Americans are fond of referring to their country as "the greatest nation on earth". Until recently, I didn't believe any country deserved that description. But today I think there is a strong contender for the title.

China is the world's oldest living civilisation. It has recovered from over a century of colonial oppression and lifted its citizens out of poverty. As its growth continues, China is poised to become the world's largest economy and a technology leader that is second to none. By 2030, I believe it will be an indisputable fact that China is the greatest nation on earth.

I need to understand China, from a Chinese perspective. This is my journey.

Tuesday 28 December 2021

The Thrill Of Being Able To Read Chinese "In The Wild"

One of my major pastimes nowadays is watching videos on China's High Speed Rail. I've lost "track" of the number of videos I've watched. I find them hypnotically soothing. Call me a nerd, but infrastructure development is a topic that gives me enormous joy.

This one on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link is one of my favourites. It's from Russia Today, and unlike the mostly fault-finding slant of typical Western media reporting on China, the tone of this documentary is refreshingly positive.

This video on the building of the Nairobi-Mombasa rail link in Kenya is another great one. China is making a real difference to the developing world, notwithstanding the smear campaigns on "debt trap diplomacy" (which have been debunked, by the way.)

Another of the videos I watched recently showed how rail tracks are actually laid. Previously, the process was manual, and could only lay 500 m of track every day even with scores of workers. Nowadays, with the process semi-automated, 2 km of tracks can be laid a day with only 20 technicians.

As the camera panned over the scene, I saw some Chinese characters come into view on the screen and almost subconsciously read them aloud - 安全第一 ānquán dì yī ("Safety first").

Such a thrill! I wasn't expecting to be able to make sense of anything, since most of the text I had seen until that point had a large number of unfamiliar characters. This just crept up on me, and I was myself taken aback that I could make sense of it at once.

[You may recall from a previous post that the character 安 ān means "safe", and the ideograph has the glyph 女 nǚ ("woman") under a roof. "Woman under roof" means "safe" in Chinese. That's cute and sad at the same time. The character 一 yī is probably the simplest Chinese character to learn, and means "one". 第一 dì yī means "first".]

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