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is Chinese the language of the future?

So which one should you, or your children, learn? If you take a glance at advertisements in New York or A-level options in Britain, an answer seems to leap out: Mandarin.

The practical reasons are just as compelling. In business, if the team on the other side of the table knows your language but you don’t know theirs, they almost certainly know more about you and your company than you do about them and theirs—a bad position to negotiate from.

This factor is the Chinese writing system (which Japan borrowed and adapted centuries ago). The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. Chinese, with all its tones, is hard enough to speak. But  the mammoth feat of memory required to be literate in Mandarin is harder still. It deters most foreigners from ever mastering the system—and increasingly trips up Chinese natives.

If you were to learn ten languages ranked by general usefulness, Japanese would probably not make the list. And the key reason for Japanese’s limited spread will also put the brakes on Chinese.

A recent survey reported in the People’s Daily found 84% of respondents agreeing that skill in Chinese is declining.

Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters: type in wo and Chinese language-support software will offer a menu of characters pronounced wo; the user selects the one desired. (Or if the user types in wo shi zhongguo ren, “I am Chinese”, the software detects the meaning and picks the right characters.) With less and less need to recall the characters cold, the Chinese are forgetting them

As long as China keeps the character-based system—which will probably be a long time, thanks to cultural attachment and practical concerns alike—Chinese is very unlikely to become a true world language, an auxiliary language like English, the language a Brazilian chemist will publish papers in, hoping that they will be read in Finland and Canada. By all means, if China is your main interest, for business or pleasure, learn Chinese. It is fascinating, and learnable—though Moser’s online essay, “Why Chinese is so damn hard,” might discourage the faint of heart and the short of time.

But if I was asked what foreign language is the most useful, and given no more parameters (where? for what purpose?), my answer would be French. Whatever you think of France, the language is much less limited than many people realise.

French ranks only 16th on the list of languages ranked by native speakers. But ranked above it are languages like Telegu and Javanese that no one would call world languages. Hindi does not even unite India. Also in the top 15 are Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, major languages to be sure, but regionally concentrated. If your interest is the Middle East or Islam, by all means learn Arabic. If your interest is Latin America, Spanish or Portuguese is the way to go. Or both; learning one makes the second quite easy.

if you want another truly global language, there are surprisingly few candidates, and for me French is unquestionably top of the list. It can enhance your enjoyment of art, history, literature and food, while giving you an important tool in business and a useful one in diplomacy. It has native speakers in every region on earth. And lest we forget its heartland itself, France attracts more tourists than any other country—76.8m in 2010, according to the World Tourism Organisation, leaving America a distant second with 59.7m

what Chinese schoolchildren are encouraged to think of as the longstanding natural speech of the common people is in fact an artificial hybrid, only a few decades old, although it shares a name—Mandarin—with the language of administration from imperial times. It’s a designed-by-committee camel of a language that has largely lost track of its past.

The idea of a national Chinese language began with the realization by the accidentally successful revolutionaries of 1911 that retaining control over a country speaking multiple languages and myriad dialects would necessitate reform. Long-term unification and the introduction of mass education would require a common language.

Whatever the province they originated from, the administrators of the now-toppled Great Qing Empire had all learned to communicate with one another in a second common language—Guanhua, China’s equivalent, in practical terms, of medieval Latin

To understand this highly compressed idiom required a considerable knowledge of the Chinese classics. Early Jesuit missionaries had labeled it Mandarin,

The committee decided that the four-tone dialect of the capital would be the base for a new national language but added a fifth tone whose use had lapsed in the north but not in southern dialects. The result was a language that no one actually spoke.

After the Communist victory of 1949, the process began all over again with fresh conferences, leading finally to the decision to use Beijing sounds, northern dialects and modern literature in the vernacular (of which there was very little) as a source of grammar.

This new spoken form is what is now loosely labeled Mandarin, still as alien to most Chinese as all the other Chinese languages.

A Latin alphabet system called Pinyin was introduced to help children learn to pronounce Chinese characters, but today it is usually abandoned after the first few years of elementary school.

The view that Mandarin is too difficult for mere foreigners to learn is essential to Chinese amour propre. But it is belied by the number of foreign high-school students who now learn the language by using Pinyin as a key to pronunciation —and who bask in the admiration they receive as a result.

Since 1949, the Chinese government, obsessed with promoting the image of a nation completely united in its love of the Communist Party, has decided that the Chinese people speak not several different languages but the same one in a variety of dialects. To say otherwise is to suggest, dangerously, that China is not one nation

Yet on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic in a Hunan accent so thick that members of his audience subsequently differed about what he had said. He never mastered the Beijing sounds on which Putonghua is based, nor did Sichuanese-speaking Deng Xiaoping or most of his successors.

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced. “At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!” One leader down, only 400 million more common people to go.

Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life. 

Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals”

Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan.

Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career.

He teaches them that:   The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. 

From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence

Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same.

If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.

In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.

Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. 

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person.

“The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.”

Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings.

Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them

To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence.

One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward.

after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies.

“I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”

“This software feature could also be seen as an embodiment of Wikipedia’s neutrality principle, in that it brings together editors from different political systems and enables productive discussion and collaboration between them,”

most Internet forums have a parochial focus, but that Chinese Wikipedia offers rare opportunities for all Chinese-speaking people to engage in discussion. “There is some form of integration across the region,” he said. “But that does not mean that mainland China assimilates Taiwan or Hong Kong. Every area stands on the same ground.” He pointed out that the flexible language options put all countries on an equal footing. For example, this year Macau was given its own setting, despite having a population of only 500,000.

“There was more bickering in the early days, but the discussion matured at a quick pace after 2009,”

“When I first joined the Chinese Wikipedia, I was an ‘angry youth,”’ said Wilson Ye, a 17-year-old Wikipedia editor from Shanghai who started writing entries four years ago. “I was furious when I came across terms like Taiwan and the Republic of China. But after more interactions, I understand how people in Taiwan think, and I become much more tolerant.”

Isaac Mao, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, attributed the maturation to the fact that more users are learning what Wikipedia is all about. “It all came back to the ‘five principles’ of Wikipedia, including authenticity, accuracy, neutral point of view and the use of references,” Mr. Mao said. “If there are disagreements over management and editing, people can engage in discussion based on these principles. Such atmosphere has been built up in the Chinese Wikipedia community gradually.”

This is simply how the man talks. About everything. What's more, he says everything, takes the both sides of everything:

Does he believe any of this, either way? Almost certainly not. The man has the brain of a goldfish: He "believes" whatever is in front of him in the moment. No matter whether or not it contradicts something he believed five minutes ago or will believe ten minutes from now.

All this guy does is try to create panic. That's his move

(2) The most alarming part of the Woodward tapes is the way Trump talks about Kim Jong Un and the moment when Trump literally takes sides with Kim Jong Un against a former American president.

In a way, it would be comforting to believe that our president was intelligent enough to grasp the seriousness of the coronavirus, even if his judgment in how to deal with the outbreak was malicious or poor.

All of the available evidence suggests the opposite:

Donald Trump lacks the cognitive ability to understand any concepts more complicated than self-promotion or self-preservation.

Put those two together—constant exaggerating self-aggrandizement and the perpetual attempt to stoke panic—and what you have is a guy was just saying stuff to Woodward.

After the Woodward tapes, anyone still deluding themselves about the authoritarian danger Trump poses to America is, finally, all out of excuses.

This, right here, is the most damning revelation from the Woodward tapes (so far):   Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?” It's not hard to explain. And it's not funny.

You have this incredible rise in interest in technology and excitement about technology and the beat itself really took off while I was there. But then at the same time, you have this massive new centralization of government control over technology and the use of technology to control people and along with that rising nationalism.

Paul Mozur, who covers China and tech for the New York Times and is currently living in Taiwain, after the Chinese expelled all foreign journalists. 

That was more apparent, I think, over the past five years or so after Xi Jinping really consolidated power, but the amount of cameras that went up on street corners, the degree to which you used to be able to — there’s a moment maybe seven or eight years ago — where Jack Ma talked about the Tiananmen Square crackdowns on Chinese social media and now that’s just so utterly unthinkable. The degree to which the censorship has increased now to the level where if you say certain things on WeChat, it’s very possible the police will show up at your door where you actually have a truly fully formed Internet Police. . .

I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .

The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.

The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas

And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been

So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .

WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.

It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.

It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.

“Underneath her image are very traditional values,” said Dai Linjia, a communications consultant. “Her family is almost like a dynasty.”

Many younger Chinese will be watching this week’s meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi for signs of Ms. Trump.

After all, four decades of social pressure and sometimes coercive enforcement have deeply engrained the one-child norm into Chinese identity — and it may well take as many decades to root it out. And given the economic realities associated with raising a child in modern China, a second child could be an expensive luxury, reserved largely for the wealthy.

Chinese culture has long valued children above all things. Families with large broods were seen as exceptionally fortunate — because more offspring are signs of wealth, or meant more hands to work for the family.

having two or fewer children was a patriotic duty that ensured the nation would have enough resources for all

one child has become a social standard, with the consequence that for every household, a single son or daughter is now doted upon by two parents and four grandparents, showered with material possessions, pushed to excel academically and entrusted with the entirety of a family's hopes and expectations.

Americans spend about $13,600 per year on each child they have. That's about 27% of the median U.S. household income. Chinese spend around $3,745 per year on their kids — or about 50% of China's median household income. Almost three-quarters of that money goes toward education and enrichment; it's seen as an investment in the future

most of China's 140 million rising middle-class families feel they simply can't afford the financial burden of raising more than one. Which is why China's attempted doubling down on childbirth may ultimately have little near-term effect on Chinese demographics.

The affluent have always been able to pay the penalties for multiples. Fong points out that the three richest men in China all have more than one child. But for middle class families, simply removing penalties isn't enough. "I think many will be resistant to have second children unless the measures are accompanied by financial relief — tax breaks, scholarship guarantees, things like that.

Will second children simply be a luxury of the wealthy? And if so, how will that impact Chinese society?My prediction: Within a few years, no Chinese millionaire's Mercedes will be fully complete without two baby seats in back, and Bugaboo Donkey double strollers will become the new Prada bags.

TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government have accumulated millions of followers and tens of millions of views, many of them on videos editorializing about U.S. politics without clear disclosure that they were posted by a foreign government.

The accounts are managed by MediaLinks TV, a registered foreign agent and Washington D.C.-based outpost of the main Chinese Communist Party television news outlet, China Central Television. The largest of them are @Pandaorama, which features cute videos about Chinese culture, @The…Optimist, which posts about sustainability, and @NewsTokss, which features coverage of U.S. national and international news.

In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the @NewsTokss account criticized some candidates (mostly Republicans), and favored others (mostly Democrats). A video from July began with the caption “Cruz, Abbott Don’t Care About Us”; a video from October was captioned “Rubio Has Done Absolutely Nothing.” But @NewsTokss did not target only Republicans; another October video asked viewers whether they thought President Joe Biden’s promise to sign a bill codifying abortion rights was a “political manipulation tactic.” Nothing in these videos disclosed to viewers that they were being pushed by a foreign government.

any Chinese play for Taiwan would be accompanied by TikTok aggressively pushing content in America designed to divide public opinion and weaken America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.

With all the official GOP machinations against gay marriage, it seems like if McConnell wanted that bill to fail, he could have pressured two Republican senators to vote against it. He said nothing. Trump said nothing. DeSantis said nothing. There was barely a whimper of protest from those who could have influenced this. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz engaged in theatrics, but no one actually used their power to stop this.

They let it pass because they don’t care and they want it to go away as an issue. And that goes for the MAGA GOP as well. Opposition to it in politics is all theater and will have a shelf life in riling up the base.

Evangelical religious convictions might be for one man + one woman marriage. But, the civil/political situation is far different from that and it’s worth recognizing where the GOP actually stands. They could have stopped this. They didn’t. That point should be clear, especially to their evangelical base who looks to the GOP to save America for them.

The blurry distinction between perpetrators and victims makes collective healing by confronting the past a thorny project.

The idea that life experiences could cause inheritable genetic changes has been identified among children of Holocaust survivors, who have been shown to have an increased likelihood of stress-related illnesses.

The possibility of epigenetic inheritance has been raised by Chinese academics regarding the Cultural Revolution, but to research the topic would most certainly invite state punishment.

six to ten months children have already learned to be sensitive to the basic sounds, known as phonemes, that matter in their native language.

language requires real-time mappings between words and their meanings. This requires that the sounds heard in speech – decoded in the auditory cortex – must be integrated with knowledge about what they mean – in the frontal cortex.

Modern theories on connectionism – the idea that knowledge is distributed across different parts of the brain and not tucked into dedicated modules like Broca’s area – have compelled researchers to take a closer look.

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language in which the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different things based on the tone with which it is spoken

non-tonal language such as English, tone might convey emotional information about the speaker, but indicates nothing about the meaning of the word that is spoken

found that these differences between Mandarin Chinese and English change the way the brain’s networks work.

researchers took advantage of the basic differences between Mandarin Chinese and English to investigate the differences between the language networks of native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. Thirty native Chinese speakers were matched on age, gender, and handedness (they were all right-handed) with a sample of native English speakers. All participants listened to intelligible and unintelligible speech and were asked to judge the gender of the speaker.

The first difference was the operation of the brain networks shared by English and Chinese speakers

English speakers showed stronger connectivity leading from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area. This increased connectivity was attributed to English relying more heavily on phonological information, or sounds rather than tones.

Chinese speakers had stronger connections leading from an area of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus – which has been identified as a “semantic hub” critical in supporting language – to both Broca’s and Wernicke’s area.

increased connectivity is attributed to the enhanced mapping of sound and meaning going on in people who speak tonal languages.

second difference showed activation in an area of the brain’s right hemisphere, but only among the Chinese speakers

findings emphasise the importance of developing a bilateral network between the two brain hemispheres to speak and understand languages, particularly for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese.

As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.

Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.

Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.

Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."

"You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."

Instead of leading to a search for certainty, as Descartes’s dream did, Zhuangzi came to the realization that he had perceived “the transformation of things,” indicating that one should go along with this transformation rather than trying in vain to search for what is real.

the views of Mencius and his later opponent Xunzi’s views about human nature are more recommendations of how one should view oneself in order to become a better person than metaphysical assertions about whether humans are by nature good or bad. Though each man’s assertions about human nature are incompatible with each other, they may still function inside the Confucian tradition as alternative ways of cultivation.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self surely looks metaphysical, but its real aim is to free one from suffering, since according to Buddhism suffering comes ultimately from attachment to the self. Buddhist meditations are kung fu practices to shake off one’s attachment, and not just intellectual inquiries for getting propositional truth.

The essence of kung fu — various arts and instructions about how to cultivate the person and conduct one’s life — is often hard to digest for those who are used to the flavor and texture of mainstream Western philosophy. It is understandable that, even after sincere willingness to try, one is often still turned away by the lack of clear definitions of key terms and the absence of linear arguments in classic Chinese texts. This, however, is not a weakness, but rather a requirement of the kung fu orientation — not unlike the way that learning how to swim requires one to focus on practice and not on conceptual understanding.

It even expands epistemology into the non-conceptual realm in which the accessibility of knowledge is dependent on the cultivation of cognitive abilities, and not simply on whatever is “publicly observable” to everyone. It also shows that cultivation of the person is not confined to “knowing how.” An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others.

Western philosophy at its origin is similar to classic Chinese philosophy. The significance of this point is not merely in revealing historical facts. It calls our attention to a dimension that has been eclipsed by the obsession with the search for eternal, universal truth and the way it is practiced, namely through rational arguments.

One might well consider the Chinese kung fu perspective a form of pragmatism.  The proximity between the two is probably why the latter was well received in China early last century when John Dewey toured the country. What the kung fu perspective adds to the pragmatic approach, however, is its clear emphasis on the cultivation and transformation of the person, a dimension that is already in Dewey and William James but that often gets neglected

A kung fu master does not simply make good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever preferences a person happens to have. In fact the subject is never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be the result of a sound rational decision, a good action that demonstrates kung fu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it. It also brings forward what Charles Taylor calls the “background” — elements such as tradition and community — in our understanding of the formation of a person’s beliefs and attitudes. Through the kung fu approach, classic Chinese philosophy displays a holistic vision that brings together these marginalized dimensions and thereby forces one to pay close attention to the ways they affect each other.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct. Yet unlike Aristotelian ethics, the kung fu approach to ethics does not rely on any metaphysics for justification.

This approach opens up the possibility of allowing multiple competing visions of excellence, including the metaphysics or religious beliefs by which they are understood and guided, and justification of these beliefs is then left to the concrete human experiences.

it is more appropriate to consider kung fu as a form of art. Art is not ultimately measured by its dominance of the market. In addition, the function of art is not accurate reflection of the real world; its expression is not constrained to the form of universal principles and logical reasoning, and it requires cultivation of the artist, embodiment of virtues/virtuosities, and imagination and creativity.

If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.

these ideas are not about looking within and finding oneself. They are about overcoming the self. They are, in a sense, anti-self-help.

Today, we are often told that our goal should be to look within and find ourselves, and, once we do, to strive to be sincere and authentic to that true self, always loving ourselves and embracing ourselves for who we are. All of this sounds great and is a key part of what we think of as a properly “modern” way to live.

But what if we’re, on the contrary, messy selves that tend to fall into ruts and patterns of behavior? If so, the last thing we would want to be doing is embracing ourselves for who we are — embracing, in other words, a set of patterns we’ve fallen into. The goal should rather be to break these patterns and ruts, to train ourselves to interact better with those around us.

Certainly some strains of Chinese political theory will take this vision of the self — that we tend to fall into patterns of behavior — to argue for a more paternalistic state that will, to use a more recent term, “nudge” us into better patterns.

many of the texts we discuss in the book go the other way, and argue that the goal should be to break us from being such passive creatures — calling on us to do things that break us out of these patterns and allow us to train ourselves to start altering our behavior for the better.

You argue that Chinese philosophy views rituals as tools that can liberate us from these ruts.

Rituals force us for a brief moment to become a different person and to interact with those around us in a different way. They work because they break us from the patterns that we fall into and that otherwise dominate our behavior.

In the early Han dynasty, for example, we have examples of rituals that called for role reversals. The father would be called upon to play the son, and the son would play the father. Each is forced to see the world from the other’s perspective, with the son learning what it’s like to be in a position of authority and the father remembering what it was like to be the more subservient one

We tend to think that we live in a globalized world, but in a lot of ways we really don’t. The truth is that for a long time only a very limited number of ideas have dominated the world, while ideas that arose elsewhere were seen as “traditional” and not worth learning from.

imagine future generations that grow up reading Du Fu along with Shakespeare, and Confucius along with Plato. Imagine that type of world, where great ideas — wherever they arose — are thought about and wrestled with.

There’s a very strong debate going on in China about values — a sense that everything has become about wealth and power, and a questioning about whether this should be rethought. And among the ideas that are being brought into the debate are these earlier notions about the self and about how one can lead a good life. So, while the government is appropriating some of these ideas in particular ways, the broader public is debating them, and certainly with very different interpretations.

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize

Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.

Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional

Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum

The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre

Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”

Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.

Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”

“The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.

Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future

The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”

Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good

In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

“I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”

Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes

“I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.

Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”

“We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”

Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.

When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.

Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious

“Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.

A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.

The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop

psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.

psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.

during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.

These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.

A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened

Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.

during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.

When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.

, other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.

we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”

Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others

The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san

Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.

This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.