Enter The Dragon

This autumn I've been mainly sudying Chinese. I've spent about as much time on it as on everything else combined.

There are two main arguments for me to read Chinese. The first one is the Demographic Argument. China with its population of 1.3 billion is the most populated country in the world. If they can raise the richest 1/4 of their population to the same standard of living as the USA, they will have equal ecomonic weight. It's really simple.

The second argument is the fact that I've already run into Chinese people and language. In my previous job, one of my 2 closest co-employees was from China. We also wrote a piece of software, which was localized to Chinese.

The fundamental nature of software writing is that you write it once and take as many copies as you can sell. This makes it almost inevitable that I will work with Chinese software also in the future (unless I work only for consulting companies; consults produce local services rather than international products).

When I still subscribed to Helsingin Sanomat, I used to cut all articles written by its the foreign correspondent in China, Sami Sillanpää.

My knowledge of China isn't too deep, and I don't have many opinions on China, other than the fairly trivial ones: They should stop threatening Taiwan. They should democratize their country. EU should retain the arms embargo as long as China threatens Taiwan.