TO RUIN OR NOT TO RUIN CHINA'S TECHNOLOGY FUTURE
China is in the process of turning her worst foe into her best
ally. I'm referring to water. The Three-Gorges and
South-North hydraulic projects would do just that.
Well, this is relatively easy and clear cut. But what is not so
is the issue of Chinese language's impact on technology
development. Like the water, China's language has been the
greatest obstacle to our technology advancement. China must face
the fateful fact that the pictorial, analogous language is just too
inflexible and factual for abstract thinking, which is vital
to high-tech innovations. We need to ask the brave question:
Shall we let our language ruin our technology future?
As a culture-oriented people, Chinese have naturally developed a
language
mainly for cultural pursuit and for a world at a time in which culture
development had been its worth. Now time has changed. Some
young nations have opportunistically embarked on this new rage known as
technology.
And
using this technology they have proven to China, if you fell behind,
you
could also lose your culture.
The lesson of last three hundred years tells China she may
very well have to get back to the drawing board on redesigning the
language. The recent digression in simplifying its characters may
be a blessing in disguise. It showed that the government still
have the power, and the people have the will, to endure the painstaking
effort of language alteration.
Someone once said: a Chinese is someone who speaks Chinese. We,
therefore, should tread the water very carefully on this. This
could be no less than redesigning the people's very psyche. And
it's not just
any people, but the front-running candidate of the next world
leader. Anyway, it's as harmless to do it on paper as it is
harmful not to do it. Let's see what we can get.
China's culture would be safely preserved in the capable hands of her
character language. What China needs is an additional subset of a
technology-oriented language, specifically
tailored to computer applications. China should start with a
trimmed-down version of English as it has a proven track record in this
area. This would also launch us on the pursuit of a universal
language for the entire world. The obvious selection should be
based on some
naturalized computer
language. Such a language can, not only link the
non-English-speaking people with the privileged English-speaking people
along with their
lucritive high-tech markets, but also allow automated communication
between men
and machines, mainly through computers.
Chinese were the original communists. But being a communistic
country that practices capitalism has given China an image of
hypocracy. This situation can improve if China adopts
intellectual communism. Just as materialistic communism is
impratical to apply in
today's environment, intellectual communism, however, promises to solve
all the
problems in our pursuit of material well being. And through
intellectual communism, supported by open network computing, a
collaborative
effort could be achieved among all people of the world. At the
end,
the cultural and technological worlds would be able to join forces to
usher in a new
era
of cultural enlightment, made possible by material plenty.