I can’t imagine mandarin ever becoming widespread in the west unless there are some fundamental changes to Chinese society and culture.
Similarly western tech companies have huge issues in penetrating the Chinese market.
But the sheer number of characters to rote memorize makes it way too inefficient to learn for foreigners, and arguably even for natives, that I don't see it becoming a world language.
There's always the argument that pinyin isn't enough, that the characters are essentially useful. Which I think Vietnamese, which used to be based on the same writing system and is also tonal, proves wrong.
If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.
hm, i'd say it's a bit more complicated than that. written and literary chinese has a different (often more concise) style than conversational chinese because certain things that would be ambiguous spoken aren't that way when written. similarly, japanese has a perfectly functional syllabary (hiragana), but people will use kanji anyways because it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.
Chinese TV shows could become equally popular. Some will say you need to have freedom to create art but I’m pretty sure that the Mario movie or Fast X (two movies at the top at the moment) needed minimal artistic freedom. Fast X is actually a great example because that franchise goes out of its way to toe the CCP line.[1] It shows that it’s possible to make billions while also kowtowing to the Party.
[1] - John Cena apologises for calling Taiwan a country (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/world/asia/john-cena-taiw...)
I personally do believe that you need enough artistic freedom to create those worldwide popular shows.
As an example, I'm watching Korean police shows which constantly have corruption as a main plot line, good luck filming corrupt cops in a series in China with the CCP.
What they can produce for now is limited to the dullest stories and that's not going to cut it.
CCP would heartily endorse these brainless plots. Consumers would eat it up.
Not everything needs to be Infernal Affairs. The vast majority of Korean TV isn’t Infernal Affairs. I will admit that China could never make Parasite, but that’s ok. The metric we’ve chosen is popularity, not Oscars.
Side note I’m a bit sad that Hong Kong can’t make Infernal Affairs type of movies anymore. It would show the Party in a bad light.
I don't know about China, but when Poland was communist and there was widespread censorship - it was still OK to talk about corruption, it was just supposed to be shown in a way that makes it clear that corruption is western influence and communism is getting rid of it.
Funnily enough - Polish cinema was probably better artistically during communism, because it had to work hard to work around the censorship. So you had movies that were trying to be universal, say the things that can't be said using symbols, etc.
Modern Polish cinema is pretty awful, mostly shitty romcoms.
I'm not saying censorship is good, it's evil obviously, but the effect on art can be counterintuitive.
Here's a Zhihu question where someone asked to be recommended anti-corruption series, maybe you should watch some of the shows mentioned in the replies before concluding that only dull stories can be produced: https://www.zhihu.com/question/502243280
True. But it’s still rather limited and almost nobody is learning Korean just because of that.
e.g. in the 60s French cinema was pretty popular for some time in the US in a similar way. Barely anybody learnt French because of that (and it would’ve been way, way easier than Chinese or Korean)
I could imagine it if a better pinyin similar as Vietnamese would become the most popular way to write mandarin in China. This would lift a lot of the difficulty of westerners.
This isn't going to happen though.
It’s possible Mandarin has even higher efficiency. And there are very many people who speak Mandarin. You are expecting English to come out on top. But do not be surprised if in the end it will be Mandarin.