The administration is also pressing for a 55% budget cut to the National Science Foundation. The NSF is the primary funding agency for engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry and computer science, among many other fields. If there's any doubt about the seriousness of that situation, the director has resigned over it. When some worried that US world leadership in physical and life sciences may be surpassed in a generation, I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year.
>I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year
I mean China has been modernizing their academics for a long time. See "Double First-Class Construction" [0]. But it's worth remembering that they did a lot of damage during the Cultural Revolution.
China has a highly unique language for foreigners to acclimate to. While I salute the effort for and commitment to higher education, I’m not sure this will bring the boon they’re hoping for.
I would have suggested that they create a high-quality course for introducing westerners to their language instead. It’s the sort of thing that everyone takes for granted that it exists but often doesn’t (where is the Wheelock’s for Spanish these days?) Tonality, pictography, and a highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners, let alone all three at once.
There is a ton of easily available content for learning Chinese.
In terms of government-sponsored resources, the Chinese government has created the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) tests, and has written standard textbooks for them that are pretty decent. All sorts of third parties have written their own textbooks oriented towards the HSK tests as well.
> highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners
Analytic morphology is what makes spoken Chinese so easy to learn, in my opinion. There's almost none of the complexity found in Indo-European languages, like number, case, gender and tense. The main barriers to learning Chinese for Westerners are:
* It's not Indo-European, so the vocabulary is almost entirely new.
* Tonality, though this is about the same level of difficulty as memorizing noun genders in Indo-European languages.
* The writing system. Memorizing a few thousand relatively arbitrary characters is difficult.
AI has made real time translation very feasible, I don’t think Chinese will be much if a language barrier for foreign students and researchers in the near future. You can do it all in a local model with a moderately powerful mobile GPU. We are almost at the point where you put some ear buds in your ear and some glasses could handle reading…etc…
The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs. Visit India and you will understand what Mao's goals were.
(European countries killed off 1000 years of Christianity in a single generation at the same time Mao did his giant leap experiment).
> The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Most of the semi-religious customs that were killed off still live on in Malaysia - to the point where I was surprised at how un-chinese China was when I visited.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-director-resign-...