DID Joe Biden insult China?  The American vice-president has a habit of sticking his foot into his mouth, and in this case, the recent graduation speech he gave at the University of Pennsylvania inspired a viral rant by a “disappointed” Chinese student at Penn, Zhang Tianpu. What was Mr Biden’s sin? Was it Mr Biden’s suggestion that creative thought is stifled in China?

You cannot think different in a nation where you cannot breathe free. You cannot think different in a nation where you aren’t able to challenge orthodoxy, because change only comes from challenging orthodoxy.

No, that wasn’t it.

The source of the insult is a surprising one: Mr Biden called China a “great nation”, and a “nation” repeatedly after that. Victor Mair, the resident sinologist at the Language Log blog, translates Mr Zhang’s complaint.

In this sentence, “You CANNOT think different in a nation where you aren’t able to challenge orthodoxy”, he used the word “nation”. This is what really infuriated me, because in English “nation” indicates “race, ethnicity”, which is different from “country, state”. “Country, state” perhaps places more…Continue reading

via Johnson http://www.economist.com/node/21578296?fsrc=rss