Chinese Teen-Girl Chess Champion

[monk222]

Nicholas Kristof gives us another piece on China's future domination:

If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named Hou Yifan.

Ms. Hou (whose name is pronounced Ho Ee-fahn) is an astonishing phenomenon: at 16, she is the new women’s world chess champion, the youngest person, male or female, ever to win a world championship. And she reflects the way China — by investing heavily in education and human capital, particularly in young women — is increasingly having an outsize impact on every aspect of the world.

Napoleon is famously said to have declared, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.”

Maybe it's best that I'm getting on in years, because I am not learning Mandarin.

Though, rereading that, I just noticed that she is the women's world champion. At first, I thought it was for both men and women. That's not to say I'd care to play her, but the news is a little less sparkly. Maybe world domination is still some decades away.

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Just considering the strictures on their political expression that the people must live with is enough that we needn't really be envious. But it is no doubt a good thing that the material life of more people is rising appreciably, even if the competitive pressures do pinch us a little. It has been long hoped that rising prosperity will relentlessly give rise to greater freedoms.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I hope so. It seems intuitive that it's harder to crush people who aren't forced into effective slavery by economic circumstances.

Though I'm not sure it always works perfectly in practice.

Gujarat

[poovanna.livejournal.com]

It doesn't :( And a great example is the state of Gujarat in my country, India.

This region leads the country in all kinds of economic metrics (foreign investment; per capita income; quality of infrastructure etc.), but is governed by a repressive establishment which instituted state-sponsored attacks on Muslims in India.

However, the people of the state didn't care & voted it back to power. More than equality & freedom of speech, they seemed to care more about economic issues. It was very disappointing :(