This is fantastic Sam! You mentioned it would be a long piece but not that it would be so packed with data, no fat anywhere (rare these days). Thank you for the time you put into it.
Fantastic write up. Thanks so much for tagging my $4 lunch article - and teaching me and us about Taiwans similar cheap meals!! Also very cool you taught at ASPR. I taught at ESPR!
Yea I think you’re too cool for schwarzman and you wouldn’t actually learn chinese it’s a post professional program 85% of the kids go into investment banking or consulting. Just spend a month or two in a language school see if you actually like it
i think you'd find alot of what schwarzman forces you to spend your time doing as less interesting than the china adventure it seems like you want--it will feel alot like going to SAIS or something in DC as opposed to what you could get up to like isaak did here https://www.isaak.net/mandarin/. now if you want to go to an interesting free SAIS for a year you can do that at schwarzman but it's going to be much less of a china adventure than you think and you will find it much harder to progress your chinese vs actually doing some immersion and not living with lots of foreigners
A few random facts that I think build off things you mentioned or wondered about.
1. Chiang Wan-an (the grandson of Chiang) actually hosts/promotes Taipei Pride. LGBT is very much a generation gap issue, even in Mainland China. And the KMT shifting so much highlights that the DPP is no longer really the party of young people anymore for a lot of reasons. One complaint I've heard a lot is young women complaining that the DPP banned xiaohongshu because "it's an app for young women and they don't like us."
2. Though the biggest reason is definitely a housing crunch, but it's actually kind of interesting economically to me. The cost of renting an apartment in Taipei is quite low, often 500 euro or so. But the cost of buying an apartment is basically Ireland levels. Not sure what causes this unusual ratio. There's kind of this cultural thing where people want to buy a house before having kids - and this is actually just not really possible for most people, so the youth feel like they're economically struggling and TFR is extremely low.
Also, Taiwan is probably running the world's most undervalued major currency, which is part of why things in Taiwan are so cheap (and why exports are so great) - but it means that young Taiwanese have absolutely no buying power when they go abroad. It's probably pretty depressing for young, travel-friendly, cosmopolitan youth.
3. On note #19, part of reason the indigenous are pro-KMT is that the DPP does have some sort of weird right-wing Lost Cause fringe (and Japanese colonialism was worst for the indigenous people). I was told that many of the activists in the predecessor to the DPP were landlords who lost out with land reform. Unclear if true, but plausible.
Weird incidents with this keep popping up. When the right-wing President Yoon in South Korea tried to launch a coup and establish de facto martial law, the DPP parliamentary caucus put out a statement applauding and supporting him, which is extremely ironic considering the history of the DPP in...resisting martial law. One of the major activists in the anti-KMT recall campaigns was also outed (by fellow activists) of basically being a Nazi sympathizer. This caused minor drama, though in a predictable German way, the German embassy only complained about the KMT using this to attack the DPP. There's an interesting comparison to Ireland because Taiwanese nationalists and Irish nationalists very much basically sympathize with the opposite sides of the Israel/Palestine issue (which may explain German sympathy to the Greens...). In a lot of ways, the KMT-DPP divide isn't really left-right at all anymore - and more class/ethnic - kind of like the FG-FF divide but on steroids.
4. The Formosa Republic tiger flag is actually pretty rare to see - possibly because it's actually the least political Taiwanese symbol. I saw it once in a museum in Tainan but that's it. The Green types don't embrace it because it was historically used as a symbol of resistance against Japanese imperialism. And the Blues aren't in any hurry to embrace really any symbol of Taiwanese nationalism.
Sam, this is a beautifully rational travelogue. As someone who models the "Taiwan Strait System" for a living, I loved your observation about TSMC being the "Silicon Shield."
But in the ChinArb framework, we take that logic one step further: It’s not just a Shield; it’s a Hostage.
1. The "Clean Room" Constraint you missed You mentioned the risk of invasion. But to a rationalist, the "Priors" need to update based on Physics, not just History. TSMC's EUV machines (which Morris Chang built) require perfect stability. A single artillery vibration ruins the alignment. System B (China) is an "Industrial Capitalist." They want the Asset (Capacity), not the Liability (Rubble). This physics constraint—what we call the "Porcelain Shop Paradox"—is why there will be no D-Day. The Rationalist equilibrium is an M&A (Acquisition), not a War.
2. The Energy Bottleneck (The Rationalist Kill Switch) You noted 7-Eleven is "critical infrastructure." The real critical infrastructure is LNG. Taiwan has 11 days of gas reserves. If System B wants to take the island, they don't need to fight urban warfare in Taipei (which is costly). They just need to blockade the LNG tankers. No Gas = No Power = No Clean Room. To a Game Theorist, this is the dominant strategy: Energy Strangulation, not Amphibious Landing.
3. The "Kumamoto Hedge" You mentioned Morris Chang is a hero. But notice where TSMC is expanding fastest: Japan (Kumamoto), not Arizona. Why? Because of Supply Chain Entropy. The chemicals needed for chips come from Japan. Moving fabs to Arizona increases entropy (10,000km logistics). Moving to Kumamoto decreases it. Japan is becoming the "Backup Server" for the Silicon Heart.
The 7-11 thing is even more interesting when you realize that almost every street that has a 7-11 also has two of its local competitor chains, which provide very similar services.
(Also worth looking up: the role they played during the pandemic).
If you want to acquire Chinese competence, IMHO a great starting point is to begin learning to write Chinese characters, write them properly, I mean write the strokes in order. That is a different kind of learning from character recognition, which is only receptive.
By the way, it is a strong claim to say that the claim ‘language shapes how you think’ has been disproven- Pinker’s antsgonists say so… FWIW.
Back to the question of learning Chinese, I found that living in Shikoku, after three years in Tokyo, was much more supportive of my language learning, since so many people in Tokushima and Kochi were either unable or unprepared to communicate with me in a non-Japanese language.
BTW I don’t know how big my Japanese vocabulary is, but half of it doesn’t appear in early level language textbooks.
Whoa, bloviating, best stop and say enjoy whatever process works 4U.
You wrote: "Most of the time, when I hear someone tell me about the ostensible benefits they got from learning a language, they justify it with Whorfianisms about how ‘language shapes how you think’ which I think has been convincingly refuted by modern psycholinguistics."
Uhhh....Im not so sure about that. As a native English speaker who also speaks Chinese fluently, conversing in Chinese often leads me to see things very differently than when I am conversing in English.
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the hyperlink in your article, which took me to a Wikipedia entry on a Steven Pinker book with which I am not familiar. I then clicked on a link in that article to the "Whorf hypothesis," which included this passage:
"Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them."
a good read! i would note that Peking isn't actually a product of wade-giles (where it's Pei-ching) — it's a holdover as a result of the romanisation scheme implemented by the imperial post office in the 1800s, which fossilised the pronunciation used in nanjing mandarin at a point when the middle consonant was, in fact, a ~[k], before it underwent palatalisation to yield the modern j-sound
There was no Imperial Post Office in the 1800s romanizing Chinese place names - people in the Middle Kingdom had no need to send mail to the red-fur barbarians. They wouldn't have been able to read civilized writing anyway. LOL!
Peking is more likely a result of foreigners mixing up "mandarin Chinese" with Cantonese pronunciation during the Canton Trade era. Pre-opium wars, all foreigners in China were by law based in Macao and Shamian island in Guangzhou (for a few months of each year), places where 99.999% of the population spoke Cantonese. In Cantonese, Beijing is pronounced "Puk-Ging". I'm not sure any foreigners at the time would have been aware that people in different parts of China spoke different languages and dialects.
introduced in the late 1800s, post-opium wars; i did mistake the timing of the shift from [ki] to [tɕi], so it would appear that the use of k was a word-specific exception to giles’ nanking syllabary (likely, yes, influenced by the cantonese retention of the middle chinese velar and consequent names adopted in the west), but i do think it worth noting the presence of such a standard in official usage as a possible influence on the choice of westerners to use Peking rather than other alternatives even after wade-giles had achieved widespread adoption.
I take back my contention that foreigners wouldn't have been widely aware, before the early-to-mid-1800s, that there were multiple languages being spoken in China. Karl Gutzlaf supposedly learned his Hokkien in Malaysia from the diaspora, before moving to Macau. Since Cantonese, Teochow, and Hokkien are widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia by the diaspora (some of my Malaysian-Chinese friends can speak all three, plus mandarin), there's a lot of knowledge that could have been gained from them about China proper, especially by missionaries in preparation for proselytising in China. I still think it's unlikely that any foreigners would have been able to speak Beijing-Mandarin at the time.
This is fantastic Sam! You mentioned it would be a long piece but not that it would be so packed with data, no fat anywhere (rare these days). Thank you for the time you put into it.
really good! sad that the clip of you on the sex worker's livestream wasn't included
As Sam's mum, I definitely don't want to see that!
Fantastic write up. Thanks so much for tagging my $4 lunch article - and teaching me and us about Taiwans similar cheap meals!! Also very cool you taught at ASPR. I taught at ESPR!
This was such great reading. Thank you. I spent three months in Taiwan last year and, I agree, it's really sui generis in so many ways.
This is great - everyone in tech should read this as basic cultural background to a critical part of the AI industry
A great account ! And after the first trip! Respect.
Yea I think you’re too cool for schwarzman and you wouldn’t actually learn chinese it’s a post professional program 85% of the kids go into investment banking or consulting. Just spend a month or two in a language school see if you actually like it
...in Taiwan? The options are pretty limited in Ireland.
i think you'd find alot of what schwarzman forces you to spend your time doing as less interesting than the china adventure it seems like you want--it will feel alot like going to SAIS or something in DC as opposed to what you could get up to like isaak did here https://www.isaak.net/mandarin/. now if you want to go to an interesting free SAIS for a year you can do that at schwarzman but it's going to be much less of a china adventure than you think and you will find it much harder to progress your chinese vs actually doing some immersion and not living with lots of foreigners
happy to discuss
A few random facts that I think build off things you mentioned or wondered about.
1. Chiang Wan-an (the grandson of Chiang) actually hosts/promotes Taipei Pride. LGBT is very much a generation gap issue, even in Mainland China. And the KMT shifting so much highlights that the DPP is no longer really the party of young people anymore for a lot of reasons. One complaint I've heard a lot is young women complaining that the DPP banned xiaohongshu because "it's an app for young women and they don't like us."
2. Though the biggest reason is definitely a housing crunch, but it's actually kind of interesting economically to me. The cost of renting an apartment in Taipei is quite low, often 500 euro or so. But the cost of buying an apartment is basically Ireland levels. Not sure what causes this unusual ratio. There's kind of this cultural thing where people want to buy a house before having kids - and this is actually just not really possible for most people, so the youth feel like they're economically struggling and TFR is extremely low.
Also, Taiwan is probably running the world's most undervalued major currency, which is part of why things in Taiwan are so cheap (and why exports are so great) - but it means that young Taiwanese have absolutely no buying power when they go abroad. It's probably pretty depressing for young, travel-friendly, cosmopolitan youth.
3. On note #19, part of reason the indigenous are pro-KMT is that the DPP does have some sort of weird right-wing Lost Cause fringe (and Japanese colonialism was worst for the indigenous people). I was told that many of the activists in the predecessor to the DPP were landlords who lost out with land reform. Unclear if true, but plausible.
Weird incidents with this keep popping up. When the right-wing President Yoon in South Korea tried to launch a coup and establish de facto martial law, the DPP parliamentary caucus put out a statement applauding and supporting him, which is extremely ironic considering the history of the DPP in...resisting martial law. One of the major activists in the anti-KMT recall campaigns was also outed (by fellow activists) of basically being a Nazi sympathizer. This caused minor drama, though in a predictable German way, the German embassy only complained about the KMT using this to attack the DPP. There's an interesting comparison to Ireland because Taiwanese nationalists and Irish nationalists very much basically sympathize with the opposite sides of the Israel/Palestine issue (which may explain German sympathy to the Greens...). In a lot of ways, the KMT-DPP divide isn't really left-right at all anymore - and more class/ethnic - kind of like the FG-FF divide but on steroids.
4. The Formosa Republic tiger flag is actually pretty rare to see - possibly because it's actually the least political Taiwanese symbol. I saw it once in a museum in Tainan but that's it. The Green types don't embrace it because it was historically used as a symbol of resistance against Japanese imperialism. And the Blues aren't in any hurry to embrace really any symbol of Taiwanese nationalism.
Really fun post! Genuinely laughed out loud at several parts
Sam, this is a beautifully rational travelogue. As someone who models the "Taiwan Strait System" for a living, I loved your observation about TSMC being the "Silicon Shield."
But in the ChinArb framework, we take that logic one step further: It’s not just a Shield; it’s a Hostage.
1. The "Clean Room" Constraint you missed You mentioned the risk of invasion. But to a rationalist, the "Priors" need to update based on Physics, not just History. TSMC's EUV machines (which Morris Chang built) require perfect stability. A single artillery vibration ruins the alignment. System B (China) is an "Industrial Capitalist." They want the Asset (Capacity), not the Liability (Rubble). This physics constraint—what we call the "Porcelain Shop Paradox"—is why there will be no D-Day. The Rationalist equilibrium is an M&A (Acquisition), not a War.
2. The Energy Bottleneck (The Rationalist Kill Switch) You noted 7-Eleven is "critical infrastructure." The real critical infrastructure is LNG. Taiwan has 11 days of gas reserves. If System B wants to take the island, they don't need to fight urban warfare in Taipei (which is costly). They just need to blockade the LNG tankers. No Gas = No Power = No Clean Room. To a Game Theorist, this is the dominant strategy: Energy Strangulation, not Amphibious Landing.
3. The "Kumamoto Hedge" You mentioned Morris Chang is a hero. But notice where TSMC is expanding fastest: Japan (Kumamoto), not Arizona. Why? Because of Supply Chain Entropy. The chemicals needed for chips come from Japan. Moving fabs to Arizona increases entropy (10,000km logistics). Moving to Kumamoto decreases it. Japan is becoming the "Backup Server" for the Silicon Heart.
Great piece. If you are interested in the "Game Theory/Balance Sheet" model of this conflict (minus the political noise), I wrote a forensic audit on it here. (https://chinarbitrageur.substack.com/p/stupid-taiwan-is-not-venezuela?r=71ctq6 )
The 7-11 thing is even more interesting when you realize that almost every street that has a 7-11 also has two of its local competitor chains, which provide very similar services.
(Also worth looking up: the role they played during the pandemic).
Great article! Thank you.
If you want to acquire Chinese competence, IMHO a great starting point is to begin learning to write Chinese characters, write them properly, I mean write the strokes in order. That is a different kind of learning from character recognition, which is only receptive.
By the way, it is a strong claim to say that the claim ‘language shapes how you think’ has been disproven- Pinker’s antsgonists say so… FWIW.
Back to the question of learning Chinese, I found that living in Shikoku, after three years in Tokyo, was much more supportive of my language learning, since so many people in Tokushima and Kochi were either unable or unprepared to communicate with me in a non-Japanese language.
BTW I don’t know how big my Japanese vocabulary is, but half of it doesn’t appear in early level language textbooks.
Whoa, bloviating, best stop and say enjoy whatever process works 4U.
Lawrie
One quibble:
You wrote: "Most of the time, when I hear someone tell me about the ostensible benefits they got from learning a language, they justify it with Whorfianisms about how ‘language shapes how you think’ which I think has been convincingly refuted by modern psycholinguistics."
Uhhh....Im not so sure about that. As a native English speaker who also speaks Chinese fluently, conversing in Chinese often leads me to see things very differently than when I am conversing in English.
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the hyperlink in your article, which took me to a Wikipedia entry on a Steven Pinker book with which I am not familiar. I then clicked on a link in that article to the "Whorf hypothesis," which included this passage:
"Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them."
a good read! i would note that Peking isn't actually a product of wade-giles (where it's Pei-ching) — it's a holdover as a result of the romanisation scheme implemented by the imperial post office in the 1800s, which fossilised the pronunciation used in nanjing mandarin at a point when the middle consonant was, in fact, a ~[k], before it underwent palatalisation to yield the modern j-sound
Thanks for a great read!
There was no Imperial Post Office in the 1800s romanizing Chinese place names - people in the Middle Kingdom had no need to send mail to the red-fur barbarians. They wouldn't have been able to read civilized writing anyway. LOL!
Peking is more likely a result of foreigners mixing up "mandarin Chinese" with Cantonese pronunciation during the Canton Trade era. Pre-opium wars, all foreigners in China were by law based in Macao and Shamian island in Guangzhou (for a few months of each year), places where 99.999% of the population spoke Cantonese. In Cantonese, Beijing is pronounced "Puk-Ging". I'm not sure any foreigners at the time would have been aware that people in different parts of China spoke different languages and dialects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization
introduced in the late 1800s, post-opium wars; i did mistake the timing of the shift from [ki] to [tɕi], so it would appear that the use of k was a word-specific exception to giles’ nanking syllabary (likely, yes, influenced by the cantonese retention of the middle chinese velar and consequent names adopted in the west), but i do think it worth noting the presence of such a standard in official usage as a possible influence on the choice of westerners to use Peking rather than other alternatives even after wade-giles had achieved widespread adoption.
I take back my contention that foreigners wouldn't have been widely aware, before the early-to-mid-1800s, that there were multiple languages being spoken in China. Karl Gutzlaf supposedly learned his Hokkien in Malaysia from the diaspora, before moving to Macau. Since Cantonese, Teochow, and Hokkien are widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia by the diaspora (some of my Malaysian-Chinese friends can speak all three, plus mandarin), there's a lot of knowledge that could have been gained from them about China proper, especially by missionaries in preparation for proselytising in China. I still think it's unlikely that any foreigners would have been able to speak Beijing-Mandarin at the time.