Phil Torrone’s written a call-to-arms for geeks and makers to learn to speak and read Chinese. I’m not sure I’m confident in his premise that the Chinese economic revolution will continue to produce strong returns and thus increase Chinese economic and technical dominance to the point where this is a must-have for anyone who cares about technology, but you don’t have to accept this to believe that knowing Chinese is an enormous asset to anyone trying to make sense of the world (and especially the world of manufacturing and technology) today.
Phil’s written up a bunch of tips for approaching Chinese language instruction, which is an admittedly daunting prospect for a lot of westerners, with its trifecta of unfamiliar tones, non-Roman script, and absence of Latinate/Germanic cognates.
Fast forward almost a decade, and I’m living in NYC and talking, reading, or emailing with someone in China. If you make anything, eventually you’ll find that there isn’t a supply chain that beats what China has; while a lot of people will claim goods are made in China only because of lower costs, that’s not 100% true. The supply chain of components to assembly are almost impossible to find elsewhere. If you look at once-booming industrial cities in the USA, you’ll see a lot of the work, from parts to assembly, happened in big chunks of locations — this is efficient and allows manufacturing to flourish…
You’re going to see and hear about more and more open source hardware and maker businesses visiting China, and we’ll likely even see and hear some familiar faces in the maker community spending extended time living/working in China. Makers are smart, nimble, and efficient. Being on-site and on the assembly line is usually how we think; we don’t mind getting our hands dirty and participating in all parts of the process. It’s only going to make sense that more and more of the most prolific makers will consider learning a new language the more time they spend in China.
