liberal japonicus
This post is a lot shorter than it should be, but going into it any deeper will have me plunge off the continental shelf.
It starts with this piece interviewing Jing Tsu, a Taiwanese-American professor of Chinese literature at Yale. Despite the article's dependence on what and where the two are eating:
We order starters: an endive salad, salted almonds, lemon-punchy marinated anchovies, slivers of cured Culaccia ham. When they come, we share them. I consider how my grandparents would see a typical London meal out: you emigrated to the west, worked hard, in order to get ripped off at restaurants where each person only eats one dish? A Chinese meal is measured by the number of dishes, which are all shared.
I find establishing one's bona fides by criticizing food choices kinda silly, but I suppose, for the readers of Financial Times, that's how it has to be. And I'm sympathetic to her thesis that there are
...three cliched narratives about China: “big China, bad China, crazy China”. “That’s what we need to shift to really understand what’s happening,” she says, adding that such narratives “sensationalise China as something exceptional rather than another rising power looking for staying power”.
The article didn't really hit a home run with me, but I did get Tsu's book, Kingdom of Characters. The book is 7 chapters chronologically charting the Chinese writing system from 1900 to 2020, with each chapter built around 1 or a few key figures. The Guardian review has this
This focus on colourful individuals makes the book lively, but it’s not without its problems. The people we get to know best, those we keep company in their eureka moments and their long struggles, are often not the ones whose ideas end up prevailing. As a result, we get to know a lot more details about “also-ran” inventors and their inventions than about the ones who actually shaped modern China.
In fact, I feel like the concentration on those individuals makes the book very un-Chinese. It is a 'great man' theory of history, with all the individualism that implies. (I'd note the last chapter has the discussion of Unicode, which I think someone here may have been a part of, so I wonder if they would recognize the stories being told here).
I say with a side of ChatGPT because Tsu has this
“An adage, recalled by Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, goes, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” The idea is that the way any language becomes dominant has less to do with linguistic attributes than the politics that drive it. The Chinese script revolution has scaled up that statement for contemporary relevance. The country’s most decisive push will come in the next two decades, as it aims to take the lead in artificial intelligence by 2035. Deep neural networks are being trained on China’s ever-growing volume of data. Chinese tech giant Baidu has become a leader in machine translation and natural language processing, while Tencent sits on a wealth of data gathered through WeChat and its video gaming platforms. From health care to smart cities, education to social control, the Chinese state’s priority under its current leadership is to implement, if not to perfect, its vision of global governance. The country now enjoys a level of confidence it did not have for two centuries. China is no longer trying to catch up to anyone—except the future it sees for itself.”
This is really interesting to me, because while the book has the date of 2022, it must have been written before ChatGPT dropped. But it gets at something that I've tried to explain to foreign colleagues here, which is that, imo, the existential horror that many have about ChatGPT will not happen here in Asia. It's difficult to explain exactly why this is the case, but I think it is tied up in what I see as the separation between form and function and the elevation of form over function. In my class on Martial Arts and Japan, I make a comparison between kyudo or Japanese archery and Western archery. In the latter, all manner of balancing weights and innovations are seen. Though the bow is a descendant of what some English archer used to skewer the French at Agincourt, it is hard to imagine handing one of today's bows to them and having them see it as related. On the other hand, Japanese archery bows look the same as they did when they were used on the Mongols 200 years before Agincourt. But it is just surface appearance, the bows and bowstrings can be just as high-tech, using carbon fibre and Kevlar. But the key is to hide that modernization. I also point out that the first sport in the world to have video replay was sumo, which started in 1969. However, you never see it.
Now, there are a lot of ways to spin this. You can think how great it is that Japan/Asia keeps traditions that the West chucks off willy-nilly. Or you can think that it is hypocrisy, thinking that they can replace the innards with hi-tech, but keep the surface looking traditional. But either way, it seems to be based on the idea that if one can't tell from the outward appearance, why worry about it?
Is this just a Japan thing or is this a fundamental divide between Asia and the West? Well, this video of Zhi Bing Hua, a student at Tsinghua University and a chatbot powered by Wu Dao, the LLM which has 10x as many parameters as OpenAI's LLM, has me think that despite the fact that Japan and China are two very different places, that ability to look at this sort of AI powered chatbot as simply another student rather than something that makes us question individual creativity tells me that there is a difference, though when I argue for it, it seems to slip away.
Anyway, have at it, definitely interested to hear what all of you have to say on this.
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