely on their friends who "know computer" or "know how to use a computer" to teach them or help them.
And for a normal user, what they need is most often browser, media players, input methods (for all language besides English), and probably a word processor.
Now, the important point. I'm not normal user, but I see enough normal user that they're just not willing to "try" things that is a little more complex than the simplist sotwares.
So basically, yes, the "OS" of Windows is not really easier than Ubuntu (or should I say, GNOME on Linux?). But application is a big problem still. If we really want to convince people to use Linux, ensure Linux has media tools (music player, media tag editor) that works as good as those best/most-common ones on Windows first.
OpenOffice is actually lesser a problem compare to the above one.
We're not general publics. We're people used to reading and understanding technical stuff. No matter if you're math/cs/science/engineer, you're nowhere near general public.
Every time I see people talking about gay marrage, I see they talk about fairness in tax. But you got to know WHY married couples get some tax benefit at first. It's because governments want to encourage people to get marry AND give birth. Now, if you say, gay couples are adopting a child. You'll get your benefit of adopting child as normal couples. But the reasoning of giving tax benefits to married couples is to decrease the financial stress of marriage and is actually targeted at *give birth*.
That depends on the dialect they're speaking. Different dialects can have very different characteristics, and people with different dialects have different difficulties on pronouncing English.
Ontario and Quebec is actually called Eastern Canada. Those 3 provinces west of Ontario are central. While British Columbia is West.
I guess it's because for most families, money is really not so easy to earn. And prices of everything is rising in cities. And job market is not very good also. Most of these parents save up every bit of their money trying to support their child's education in the future.
Now, most of these kids who pay for these games probably get their money from parents, and the problem of "addition" to internet and internet games games are pretty serious. This can potentially harm their family's financial and their future education situation.
So personally, I think they do have enough reason behind that.
You got to know, finance situation of most companies in mainland China are much worse than in western countries. It's "just enough" for living and is very hard to support higher education already. It's sometimes hard to control the kids on parent's side. Then law like that can just stop a lot of problems caused by this.
I'm Chinese migrated to foreign country for years. I can tell you that I do, in fact forget some words when it gets down to writing because I don't write it. But it just take a little bit of thinking to get the memory back.
Now, if you write it or see it everyday, you shouldn't have the problem. If you're having problme, it's most likely that you're not seeing it everyday in real life but just on your book or computer screen. I find reading words from books/monitor every day give you less strong memory about the words than if you see them in real life.
Well, if you look at those words everyday, you'd know what those words are. Much like I look at some English words, be able to read them, but still have no idea what it means.
And Kanji is really not a pain to Chinese at all. The background of that "romanize Chinese" is the chaos era when all those Chinese people are crazy about revolution to "save China" and try to copy the whole western set of knowledge and culture over.
Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan easily proves that the problem is really about the lack of "education" for many farmers etc. It has nothing to do with Chinese itself. Chinese have many dialects that sound very different or even say things totally differently. Their sentence structure my be slightly different, and the term they use are different. The fact is that, if you romanize Chinese, but don't provide a good education system, people are still not going to understand those romanized writing at all.
The problem, is education.
Also, except the most original Chinese words, many Chinese words that were developed later on are based of a "side" and a "sound". Looking at the word, you can figure out most sound of word. Now Japanese have a problem in that because they don't say it the Chinese way. But they only have some 2000 frequently used Chinese words. If you're learning the language and use it everyday, see it everywhere, you don't need to memorize. It just gets into your mind and you'll remember.
Well, Chinese words have a much larger set than what's in the offical set of Traditional Chinese of Taiwan/HK or simplified Chinese of mainland China/Singapore/etc. In the traditional time, although there is offical set of words, there are usually more writing form of the same word that are used and recognized by scholars, and they are often used freely without a very strong constraint on "you must use the offical form", even in Chinese classics and classic history books. The offical form also changes depends on a balance in "which form is used more" and "what's more correct". An example is, I know 3 different forms of how to write the word "fish" in Chinese. And 4 different ways to write the word "one". And I've seen all those in differnet classic books (in their original word form). Now, a certain form of Chinese words get passed to Korea and China at different time, from different location, and from different people. And they have been using it for hundreds of years themselves. So you can call them Chinese writers, and scholars in Korea and Japan write their writings in classical Chinese for years. They ARE Chinese scholars and users. They know our words, and they know our literatures. So they have all the rights to Change word form as long as it's following the rules. Personally, I'd say the way the Japanese simplified their words are much better than those simplified Chinese in terms of following the traditional rule. The original draft of simplified Chinese created by the Nationalist Party/Republic of China government was based on the Japanese simpilfied Chinese, adding in "scremble form" () and "smooth form" () of Chinese. and are written form and putting those as printed/standard word form breaks the rule of Chinese word. So the China-Simplified-Chinese creaters actually break Chinese way more than the Japanese did. Unfortunately.
If you went to Japan before, you'd know they don't eat a lot of sushi... It's relatively expensive stuff to eat for many people in Japan... Noodle and rice, fry vegetable dishes etc., all those cooked on-land stuff are what they actually eat usually.
Chinese have a life expectancy of 60+ some 2000+ years ago anyway, and continuous to increase to above mid-80 during the last dynasty. Let alone the daoist practisers that often have a life expectency above 80 and some above 130's since more than a thousand years ago. It's industry revolution and modernization, and westernization of food that actually brings down life expectency and shoot up stress/sickness unfortunately.
I don't think the aboriginals etc. have life expectancy of only 40's though?
You're a bit twisting the meaning here if you think Confucius approves censorship. In fact, the translation is not all that correct.
The first paragraph you quote is simply saying "you should put the upright in power because people respect upright, not power".
The qustion part of your second quote is more like "How to cause people to reverence and loyal to their ruler, and be strive". Note that the last point is not about virtue, but striveness.
The answer part of your second quote is "Act solemnly, and they will respect you. Let them filial to their parent/anybody-above-them-in-family, and let them be kind to their kids, then they will be loyal to you. Let the competent and good to teach the once who are not (yet), and they will be strive."
There is nothing here to do with censorship. In fact, confucius lived in the free-est age in China when different kind of philosophy just started to flourish, trying to find a better way to rule good and end hundreds of years of endless war. And he is the one who bring all the knowledge that were held in the hand of nobles to the people. With just a small string of dry meat, he'll teach you all you can learn from him. His teaching style also encourage his students to discuss with him whatever they see or thought of in their journey around different countries in the then China. So basically, it's quite opposite to censorship.
Unlike the western world back then, China never really do any real censorship ( with a few exceptions). In the culture of Chinese, people may just pretend they can't see, or just talk as "entertainment" if you do something that is not "right" in our the culture but is not breaking the most important values "visibly" or "publicly" or in more formal situations.
For example, your comment about "writing sex gossip columns". China in most time in history not only has books with drawings about different "style" of sex positions. We also have private brothel and government opened once. Scholar etc. going to those places are considered not having good practise, but since it doesn't touch the most important stuff like filial to parents, people more "follow the rule" may just talk about it. But never see it as very serious. And in any period of time, there are always differnt schools of confucius taking different view among themselves or in favourite or against preious confucius scholars. They openly debate about differnet views etc. Later on, colleges are form at many places allowing schoolars to discuss and further learn or develope. At the time, colleges often represents schools of thought and they do have a relatively strong political power because traditionally, most government officals are selected through national wide exams and are often part of a certain school of confucius.
So in fact, censorship has no relationship to confusius. Chinese culture's degree of acceptance in diff things is very high as long as it doesn't touch family matters (e.g. filial) and country matter (e.g. loyalty). Otherwise, you wouldn't have buddism in China since there was actually a serious discussion among the top officers during the Dynasty of Tang because some practise of buddism is against some Chinese traditions. But they finally let it pass and decide it's up to the people to decide if they accept it or not.
Actually, you should think about it in another way.
While many Chinese inland or oversea dislike the sensorship and complain about it all the time. It is fully a differnt topic of them supporting the mainland government against Google or not. You need to know, when complaint/action against the government is from inside, it's one thing. When foreigners are doing that, the view is totally different.
On one hand, Google's view against censorship is right on for many Chinese. But the action it does to the mainland government remind Chinese how foreigners attack and take advantage of China some 60/hundred years ago. This brings up deep anger for many people.
Dealing with Chinese, you can only do it the soft way. Any action/talk that appears to be insulting/forceful will create negative results most likely, not only on government, but on Chinese people also.
You know, you're talking about two totally different things.
Hong Kong is a region that doesn'ts have "separation problem". They don't need to worry about it. On the other hand, Tibet does have terrorist organisation that tries to form its own country (though it's not gaining stream, but it exists).
Now, I don't mean I neccessary agree on the way they do things. But you really can't compare the two places.
Those few/several Hong Kong politicians are not fighting to preserve the region's autonomy nor anywhere near that. Those few person are fighting for "real-election" for the city's mayor in 2012 instead of the determined 2017 (which is writen in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, and is agreed upon by the mainland government). The exact situation is that Hong Kong does not have a law that allows *Referendum*, so they resign and claim that they'll use it as a *Referendum*, so if they get elect again, it means people support having "real-election" in 2012 instead of 2017. Their action, even Hong Kong's biggest democratic party (The Democratic Party, it is actually called) oppose. Mainland government, Hong Kong government, and the Hong Kong political parties that maintain close relationship to the Communist Party are pretty much just saying that it is technically legal to resign and re-elect, but using that as *Referendum* is just not respecting the Basic Law and is affecting the operation of the Legistrative Council of Hong Kong (which is like the parliment of the city). But they didn't say much more than that, and what they say have no power on affecting the election etc and are far from meddling Hong Kong government's operation.
Now on google's matter. They've a team in Taiwan already I think? I don't believe it matters so much even if they base themselves in Taiwan. Taiwan and HK have been a strategic place to land on when companies are eyesing mainland China anyway. And if they're really rebasing, Taiwan is actually much more reasonable than HK because it's still considered to be part of "Greater China Area" and I believe Taiwan business's reach in mainland is stronger than many of those from HK. TW also seem to have an edge in software/web-business also. I don't think any Chinese including the mainland government will see anything wrong with that.
This, however, is just redirecting. Then of course, you'd redirect to somewhere within the same political power.