To learn Mandarin in China is a fantastic undertaking in many ways. It is extraordinary because you will be doing something hard, but more so because you will be doing something new in a place that is just starting to become what it will be known as in the future.
To learn Mandarin is, ultimately, to do something extra ordinary. Not only is a difficult undertaking, it is also, in many ways a unique task. Chances are that if you were to engage in serious Mandarin studies you would never meet someone else outside of the time of your studies that has done the same thing. It is also extra ordinary because China is extra ordinary.
First of all, China is not a country in the same way that other nation states are countries. Just over one fifth of the humanity lives in China. At the same time, there are six habitable continents on earth. That means that China is more like a large continent than a country. To put this is the context of other countries: there is roughly the same amount of Chinese people as there are Africans, Europeans, South and North Americans.
Second of all, China has an almost unique cultural legacy. For starters, it is has existed somewhere between 4.000 and 5.000 years. There were city kingdoms in China with populations in excess of a million while there were only tribes in the majority of the rest of the world. Secondly, China is the most successful autocracy in our contemporary world. No other nation shares China’s explosive economic growth. The other Asian giant, India, is so far behind China in terms of manufacturing prowess that it is cheaper to send plastic pellets to China, from India, make low tech plastic bags and then ship them back. When it comes to more complicated manufacturing tasks India does not even stand a chance.
The third reason that China is extra ordinary ties into its dominance of the worlds manufacturing sector. China has in the last 20 years beaten every record there is for economic development. If you look at a graph of China’s gross domestic product it looks like the very definition of exponential leverage. Since the reformation of the Chinese domestic economy from pure central planning to an export oriented powerhouse over half of the country has changed jobs from the agriculture sector to the much better paid industrial sector. This has lifted over a billion people out poverty in the historical/economic timeframe of a second.
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